And Then Life Happens
Original price was: R300.00.R200.00Current price is: R200.00.
While her younger brother Barack grew up in the U.S. and Indonesia, Auma Obama’s childhood played out at the other end of the world in a remote village in Kenya, the birthplace of the siblings’ shared father. Barack and Auma met for the first time in the 1980s, and they built a lasting relationship which led to travels together in Kenya, research into their family history, and Auma’s support for her brother’s political career and eventual bid for the U.S. presidency. Auma spent sixteen years studying and living in Germany, moved to England for love, and gave birth to a daughter there. The tension between her original and chosen worlds and cultures was a constant challenge, and eventually Auma returned to Africa and worked to support young men and women in shaping their futures. In this candid and emotional memoir, Auma shares her own story as well as recollections of and experiences with her famous brother, who says about their first encounter: “I hugged her, we looked at each other, and laughed. I knew right then that I loved her.”
Author(s): Auma Obama
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In June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murderers: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film I am not your negro, Raoul Peck imagines the boo Baldwin never wrote, using his original words to create a radical, powerful and poetic work on race in the United States – then and today.
Taken from the book: I am not your negro
Author: James Baldwin
Directed by: Raoul Peck
This powerful and widely acclaimed autobiography of Sindiwe Magona’s early years in South Africa, announced the arrival of a major new black writer. Here she gives an account of her eventful first 23 years and tells a candid, unself-pitying story of trium.
Author(s): Sindiwe Magona
After his wife died, Rick Rigsby was ready to give up. The bare minimum was good enough. Rigsby was content to go through the motions, living out his life as a shell of himself. But then he remembered the lessons his father taught him years before – something insanely simple, yet incredibly profound. These lessons weren’t in advanced mathematics or the secrets of the stock market. They were quite straightforward, in fact, for Rigsby’s father never made it through third grade. But if this uneducated man’s instructions were powerful enough to produce a Ph.D. and a judge – imagine what they can do for you. Join Rigsby as he dusts off time-tested beliefs and finds brilliantly simple answers to modern society’s questions. In a magnificent testament to the “Greatest Generation” which gave so much and asked so little in return, Lessons from a Third Grade Dropout will challenge you while reigniting your passion to lead a truly fulfilling life. After all, it’s never too late to learn a little bit more about life – just ask the third-grade dropout.
Author(s): Ricky Rigsby
At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe – a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who’d been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both survivors of difficult divorces. Enough said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the U.S. government, who – after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing – gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again. Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackled her fears of marriage by delving completely into this topic, trying with all her might to discover (through historical research, interviews and much personal reflection) what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is. The result is Committed – a witty and intelligent contemplation of marriage that debunks myths, unthreads fears and suggests that sometimes even the most romantic of souls must trade in her amorous fantasies for the humbling responsibility of adulthood. Gilbert’s memoir – destined to become a cherished handbook for any thinking person hovering on the verge of marriage – is ultimately a clear-eyed celebration of love, with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, actually entails.
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
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Growing up as gay in a township, Siya Khumalo was “different”. He begins an exploration of sex, politics and religion & unmasks techniques used by power-brokers of our time, tackles DA vs ANC, and African cultures and communities.
Siya Khumalo grew up in a Durban township where being gay was “different”. Thus begun Siya’s exploration into sex, politics and religion. He unmasks techniques used by the power-brokers of our time, he tackles DA vs ANC, unpacks corrective rape, and African cultures and communities. Splicing in political and religious commentary, he uses his own life experiences to make sense of these topics.
Author: Siya Khumalo
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The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States is a defining moment in American history. After years of failed policies and failed politics from Washington, this is our chance to reclaim the American dream. Barack Obama has proven to be a new kind of leader–one who can bring people together, be honest about the challenges we face, and move this nation forward. Change We Can Believe In outlines his vision for America.
In these pages you will find bold and specific ideas about how to fix our ailing economy and strengthen the middle class, make health care affordable for all, achieve energy independence, and keep America safe in a dangerous world. Change We Can Believe In asks us not just to believe in Barack Obama’s ability to bring change to Washington, it asks us to believe in our ability to change the world.
Author: Barack Obama
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It’s 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She’s in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they’re trying for a baby – and she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and balance. So, she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep up on her.
