South Africa category: 561 books

City of Extremes is a powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994. Martin J. Murray describes how a loose alliance of city builders—including real estate developers, large-scale property owners, municipal officials, and security specialists—has...

This monograph is part of the Advancing Strategic Thought Series precisely because its topic is so important. As it stresses, the explosive growth of China's economic interests in Africa is arguably the most important trend in the continent's foreign relations since the end of the Cold War. China-Africa...

Join Leslie Dikeni in his intriguing journey into the contested state of the Kruger National Park in the early years of the democratic transition. He speaks to chefs and wardens, cleaners and government officials, ecologists and secretaries. As word of his research spreads, those whose voices had...

This book is a personal account of the battle for Mavinga in South Eastern Angola during September and October 1985. At that time FAPLA, the armed wing of the MPLA government, was at war with rival UNITA guerrilla forces opposing the MPLA rule in Angola. UNITA had its headquarters and main...

In this transnational account of black protest, Nicholas Grant examines how African Americans engaged with, supported, and were inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Bringing black activism into conversation with the foreign policy of both the U.S. and South African governments, this...

Southern Africa was once regarded as a worthless jumble of British colonies, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world. But then prospectors chanced upon the world's richest deposits of diamonds and gold, setting off a titanic struggle between...

In January 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, two-thirds of the city’s population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militia, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that scattered...

Angola's civil war was the longest in Africa. Once the battleground for a proxy war between the Cold War superpowers, the country was supposed to become a model for a smooth transition from armed conflict to democracy. The government, earlier backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, and the UNITA rebels,...

In 1961, Portugal found itself fighting a war to retain its colonial possessions and preserve the remnants of its empire. It was almost completely unprepared to do so, and this was particularly evident in its ability to project power and to control the vast colonial spaces in Africa. Following the...

In 1975, Angola was tumbling into pandemonium; everyone who could was packing crates, desperate to abandon the beleaguered colony. With his trademark bravura, Ryszard Kapuscinski went the other way, begging his was from Lisbon and comfort to Luanda—once famed as Africa's Rio de Janeiro—and chaos.Angola,...

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is Saul David's compelling examination of one of history's greatest battles. On 22nd January, at Isandlwana in Zululand, South-East...

"This incredible true story reads like the wildest fiction."—Booklist In the summer of 1783 the grandees of the East India Company were horrified to learn that one of their finest ships, the 741-ton Grosvenor, had been lost on the wild and unexplored coast of southeast Africa. Astonishingly,...

The story of a nation’s agony and hope A true tale of an Angolan migrant miner who goes to ‘e’Goli’, the big city of gold in South Africa. Also a realistic portrayal of the Angolan conflict in “darkest Africa” through the eyes of a hospital orderly. A moving and realistic novel about the evil and destructiveness of war, as well as the inherent goodness within every human spirit.

Signs of hope in sub-Saharan Africa: modest but steady economic growth and the spread of democracy. By the end of the twentieth century, sub-Saharan Africa had experienced twenty-five years of economic and political disaster. While “economic miracles” in China and India raised hundreds...