As the most influential and powerful country on the entire continent of Africa, an understanding of South Africa’s past and its present trends is crucial in appreciating where South Africans are going to, and from where they have come. South Africa changed dramatically in 1994 when apartheid was dismantled, and it became a democratic state. Since 2000, when the previous edition appeared, further big changes occurred, with the rise of new political leaders and of a new black middle class. There were also serious problems in governance, in public health, and the economy, but with a remarkable popular resilience too. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of South Africa contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about South Africa.

A study of the influence of environment on culture and social organization among the Khoisan, a cluster of southern African peoples, comprised of the Bushmen or San "hunters," the Khoekhoe "herders", and the Damara, (also herders).

Women in the Second Anglo-Boer War demonstrated great heroism. Theirs is a remarkable history derived from diaries and letters written during their incarceration in concentration camps. Against the Tide illustrates the fortitude of the brave Dutch women and children in their struggle against impossible circumstances in the attempt to save their country from the stronger forces of the British usurper. Not many today are aware that the British government established concentration camps to imprison innocent civilians nearly forty years before Germany did so. Their intention was to cause a quick surrender by such intimidation. However, the imprisoned Dutch women watching their children dying in these camps, developed a deep animosity toward their aggressors, and contrary to expectations, it only spurred the women on to more defiance that then strengthened the men's resolve to keep fighting. Among the few British sympathizers, Emily Hobhouse, a tenacious, justice-seeking English woman, spearheaded a major public awareness of the untenable conditions in the camps. She defied her own government in a risky plan to help ease the suffering of the captive women and children in South Africa. The Boer women demonstrated many acts of bravery including daring espionage and actually fighting alongside their men against overwhelming enemy forces. And after the war was lost, they played an active role, in forging a new language and a new Afrikaner nation from the embers of that tragedy.

This history of the poor of Sub-Saharan Africa begins in the monasteries of thirteenth-century Ethiopia and ends in the South African resettlement sites of the 1980s. Its thesis, derived from histories of poverty in Europe, is that most very poor Africans have been individuals incapacitated for labour, bereft of support, and unable to fend for themselves in a land-rich economy. There has emerged the distinct poverty of those excluded from access to productive resources. Natural disaster brought widespread destitution, but as a cause of mass mortality it was almost eliminated in the colonial era, to return to those areas where drought has been compounded by administrative breakdown. Professor Iliffe investigates what it was like to be poor, how the poor sought to help themselves, how their counterparts in other continents live. The poor live as people, rather than merely parading as statistics. Famines have alerted the world to African poverty, but the problem itself is ancient. Its prevailing forms will not be understood until those of earlier periods are revealed and trends of change are identified. This is a book for all concerned with the future of Africa, as well as for students of poverty elsewhere.

"Defining their enterprise as more in the direction of poetics than of prosaics, the Comaroffs free themselves to analyze a vivid series of images and events as objects of analysis. These they mine for clues to the 19th-century contents of the British imagination and of Tswana minds. They are themselves imagining the imagination of others, and they do the job with characteristic aplomb....The first volume creates an appetite for the second."—Sally Falk Moore, American Anthropologist

The Dictionary of Southern African Place Names - now in its 4th edition - helps you sort your Komkhulu from your Kommetjie with the most comprehensive glossary of Southern African towns, villages, railway stations, mountains, rivers and beaches. The 9 000 short entries incorporate data from sources dating as far back as 1486, encapsulating the linguistic and cultural heritage of all the peoples of the subcontinent, past and present. In this highly readable book the expert authors take you on a fascinating journey of the highways and byways of Southern Africa. Whether you are a motorist, an adventurer or merely an armchair traveller, this book has a multitude of facts and details that will fascinate you. This is much more than a reference book - it gives an insight into what shapes a place and its people through our heroes, events, beliefs, values, fears and aspirations.

Robben Island – best known as the place where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for eighteen years – has been a place of harshness and brutality; its history steeped in the suffering of those banished there. Yet it has also become a universal symbol of hope, forgiveness, and triumph. With a storyteller’s sensibility, combined with rigorous research, Charlene Smith charts the evolution of the Island’s political and social history, from mail station, place of exile, and military defence post to maximum security prison and World Heritage Site. Fully revised, this new edition of Robben Island provides absorbing accounts of daring escapes, maritime disasters, lepers ostracized from mainland society, the fates of the great Xhosa chiefs of the nineteenth century, and the unique bonds of friendship and compassion forged among the political prisoners confined on the Island during the apartheid era. Today Robben Island is recognised for both its environmental riches and its cultural significance. More than just a geographical location or a tourist attraction, it is an enduring tribute to the resilience` of the human spirit. Sobering and uplifting, Robben Island is an essential read for anyone interested in South Africa’s turbulent journey to democracy and the people who made it possible.

Echoes of Slavery: Voices from our Past is a collection of true stories, each chosen to illuminate a particular facet of Cape slavery in its mature form. The book concentrates on the final 30 years of slavery in order to place the least distance between Cape slaves and their modern descendants.