Author(s): Elizabeth Gilbert
A deeply moving and powerful biography of Fezekile Kuzwayo – better known as Khwezi – the woman the ANC tried to forget.
In August 2016, following the announcement of the results of South Africa’s heated municipal election, four courageous young women interrupted Jacob Zuma’s victory address, bearing placards asking us to ‘Remember Khwezi’. Before being dragged away by security guards, their powerful message had hit home and the public was reminded of the tragic events of 2006, when Zuma was on trial for the rape of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, better known as Khwezi. In the aftermath of the trial, which saw Zuma acquitted, Khwezi was vilified by his many supporters and forced to take refuge outside of South Africa.
Ten years later, just two months after this protest had put Khwezi’s struggle back into the minds and hearts of South Africans, Khwezi passed away … But not before she had slipped back into South Africa and started work with Redi Tlhabi on a book about her life. How as a young girl living in ANC camps in exile she was raped by the very men who were supposed to protect her; how as an adult she was driven once again into exile, suffering not only at the hands of Zuma’s devotees but under the harsh eye of the media.
In sensitive and considered prose, journalist Redi Tlhabi breathes life into a woman for so long forced to live in the shadows. In giving agency back to Khwezi, Tlhabi is able to focus a broader lens on the sexual abuse that abounded during the ‘struggle’ years, abuse which continues to plague women and children in South Africa today.
Author(s): Redi Tlhabi
As a teenager, Fred Khumalo greeted his friends with a handshake and the words “touch my blood”. It implied friendship and trust. The saying became his name. More than that, it became the way he viewed the world. Everything touched Fred Khumalo.
As a teenager, Fred Khumalo greeted his friends with a handshake and the words “touch my blood”. It implied friendship and trust. The saying became his name. More than that, it became the way he viewed the world. Everything touched Fred Khumalo. Twice he was bewitched. Twice his father – the “country bumpkin” – took him to inyangas to have the “demons” banished. Twice his mother – the “city girl” – took him to a doctor to have the “fevers” cured. He smoked dagga with conmen and criminals, he pickpocketed “corpses” on the Friday night trains and worked as a gardener in the larney suburbs. He studied journalism and shacked up with whiteys in a commune, for a while the only darkie in a crazy swirl of booze, drugs and sex. And then the bloody fighting that tore apart KwaZulu/Natal in the 1980s touched his life and sucked him into a place of horror and violence that threatened to destroy him. When a friend died in his arms with the worlds “They really got me, Touch my blood. They really got me”, Khumalo realised that if he was to outlive the madness, he had to run. From the journalist and Sunday Times columnist comes a startlingly honest, humorous and poignant autobiography about growing up in a time of laughter and heartache.
uthor(s): Fred Khumalo
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“Sometimes there is a void, a disarmingly candid account of the life of Zakes Mda, provides us with some answers. In this Memoir, Zakes weaves together past and present to give an intensely personal story of his development in life, as an artist, musician, film maker and beekeeper, and the events and people who shaped him.
Forced to follow his father into exile in Lesotho at Fourteen, Zakes became an exponent of fast living, frequenting sheebens to escape the confines of parental discipline. He involves himself in politics during his exile, and we see the ANC and PAC as they grow. We also witness the development of his musical and artistic talents from an early age, a little ahead of his literary gifts.”
Author: Zakes Mda
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Yusuf Daniels was the proverbial stougat among the children in his family. Growing up on the Cape flats, from Bridgetown to Portland and the occasional holiday in District six with his grandmother, he still loves to reminisce about childhood street games, family camping, beach days and the traditions that are part of his Muslim heritage.
Most coloured people will instantly recognise the memories. For those who were mere spectators at the time because of South Africa’s divisive past. Living coloured provides a front row seat to the coloured experience as seen through Daniel’s eyes and humour.
Author: Yusuf daniels
An international bestseller which has sold over a million copies in the UK, Dreams From My Father is a refreshing, revealing portrait of a young man asking big questions about identity and belonging. The son of a black African father and a white American mother, President Obama recounts an emotional odyssey, retracing the migration of his mother’s family from Kansas to Hawaii, then to his childhood home in Indonesia. Finally he travels to Kenya, where he confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
Author(s): Barack Obama
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