Lionel ‘Rusty’ Bernstein was arrested at Liliesleaf Farm, Rivonia, on 11 July 1963 and tried for sabotage, alongside Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and other leaders of the African National Congress and Umkhonto we Sizwe in what came to be known as the Rivonia Trial. He was acquitted in June 1964, but was immediately rearrested. After being released on bail, he fled with his wife Hilda into exile, followed soon afterwards by their family. This classic text, first published in 1...

"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it." –President Barack ObamaNelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the...

'A kind of epic poem, one that moves in circular fashion from passionate denunciation to intense autobiographical reflection ... should be required reading for every MP, peer, councillor, civil servant and commentator. The fury and sense of powerlessness that so many people feel at government policy beam out of every page.' The Guardian'It is not enough to read Harry's record of the struggles and hopes of a generation – we have to re-assert his pri...

An insightful collection of writings and interviews from the South African president, Nobel laureate, and former political prisoner."Outstanding. . . . Belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the nature of power and resistance." — The New York Times Review of BooksNelson Mandela is widely considered to be one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age. Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to r...

Max du Preez has one hell of a story to tell. In his career as a renegade reporter, he’s survived three dismissals, seven libel suits, thirteen criminal cases, four aeroplane crashes, a bombing, two assassination attempts and was a regular on right-wing hit lists. He was in Soweto on 16 June 1976, witnessed the debauched parties of apartheid cabinet ministers, and stepped over dead bodies in a bombed Angolan village. He looked into apartheid killer Dirk Coetzee’s eyes and published his sto...

Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe in 1980 after a long civil war in Rhodesia. The white minority government had become an international outcast in refusing to give in to the inevitability of black majority rule. Finally the defiant white prime minister Ian Smith was forced to step down and Mugabe was elected president. Initially he promised reconciliation between white and blacks, encouraged Zimbabwe's economic and social development, and was admired throughout the world as one of th...

"In October 1941 a young boy and his father disembarked at Durban harbour from a large liner commissioned into emergency service by the Allies. They were Greek refugees from their German-occupied motherland. They spoke no English. They had little money and no prospects. They were heroes, but no one knew that. Some months earlier, father and son, together with two other Greek men and seven New Zealand soldiers, had set off in an open boat in an attempt to escape the German invaders. For two...

Acknowledgements; Preface; Timeline: A chronology of key events in Robert Mugabe’s life; Introduction; 1 Brother in the background; 2 Mummy and Uncle Bob; 3 The prisoner’s friend; 4 Comrades in arms; 5 A surprise agreement; 6 Tea with Lady Soames; 7 I told you so; 8 Britain’s diplomatic blunder; 9 A reluctant politician; 10 The faithful priest; 11 In the eyes of God’s deputies; 12 The man in the elegant suit; 13 Two of a kind; 14 Yesterday’s heroes; 15 As it was in the beginning; 16 The go...

Nelson Mandela stands out as one of the most admired political figures of the twentieth century. It was his leadership and moral courage above all that helped to deliver a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa after years of racial division and violence and to establish a fledgling democracy there.Martin Meredith's vivid portrayal of this towering leader was originally acclaimed as "an exemplary work of biography: instructive, illuminating, as well as felicitously written" (

On 21 March 1960, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, leader of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), led a mass defiance of South Africa's pass laws. He urged blacks to go the nearest police station and demand arrest. When police opened fire on a peaceful crowd in the township of Sharpeville, 68 people were killed. The protest changed the course of South Africa's history. Afrikaner rule stiffened and black resistance to apartheid went underground. Sobukwe was jailed for three years on charges of incit...

Helen Zille’s long-awaited autobiography is one of the most fascinating political stories of our time.Zille takes the reader back to her humble family origins, her struggle with anorexia as a young woman, her early career as a journalist for the Rand Daily Mail, and her involvement with the End Conscription Campaign and the Black Sash. She documents her early days in the Democratic Party and the Democratic Alliance, at a time when the party was locked in a no-holds-barred factional...

The one thing that looms largest in South Africa's future is South Africa's past – most especially the nearly five decades of division and conflict at the heart of one of the twentieth century's most infamous social experiments.Apartheid, An Illustrated History is a portrait of the defining experience of modern South Africa's transition from colonial state to democracy. What began in May 1948 as a vague, grimly ambitious project to interrupt history and engineer white supremacy at ...