South Africa Books

One simply must be dialectical about it, which is hard to do. On the one hand, it celebrates in a deeply human and comic way the "new South Africa" of the 1990s--a fragile creation that needed to be celebrated both at home and abroad. And contrary to Fugard's harshest critics, he raises some difficult issues that he refuses to paper over completely (land reform and restitution, rural unemployment, the lingering effects of White privilege, etc). On the other hand, the play releases the tension of these problems in a syrup of sentimentality that, perhaps to your ironist's sense of horror, really does work its magic on audiences (present company included). So what the heck do you do with this play? I still don't know, in the big scheme of things. However, there are many smaller schemes that cause me no such difficulty. If you are interested in South African literature, I think you should feel obligated to read it. Ditto if your work takes you into the fields of political theatre. Perhaps the most exciting context in which to read this play would be to place it alongside our own country's history of sentimental/literary attempts to resist and 'work through' racism. Finally, the play can also be seen as taking place within the rhetorical space of "truth and reconciliation," a topic that embraces an exciting range of literature from Eastern Europe to South America.

With the blight of apartheid lifted from South Africa, Athol Fugard, that nation's dominant voice in the theater, turns toward a quieter, more introspective story. It is daring in its simplicity, and absolutely shattering in its emotional impact. Its lovely, rural musings on hope, despair, and growth resonate far beyond the fields the action inhabits. There is an excellent framing device of an author (meant to represent Fugard, himself) in whose perceptual inadequacies we find a mirror for our own. Highly recommended.

This book was very informative to read. It puts South Africa in a new light. The difficult transition from racial discrimination to a new governmental style can be seen in the crime rates and statistical information given. Parts of the book may be hard to understand if you never have read up on the subject before, but because of international input, many sides of the situation are looked at.

This author has also codeveloped a book about genocide and if you like this book you will like that one as well. I am a college student with a minor in history and I found that his writing style is excellent. I recommend this book, but do a little research first to get the full effect of it.

First of all, it must be said that this book is not titled correctly; it is about crime and punishment, rather than war and peace. The book takes the form of eleven individual essays that were written for the World Peace Foundation. In these essays, the authors take a look a various aspects of criminal activity in southern Africa, analyzing how it has evolved since the end of the Apartheid government in South Africa, and what can and should be done about the skyrocketing crime rates that are pandemic in the entire region.

Overall, I found these essays to be highly informative - I had no idea how bad things had become in recent years. Apparently, for many nations, the road to democracy passes through crime and violence.

Now, having been written for an academic audience, these essays are rather on the dry side, so you must be prepared. But, that said, they do shed a great deal of light on a growing problem that is already spilling out of southern African and into the rest of the world. I highly recommend this book.

For fans of the Zulu War of 1879, this book provides virtually all the information missing from Donald Morris' The Washing Of the Spears. There is such intricate detail concerning the specific makeup of the British Army of the time as well as the political facts and political and military moves in the campaign that if you persist to the end you will have a grasp of this conflict that is second to none. It is a marvelous book for the student of military history ( and for me, as an American, the terminology used was very instructive indeed, filling out some areas where I had seen terminology that I thought I understood, but obviously did not until reading this book) as well as the student of 19th Century British politics. Good stuff.

This 181 page book is a good general overview of the Zulu War of 1879. It has numerous black and white photos from that period, and is divided into three parts: The coming of the war, the first invasion, and the second invasion. This volume would be enjoyable to either a Zulu War veteran, or to the first-time reader of this period.

Those expecting exciting safari tales will be mildly disappointed. There are very few of those here. However, it is a very revealing and self-deprecating semi-autobiography of John F. Burger. Mind you, there are some wild tales about the African bush in the early to mid-1900's, they just don't all occur on the game trail. The chapter devoted to his late wife is very touching. The writing style is quite readable, yet very "proper".

After reading A. Julius Fazekas' African Diamond, a book about travel and adventure, I was completely transformed and experienced first-hand in his description the wilds and beauty as well as his vision of South Africa. There are many good moments in this book, especially the author's unabashed love of nature and feeling of oneness with Africa.

The beautiful geographic locations and their protrayal is very well outlined and makes one want to see even more of this truly marvelous place. In other words, this is also a literary travel book and is much more than just a hunting story.

Historical topics are also mentioned and there are numerous references and quotes from previous hunters and travellers of Africa past, such as Frederick Selous, Adulphe Delagorgue and John Campbell and others which gives us an even more insightful glance at the experience.

