Rivonia's children is the harrowing and inspiring account of a number of white Jewish activists who risked their lives to battle apartheid when South Africa plunged into an era of darkness in the 1960s from which it has only recently emerged.
This book explores the role of social movements in the Southern African liberation struggle, through the lens of two ‘everyday communists’. Focusing on the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the author explores the lives of Ivan and Lesley Schermbrucker, whose contribution to the party was more clandestine than that of leaders such as Bram Fischer and Joe Slovo. They represent how ‘ordinary’ people could play significant roles based on stances more rooted in common decency and morality than in Marxist theory. The book also sheds light on the interplay between transnational and national tendencies during the liberation movement, particularly between the 1940s and the 1960s. The Schermbruckers changed their views in response to the shifting national and international political landscape, the rise of Stalinism, and the flight of South African activists into exile from the 1960s. Both fluent in African languages, they were able to create relationships of trust with African members of the CPSA. Examining tensions and conflicts during the liberation struggle, this book provides fresh insights into ‘underground’ activism.
The question was: would he hang? In 1963, when South Africa's apartheid government charged Nelson Mandela with planning its overthrow, most observers feared that he would be sentenced to death. But the support he and his fellow activists in the African National Congress received during his trial not only saved his life, but also enabled him to save his country. In Saving Nelson Mandela, South African law expert Kenneth S. Broun recreates the trial, called the "Rivonia" Trial after the Johannesburg suburb where police seized Mandela. Based upon interviews with many of the case's primary figures and portions of the trial transcript, Broun situates readers inside the courtroom at the imposing Palace of Justice in Pretoria. Here, the trial unfolds through a dramatic narrative that captures the courage of the accused and their defense team, as well as the personal prejudices that colored the entire trial. The Rivonia trial had no jury and only a superficial aura of due process, combined with heavy security that symbolized the apartheid government's system of repression. Broun shows how outstanding advocacy, combined with widespread public support, in fact backfired on apartheid leaders, who sealed their own fate. Despite his 27-year incarceration, Mandela's ultimate release helped move his country from the racial tyranny of apartheid toward democracy. As documented in this inspirational book, the Rivonia trial was a critical milestone that helped chart the end of Apartheid and the future of a new South Africa.
The armed struggle waged by the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), was the longest sustained insurgency in South African history. This book offers the first full account of the rebellion in its entirety, from its early days in the 1950s to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as South African president in 1994. Vast in scope, this story traverses every corner of South Africa and extends throughout southern Africa, where MK’s largest campaigns and heaviest engagements occurred, as well as to the solidarity networks that the rebellion mobilised around the world. Drawing principally from previously unpublished writings and testimonies by the men and women who fought the armed struggle, this book recreates the drama, heroism and tragedy of their experiences. It tells the story of leaders like Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Joe Slovo and Chris Hani, whose reputations were forged in the crucible of the armed struggle, but it is also a tale of martyrs such as Looksmart Ngudle, Ashley Kriel and Phila Ndwandwe, as well as of MK cadres such as Leonard Nkosi and Glory Sedibe, who would ultimately turn against the ANC and collaborate with the state in hunting down their former comrades. Written in a fresh, immediate style, Umkhonto we Sizwe is an honest account of the armed struggle and a fascinating chronicle of events that changed South African history.
And Justice For All: Arthur Chaskalson and the Struggle for Equality in South Africa is a biography of a remarkable life lived in service both to law and to the struggle for social change and justice. The social change it describes is the victory over apartheid, which was won on several fronts and through the efforts of people in many nations, but an important one of those fronts lay in the courts of South Africa itself. Arthur Chaskalson enters the historical record in 1963, when he and a team of talented lawyers represented Nelson Mandela in the historic Rivonia Trial. Chaskalson organized legal and non-profit organizations and served as the first president of South Africa's Constitutional Court, which would eventually lead to the deconstruction of apartheid legislation. In exploring his life and career, we appreciate more clearly the roles lawyers can play in social change and the achievement of a just social order, and at the same time we gain insight into the combination of upbringing, experience, and character that shapes a man first into a 'cause lawyer’ and then into a path-breaking and foundation-laying judge.
