Black Man, You Are On Your Own
R250.00
Some 40 years ago, in 1968, workers and students in France took to the streets in battles against the conservative Gaullist regime. University students in Britain occupied campuses, calling for greater democracy and student rights. The Prague Spring saw Czechoslovakian patriots take on Soviet tanks in an attempt to overthrow Russian domination. In the United States, mass opposition to the war in Vietnam and the black civil rights and black power movements reached new heights. In South Africa, the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) was launched under the leadership of Bantu Stephen Biko. Black South African students were not just victims of apartheid but were also thinkers, conscious actors and historical agents. In the face of an authoritarian and repressive political order, SASO turned black students into an organised social force, taught them about politics and the role they should play, was a catalyst of collective action notably for the Soweto uprising, and contributed significantly to the erosion of the apartheid social order and to educational and social transformation in South Africa.
Author: Saleem Badat
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It is well known that the African National Congress was formed in 1912 and is considered the oldest political organisation on the African continent. What is often not widely known is that the person who founded it was one Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a thirty-year-old black South African from Inanda outside the city of Durban.
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Seme also established a national newspaper, became one of the pioneering black lawyers in South Africa, bought land from white farmers for black settlement right at the time when opposition to it was gaining momentum, became a sought-after adviser and confidant to African royalty, and was considered a leading visionary for black economic empowerment. And yet, when he became president general of the ANC in the 1930s, he brought it to its knees through sheer ineptitude and an authoritarian style of leadership. On more than one occasion he was found guilty for breaching the law, which partly led to him being struck off the roll of attorneys.
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In this memoir, the first of two, Dikgang Moseneke pays homage to the many people and places that have helped to define and shape him. These influences include his ancestry; his parents; his immediate and extended family; and his education both in school and on Robben Island as a 15-year-old prisoner. These people and places played a significant role in forming his principled stance in life and his proud defiance of all forms of injustice.
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Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve years a slave is a harrowing memoir about on of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, DC., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.
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Native Life in South Africa is one of South Africa’s great political books. First published in 1916, it was first and foremost a response to the Native’s Land Act of 1913 and was written by one of the most gifted and influential writers and journalists of his generation. Native Life in South Africa provides an account of the origins of this crucially important piece of legislation and a devastating description of its immediate effects. Plaatje spent many weeks traveling in the countryside and the most moving chapters in the book tell us what he saw. His book explores the wider political and historical context that produced policies of the kind embodied in the Land Act, and documents meticulously steps taken by South Africa’s rulers to exclude black South Africans from the exercise of political power.
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For more than five decades Walter and Albertina Sisulu were at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. As secretary-general of the ANC, Walter was sentenced to life imprisonment with Nelson Mandela in 1964 and spent 26 years in prison until his release in 1989. While her husband and his colleagues were in jail, Albertina played a crucial role in keeping the ANC alive underground, and in the 1980s was co-President of the United Democratic Front. Their story has been one of persecution, bitter struggle and painful separation. But it is also one of patience, hope and enduring love.
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