The safari and nature premise is also very well depicted and gives big game hunting the merit it deserves, and not only the experience of killing animals at random which is often the distorted view. Of special note is the author's full explanation regarding the hunt and the particular role hunting plays in conservation techniques in well regulated hunting ranches that were travelled.

The coloured photos of which there are 80, are also quite delightful and one can clearly see the beauty of the country as well as the wild life and hunt. The impressive artistic illustrations of wild game are also worth a mention.

Therefore, the first effort of this author should be commended, since the book was written from the heart of one man's love of travel and adventure in the wilds of Africa. Read it you will enjoy it tremendously. A good read!

The Art of John Muafangego,Visions of Love and Sorrow: celebrates the compassion and skill of an unique artist. Muafangego is the man who inspired the visions of African rennaisance,the handshakes in rythmic black and white which hung at the 1994 elections. His dream of racial harmony, as this book amply testifies, was inspried by the mans commitment to his own strongly held religious beliefs. It is both a visual history of many historial events , the "Enthroning of Archbishop Desmond Tutu" - with the information as to the occasion engraved upon the prints with pride. He is quoted to have believed that he was not a political man, but a religious one. This historical momento,sadly out of print by Orde Levinson is important because, although not large and lavish,as the more recently published book on the same artist, is soft backed and affordable, in a country where the majority of people canot afford coffee table books.A valuable addition to every South African home in the most democratic sense of the word.

This is a very good and informative pamphlet on the HIV/Aids crisis that will kill up to 8 million S Africans in the next ten years. That is about 1/4 of the population. By that time, 30% of all children under 15 will be orphans!

This book looks at the shape of the epidemic, the causes of its spread in Southern Africa at an unprecedented rate, and possible solutions. The subject is so alarming and bleak that it is impossible to exagerate. While it goes a bit too easy on the government's and Pres. Mbeki's personal responsibility in an attempt to avoid controversy, it hits hard nonetheless.

I will use this book as essential background in my current writing project. While I may have wanted a bit more scientific and historical detail at times, this book strikes a superb balance between popularisation, accurate reporting, and a call to arms. It should serve as a model to the genre.

HIV/Aids will kill a huge proportion of the global human populaton over the next 25 years, and will be looked upon as the holocost of the 21st C. While treatment regimes exist, they are proving inadequate and too costly to halt the disease's spread at this time. Books like this one are urgently needed.

For a while now, I have been searching for South African books on homosexuality as someone who only now (2005) get interested in the subject. This was one book that is a good beginning as it covers, experiences of gays, social developments and the be (south) african version of gay theology. It consists of essays of different authors with a forword by Bishop Desmond Tutu. It stimulates dialogue and understanding and even being pro gay, is very good introductory reading to the past efforts that brought a bout the resent rights for gays in the new South African Constitution. I have enjoyed most the human side of gays essay.

I am currently reading about South Africa and this title intrigued me. A Victorian spinster accompanied her brother to the unsettled regions of South Africa in the 1850's and lived to tell the tale. The enterprising spirit and stamina she discovered in herself surprised all her contemporaries --- including herself. It was a time when women were beginning to realize that they, too, could live intelligently and comfortably in the world and could experience lives of value without a husband.

If all the merit of this book lay in seeing the world through the opening eyes of a Victorian woman, it would be interesting, but it could have been set in an English garden or in the middle of the ocean. This book also allows us to look at the society of the Zulu tribe before they were impacted so heavily by white colonists. Feared warriors they were, but they were also hospitable to travelers, shrewd cattle herders and traders, and excellent managers of the environment surrounding them. Their outposts served as wayside inns for the hunters and travelers of the times. Because their wealth was concentrated in cattle, the center of their society was extinguished by the bovine flu. Only after that disaster was the tribe vulnerable to integration by other societies. Catherine Barter's observations of them as she traveled are as valuable as they are rare.

Any novel written by an immigrant with the colonizing spirit is bound to be one-sided. Is it racist? Yes. Is it autocratic? Yes. Is it historically accurate? As far as one can tell. Is it worth reading? If you are willing to wade through cultural arrogance to glimpse a tribe as it was. I'd do it again.

Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation. Edited by Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumda. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

Race, Orient, and nation represent three clusters of complicated histories of knowledge formation and political activisms, deeply entangled in the global processes of modernity initiated by western imperialist expansion. Modernity as such is experienced as a series of contradictions that operate on an axis of self-other differentiations as a set of cognitive structures that we came to call Orientalism. Although Edward Said has pointed out in his foundational work that Orientalism "as a system of citing works and authors" has no corresponding reality, Orientalism, nonetheless, has become a powerful tool by which the Orient-as geography, race, a body of knowledge, and postcolonial nation-states-is rendered knowable, appropriated, and re-invented for both universalist and particularist projects. Antinomies of Modernity is an attempt to engage with the history and karma of Orientalism in postcolonial milieu.

In a commendable form of collaboration, Antinomies of Modernity is both wide-ranging in scope and coherent in argument. It manages to grasp the self-contradictory logic of modernity as a global history of contestation and complication that manifested itself in the "conquest of space through time"-a central feature of capitalism, the editors argue-that constitutes modernity as tortuous and unsettled experiences of dislocation of mass population, consistent construction of self-other relations, and the constant crisis and struggles over the legitimation of rule. Locating their conceptual framework in the triangulated dynamic of racial thinking, colonial domination through power and knowledge, and anti-imperialist national formations, Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar suggest that "the complexities of modernity are best understood by examining its antinomies, at the core of which lie a compact set of ideas about the nature of economics, cultures, nations, identity, and alterity" (2). In their view, "It is the uneven geography of capitalist modernization [...], together with the elaboration of secular modes of thought grounded in the academic disciplines of time and space, that crystallized the dialectical tension between the universal and the particular" (3). And it is in this intense interaction between the universal and the particular that Antinomies of Modernity invites us to capture and confront the lacunae and amnesia upon which discursive constructions of academic disciplines, colonial practices, and nationalisms are articulated into powerful regimes of identity and alterity. Orientalism, in this view, has turned itself from a provincial knowledge formation into a universalizing structure of self-other construction.

Antinomies of Modernity consists of eight fascinating case studies that provide an enlightening spectrum of antinomies of modernity, ranging from the Aryan model of history in India and Nigeria, through the genesis amnesia of British and French Orientalisms and the struggle over the coinage of technical languages in colonial Tamilnadu, to the articulation of an internationalist alliance of Indians in British Central Africa, the complexities of racial dynamic in post-Apartheid South Africa, and finally to careful analyses of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran and the appropriation of multiculturalist discourses by Hindu Indians in the US. These essays are finely framed by a concise introduction to the overall project as an intervention in the studies of Orientalism in both colonial and postcolonial moments, and concluded by an elaborate essay by the two editors to work through the complex issues raised in this volume. The essays are nicely paired up to accentuate the following issues: Orientalism as a practice of knowledge and a discourse of subject making in race/class formations; the amnesia and occlusion of Orientalism that are constitutive of disciplinary and national histories; the diasporic connections and transnational contexts of race, ethnicity, and nation in India, Africa, Iran, and Indian America.

For both Vasant Kaiwar and Andrew Barnes, the Aryan model of history signifies the lingering effects of Orientalism in India and Nigeria respectively. While Kaiwar's essay on the Aryan model of history reveals the embedded strength of romantic Orientalism in the construction of Indian nationalism that suggests self-Orientalization as the completion of colonialism, Barnes looks at the collaborators in Nigeria as performing a strange mode of colonial mimicry that unsettles and resettles colonial domination. What is illuminating in both essays is the double character of Orientalist knowledge that served the European metropoles on the one hand and the postcolonial state of India on the other. The appropriation of colonial knowledge in Hindu nationalism seems to be an offshoot of the colonial search for empathetic collaborators in Africa. After the colonizers left, the ruling class, ironically, becomes the inheritor of Orientalism, which was adapted into civilizational discourses serving right-wing nationalism. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi traces the anterior history of Orientalism, and argues that a deliberate amnesia of intellectual contact before colonization was fundamental to the circulation of Orientalism as a knowledge formation specific to the West. By unearthing the contribution of indigenous scholars from India, Tavakoli-Targhi contends, "In its early phase, modern Oriental studies did not constitute a discourse of domination but a reciprocal relation between European and Indian scholars. But with European hegemony and the rise of a heroic model of science in the eighteenth century, the contribution of non-European scholars was increasingly marginalized and deemed nonobjective" (105-106). Such amnesia of the indigenous contribution and oblivion of the transformation of Oriental Studies from a two-way intellectual exchange to a one-way domination of non-western objects, Tavakoli-Targhi shows, are the constitutive lacuna of colonial operations. Orientalism, in this view, is not just a system of citation, but one of writing and over-writing, to which true criticism lies in the attempts to locate or retrieve the traces of erasure.