Prior to the Six-Day War, Israel was a darling of the international left, vocally opposed to apartheid and devoted to building alliances with black leaders in newly independent African nations. South Africa, for its part, was controlled by a regime of Afrikaner nationalists who had enthusiastically supported Hitler during World War II. But after Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, the country found itself estranged from former allies and threatened anew by old enemies. As both states became international pariahs, a covert—and lucrative—military relationship blossomed between these seemingly unlikely allies. Based on extensive archival research and exclusive interviews with former generals and high-level government officials in both countries, The Unspoken Alliance tells a troubling story of Cold War paranoia, moral compromises, and startling secrets.
This book draws on a range of key archives and oral testimonies to provide the first systematic and historical study of the origins, context, development, frustrations, inner contradictions, and legacies of the Columbus Centre. The Columbus Centre, a remarkable though largely forgotten research institute, was established at the University of Sussex in 1966, triggered by claims of a dearth of academic research about Nazism and the Holocaust. Its basic stated aim was to bring together psychoanalysis and history for a scholarly investigation of discrimination, mass violence, and the preconditions of genocide in the past and the present. The Nazi crimes were studied along with other instances of prejudice and mass violence, such as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts, South African apartheid, the persecution of the Roma people, and race relations in the United States and modern-day Britain. The book seeks to place the Columbus Centre in the historiography of mass violence by analysing the Centre’s works through four historiographical prisms or power relations in which they were produced: psychoanalysis, class, race, and gender. This interdisciplinary volume is a valuable text for scholars and students of historiography, psychoanalysis, genocide and violence, and postwar Europe, and for professionals within the field of psychology.
AIDS, Sex, and Culture is a revealing examination of the impact the AIDS epidemic in Africa has had on women, based on the author's own extensive ethnographic research. based on the author's own story growing up in South Africa looks at the impact of social conservatism in the US on AIDS prevention programs discussion of the experiences of women in areas ranging from Durban in KwaZulu Natal to rural settlements in Namibia and Botswana includes a chapter written by Sibongile Mkhize at the University of KwaZulu Natal who tells the story of her own family’s struggle with AIDS
Nelson Mandela is well-known throughout the world as a heroic leader who symbolizes freedom and moral authority. He is fixed in the public mind as the world's elder statesman -- the gray-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison before becoming the first black president in South Africa. But Nelson Mandela was not always elderly or benign. And, in Young Mandela, award-winning journalist and author David James Smith takes us deep into the heart of racist South Africa to paint a portrait of the Mandela that many have forgotten: the committed revolutionary who left his family behind to live on the run, adopting false names and disguises and organizing the first strikes to overthrow the apartheid state. Young Mandela lifts the curtain on an icon's first steps to greatness.
Martin Meredith documents the remarkable life of Bram Fischer in his biography Fischer's Choice. Fischer was born into an aristocratic Afrikaans family but became one of South Africa's leading revolutionaries. Regarded in his youth as having a brilliant career ahead of him, he rebelled not only against the apartheid system but also against his own Afrikaner people. As a defence lawyer, Fischer managed to save Mandela from the death penalty demanded by state prosecutors for his sabotage activities. He played a remarkable role in the underground movement aimed at overthrowing the government. To the very last, even when all the other conspirators had been arrested or fled into exile, Fischer held out, sought for months by the security police. His single-handed efforts ended inevitably in failure. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was cast into solitary confinement, the government continued to regard him as a potentially dangerous influence even when he was dying of cancer, refusing all appeals to release him until the last few weeks of his life. Set against the dramatic background of two massive historical struggles, one by the Afrikaans, the other by the Africans, Fischer's life contains all the ingredients of a political thriller.