Always combative, conservative commentator RW Johnson gives an historical overview of this country’s past and a summation of his views on its present in South Africa: The First Man, the Last Nation (Jonathan Ball). Johnson argues that since 1994 crime, unemployment, inequality and Aids have flourished in President Thabo Mbeki’s South Africa, and he delivers frank and devastating judgements both on the apartheid years and government by the new African National Congress elite. Guaranteed to ruffle feathers.
A possible antidote to Johnson, if you find him too acidic, would be Max du Preez’s new book, Of Warriors, Lovers and Prophets (Zebra). This lively, accessible take on South African history tells the tales of various extraordinary figures, from the Khoikhoi chief abducted and taken to England in 1610 to the mercy of King Moshoeshoe toward the cannibals who had eaten his grandfather; from “the African Socrates” to “the great lover of the Mohokare Valley” …
Also going back into South African history, Hazel Crampton investigates the case of a seven-year-old girl who was washed up on the Wild Coast in the 1730s. She was adopted by her amaMpondo rescuers and absorbed into their community, becoming the wife of a prince and the ancestor of a royal Xhosa dynasty. That story is told in The Sunburnt Queen (Jacana), set against a panorama of dramatic historical events.
Giles Foden is well-known for his previous Africa-related novels, The Last King of Scotland (about Idi Amin) and Ladysmith (about the siege thereof). His new non-fiction book, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (Penguin), also deals with an African theme: a little-known episode during World War I, when German warships controlled Lake Tanganyika. In June 1915, 28 men were sent from Britain — their orders, to take control of the lake. To reach it, they had to haul two motorboats with the unlikely names of “Mimi” and “Toutou” through the wilds of the Congo. Some may recall Wilbur Smith’s early novel Shout at the Devil — this is the real story of that episode.
Professor Jack Spence OBE, of King’s College, London, describes Greg Mills’s book The Security Intersection: The Paradox of Power in an Age of Terror (Wits University Press) as “an invaluable source for those who seek some understanding of the ‘booming, buzzing confusion’ of modern international politics. The author tackles the big issues — globalisation, the role of war and changing notions of security — with admirable clarity in prose that is crisp and a delight to read.”
Any South African with Afrikaner ancestry (whether white or coloured) who digs a little into their family history is bound to discover descent from one or more slaves. Jackie Loos worked for years in the South African Library, which must have stood her in good stead in writing her book Echoes of Slavery: Voices from South Africa’s Past (David Philip). She has collected the true stories of individual Cape slaves, gleaned from many previously untapped sources in the Cape Town Archives. She concentrates on the final 30 years of slavery at the Cape and the stories are chosen to illustrate particular facets of life as a slave.
Moving to the United States (talk about top of mind), The Price of Loyalty offers an extraordinary view from deep within the presidency of George W Bush. Written by Pulitzer-winner Ron Suskind, it draws heavily on the diaries of former Bush treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, who left the administration in disgust in last year. The triumph of ideology and greed over good sense is horrifying — and fascinating to read.
From an entirely different (yet perhaps as effective) angle comes Kitty Kelley’s take on the Bushes in The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. This enthusiastic muckraker covers everything from the Bushes’ first entry into politics (Prescott Bush in the 1950s) to George I’s climb through the CIA to the presidency, up to the wobbly accession of George II. Talk about personality issues! And yet it all seems perfectly plausible, and it’s fun to read.
For a broader understanding of the dilemma in which the US finds itself today, you can’t do better than What’s the Matter with America? (Secker & Warburg), in which Thomas Frank tries to explain how the American worker has gone conservative, basically entering into an alliance with the super-rich and the corporates — it is as though, he writes, the sans-culottes of the French Revolution were demanding a bigger, stronger aristocracy. He shows convincingly how the “culture wars” and social issues such as abortion and gay marriages have mobilised the working class to vote for economic policies that have already done them incalculable harm. “With a little more effort,” he writes, “the backlash may well repeal the entire 20th century.”
PJ O’Rourke is often seen as a conservative commentator, but he’s so funny you can’t hold that against him. His new collection of jabs at imperial and other pretensions is Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism (Atlantic). Here his eye is on US foreign policy, and O’Rourke gives his mordant views on 9/11 and various foreign military-political adventures. Perhaps most usefully of all, he explains “why Americans hate foreign policy”.
Returning to South Africa and going back a century and a half, Saul David takes a fresh look at “the heroism and tragedy of the Zulu war of 1879” in Zulu (Penguin/Viking). That was the war that got off to a bad start for the British (invading unprovoked), who got thrashed at Isandlwana. The protracted conflict that followed helped bring down the then British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, despite all the spin the propagandists of the day tried to put on it — an aspect of the war that has hitherto been under-investigated.
Recently a war of its own erupted around the abortive TV series on Great South Africans. Did HF Verwoerd really need to be in there? And why is Brenda Fassie rated higher than Abdullah Ibrahim? The companion volume of the same name from Penguin and the BBC will doubtless continue to stir the debate and take the discussion further — you decide.
The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 1 (1960 – 1970), edited by the South African Democracy Education Trust (Zebra Books) is a weighty book, strongly academic, and perhaps likely to generate some controversy. Produced by a group of academics — some established names, some new scholars, of whom one hopes to see more — it is a systematic history of opposition in the 1960s that gives the lie to the claim that the decade was one of silence and defeat.
On a different tack, yet also dealing with South African history, History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Popular Memory in a Democratic South Africa, by Annie E Coombes (Witwatersrand University Press) addresses the question of how our history can be represented in various forms of visual art, whether in museum displays, sculpture, painting, photography or even film. The author, an art historian at Birkbeck College, London University, examines a range of examples of how apartheid and the struggle is memorialised.
Some of that visual culture is to be seen in Images of Defiance: South African Resistance Posters of the 1980s by The Poster Book Collective of the South African History Archive (STE). This is a reissue of a famous local work that everyone interested in cultural-political history should have. It is a vivid visual record of grassroots mobilisation and resistance against apartheid, through the host of posters produced by members of the mass democratic movement in the most intense period of struggle.
Anné Mariè du Preez Bezdrob served as a United Nations peacekeeper in Sarajevo, Bosnia, for two years. A political journalist who had covered guerrilla wars in Africa, Bezdrob had met the deputy head of UNPROFOR years earlier in Namibia. Her story of her stay in former Yugoslavia — hell on earth — from 1993 to 1995 is told in Sarajevo Roses: War Memoirs of a Peacekeeper (Oshun), and it’s often harrowing, yet filled with compassion.
Since its inception in Canada in 1971, the ecological movement Greenpeace has been at the forefront of struggles against whaling, seal-hunting, nuclear weapons and other threats to the planet’s environment. It has been at the centre of controversy, litigation and attack from a range of states, but has built itself up to a membership of just less than three million members worldwide. Rex Weyler, a distinguished journalist, was one of its founders and his book Greenpeace: An Insider’s Account (Rodale International) provides an insight-filled account of the workings of this major international NGO.