Michael West's essay on Indians in British Central Africa shifts the focus of discussion from specific local cases to diasporic connections and transnational contexts. In West's account, Indians, as in the US, were seen as undesired immigrants in colonial Nyasaland (now Malawi) and the two Rhodesias (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) and were politically dis-enfranchised during the moment of decolonization-due to an earlier antagonism between Indians and Africans, although both groups shared a similar opposition to the British rule. The independence of India since 1947, however, generated a different political dynamic for Indians in those colonies, for it served as an inspiration for African independence movement. As West notes, "by providing scholarships to African students, the Indian government helped to increase the pool of educated cadres who everywhere formed the core of the nationalist leadership" (166). Short-lived as it may be, this Indian-African connection marks an important phase of anti-colonial struggle in British Central Africa, and shed light on the vision of Third World internationalism in the 1950s and 1960s. If the internationalist articulation of independence movement indicates a hopeful vision of decolonizing resistance, Minoo Moallem and Sucheta Mazumdar's essays offer another reading of the international story. While Moallem unpacks the concept of fundamentalism and explains the construction of Islamism as a cultural nationalist project-rather than a religious fanaticism that the Bush II administration tends to believe-that operates on a set of binarisms, Mazumdar tracks the history of Indian immigration to the US and explicates how the multiculturalist discourse was appropriated by Indians in the US to shape a Hindu Indian identity and to define an Indian polity. For Moallem, Iranian cultural nationalism was both an anti-imperialist and a self-Orientalizing project, the aim of which, however, was for cultural, political, and religious governance in Iran as one singular community that demands political participation of both male and female subjects. The veil, for instance, is a powerful symbol of political activity and "functions as a signifier in the cultural war of representation" (213), despite the prevalent misreading of the veil as a sign of female submission in the West. Moallem's critical unpacking of fundamentalism, in other words, is an attempt to debunk the Orientalist myth of Islam in the West as well as to reveal the cultural logic of such nationalist formations. Mazumdar, on the other hand, looks at the identity politics of immigrants, not merely as conditioned by the American context of racial exclusion, but also significantly connected to a long-distance nationalism. Hence, Mazumdar argues that the equation of Hindu and Aryan with Indian occludes the religious and ethnic diversity of the Indian polity where Muslims and Sikhs were also important groups of its national constituency. As Mazumdar writes, the category Hindu "has been universalized to embrace both the exclusive ethnic identity of the original peoples of India and the authentic cultural essence of the nation. Political Hindutva, seeking to define the nation and its peoples in all aspects, has resurrected the Orientalist myth of India as the land of the Hindus" (241). Like an undying ghost, Orientalism keeps on returning from the ashes of colonial past and continues, as an oppressive mechanism, to haunt the postcolonial nation formations.

These essays together offer an impressive array of rhetorical and analytical tactics to demonstrate that postcolonial dilemma formed by modernity and colonial legacies-with die-hard Orientalism as its most salient feature-are not bygone past by any means, but are active contemporary situations that require our persistent and critical engagement with history, knowledge, and politics. They exemplify both the difficulty and necessity of overcoming Orientalism by revealing, examining, and critiquing the antinomies of modernity. However, as they are challenging the notion of "post" in postcolonialism with a bifocal operation of antinomies, the essays seem to have laid too much emphasis on discursive formations to be mindful of local agencies, particularly demonstrated by the people involved in various struggles. In other words, as one is intrigued by the longevity of Orientalist thinking, the reader is left with the ethnographic question of local response, perhaps in the form of "subaltern-speak." That is, in all those instances of discursive circulation, where are the voices of the people available, if not represented, or abducted, by the nationalist elites, and how would an excavation of colonial past possible, if not accessed through Orientalist scholarship? More significantly, the exposure of Orientalist legacy in postcolonial states demands a more careful scrutiny of the stakes of nationalism, and urges us to regurgitate the legacy of decolonization that have been instrumental in much of our postcolonial thinking today. What would our future be, if life forms are no longer limited and subject to the political imaginations of race, Orient, and nation? As Kaiwar and Mazumdar poignantly remark in their concluding essay, "Neither universalism nor particularism, or localism, are per se emancipatory. To understand why those exist in dialectical tension is a precondition for going beyond `conservative' universalism and `radical' particularism toward a transformation of both, and indeed therefore of modernity itself. The latter's antinomies must become part of a critical reevaluation of politics in our time" (287).