The South Africa Reader is an extraordinarily rich guide to the history, culture, and politics of South Africa. With more than eighty absorbing selections, the Reader provides many perspectives on the country's diverse peoples, its first two decades as a democracy, and the forces that have shaped its history and continue to pose challenges to its future, particularly violence, inequality, and racial discrimination. Among the selections are folktales passed down through the centuries, statements by seventeenth-century Dutch colonists, the songs of mine workers, a widow's testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a photo essay featuring the acclaimed work of Santu Mofokeng. Cartoons, songs, and fiction are juxtaposed with iconic documents, such as "The Freedom Charter" adopted in 1955 by the African National Congress and its allies and Nelson Mandela's "Statement from the Dock" in 1964. Cacophonous voices—those of slaves and indentured workers, African chiefs and kings, presidents and revolutionaries—invite readers into ongoing debates about South Africa's past and present and what exactly it means to be South African.

Containing over 5000 entries, this enlarged and revised edition provides a wealth of new and updated words borrowed from Afrikaans, Malay, township slang, Indian Khosian and Bantu languages, including words influenced by the political upheavals of recent years. Branford offers phonetic transcripts for words derived from other languages, and for most entries, he gives etymologies, grammatical usages, and helpful quotes.

The discourses of the post-apartheid South Africa embody symbols of change and promises of new lessons in history. This is the first volume that brings together analyses of a variety of discourses produced in South Africa through which we follow the evolution of transitional processes in the country’s political institutions and in the opinions of its populace. The book offers to the reader a visit to the Parliament, a peek into the internet forums, analyses of the country's official papers and speeches, and the media accounts. Through all these discourses we see the burning questions – "Who Are We Now?" and "Who Do We Want To Be?" – being repetitively examined and identities cross-formed while the country deals with new, post-apartheid challenges, as well as successes.

At the height of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, a boy must face life decisions that test what he believes—and call for no turning back. South Africa, 1976. Joshua lives with his mother in the maid’s room, in the backyard of their wealthy white employers’ house in the city by the sea. He doesn’t quite understand the events going on around him. But when he rescues a stranger and riots begin to sweep the country, Joshua has to face the world beneath—the world deep inside him—to make heartbreaking choices that will change his life forever. Genuine and quietly unflinching, this beautifully nuanced novel from a veteran journalist captures a child’s-eye view of the struggle that shaped a nation and riveted the world.

A searing novel, told in letter form, that explores the South African legacy of apartheid through the lens of a woman whose Black son has just murdered a white woman Mother to Mother is a novel with depth, at once an emotional plea for compassion and understanding, and a sharp look at the impacts of colonialism and apartheid on South African families. Inspired by the true story of Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl's murder, the book takes the form of a letter to the victim’s mother. The murderer’s mother, Mandisa, speaks of a life marked by oppression and injustice. Through her writing, Mandisa reveals a colonized society that not only allowed but perpetuated violence against women and impoverished Black South Africans under the reign of apartheid. This book is not an apology for the murder but rather something more. It seeks to connect, through empathy and storytelling, one pained mother with another who is grief-stricken and in mourning. A beautifully written exploration of the society that bred such violence, Mother to Mother will resonate with readers interested in understanding and ending racial injustice, as well as the lasting colonial foundations of oppression.

This series of articles by leading researchers, activists and government officials describes the response of government and other agencies to the unfinished business of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It also reflects on the role of the media, art and cultural exponents who grappled with South Africa's past.

The West has finally realized that ""bringing Democracy"" to the Middle East and Southwest Asia is not necessarily in the best interests of Western Civilization. Radical Islam is hijacking its plans and making a mockery of Democracy itself. In South Africa, an earlier experiment in "Bestowed Democracy" is failing under a burden of abuse. Much taken with its own role in undoing apartheid a full generation earlier, the West prefers to look away. It appears to treat the plight of Western people in that country as a form of required penance. In the process, it indulges what is in effect a corrupt One-Party State Kleptocracy run along the Party Congress lines of its original mentor, the defunct Soviet Union. "AmaBhulu" is a view of South Africa through eyes different from those employed in fifty years of media reporting, social science, and politics. The author walks the reader from the 1652 landing of the Dutch to the present by following his own family bloodlines as example through the documented history of the country, supported by copious evidence. As settlers, soldiers, slaves, and indigenes, they farm, they fight, they triumph, and they lose. They are mercilessly impaled and massacred by savage African tyrants. They are hanged and fusilladed by an imperial overlord, and herded into concentration camps. Yet, they persevere to create a key Western Christian country; the envy of all Africa and a Cold War bulwark of the West. Eventually it falls to the author to describe the loss of his country through forces beyond his control. In 1797 the British Royal Navy feared South Africa would become a "Second America" for Britain, while, in the 20th century, the country was to Africa what the United States was to the world. "AmaBhulu" describes the developing crisis in the Second America that will inevitably entangle the First America. It is a study in the death of Civilization by its own collective hand; a severe warning for the West. "AmaBhulu" should give pause to every thinking Westerner.

It was the year of the Lord 1685. With only the clothes they were dressed in, their Bibles hidden in loaves of hollowed bread, they fled before the French Catholic authorities. Die or be Catholic! were shouted by the heartless dragonnades with emphasis on the die. And when the second word followed, the Protestant Huguenot victims were already struckdying, brutally slaughtered in the name of Catholic Christianity! This terror swept through Paris, continued through the rest of France, after King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes proclaimed by his grandfather, King Henry the Great of France. This bloody highway in the name of Christianity took thousands of Huguenots lives and hundreds of thousands fled their country of birth to find refuge in America, other parts of Europe, and also South Africa. In South Africa, they started anew, with their God (of Israel) and their Bibles, and the home and the freedom to serve their God they so longed for and found would become a nightmare again. With their blood, they paid for freedom, twice; and today they are still dying, slaughtered by the criminal elements that rule in South Africa, unfortunately, in the entire Africa.