Alan Paton (1903-1988) was an anti apartheid activist and author, who achieved international fame with his novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Size: 240x160mm
The Dutch Reformed minister DF Malan led the Afrikaners to victory in 1948 and instituted the policy of apartheid. Today grim-faced photographs of NP leaders like Malan and his successors have come to symbolise a system of racial oppression, which dehumanised and impoverished the majority of South Africa’s population.Yet, when Malan was asked on his deathbed about the most important service he had rendered during his political career, he answered, ‘that I could serve my nation; that I could unite my people’. This biography tries to understand this dichotomy: how a man who earnestly sought to unite and to protect a people could also contribute to a legacy that continues to scar a country.The book introduces the reader to Malan the man: the shy, bookish young boy, the distracted intellectual who once left home with his slippers on, the uncertain lover and the thinker who spent hours preparing his speeches, first for church sermons and then for parliamentary debates.The rise in Afrikaner nationalism in the years after the Anglo-Boer War offers the backdrop to Malan’s personal and political life. This growing movement spurs him on to leave the church to become editor of Die Burger and provincial leader of the National Party. This book therefore also offers a gripping behind-the-scenes account of Afrikaner nationalist politics.
At the end of the nineteenth century European pimps and 'white slavers' established a hugely successful global market for commercial sex. Criminal syndicates from Buenos Aires to London and from Cape Town to New York were able to organise the seduction or rape of women in under-developed parts of Europe and their 'export' as prostitutes to meet an insatiable demand for sexual services. For three turbulent decades before the First World War, Joseph Silver - brothel-owner, pimp and trafficker in women on four continents - was central to this hidden world of betrayal, intrigue, lust and sexual slavery. Burglar, gun-runner, jewel-thief, rapist, safe-cracker and sodomist, Silver's notoriety was captured in the most confidential correspondence of a dozen countries in the western world. What those in charge of law-enforcement agencies kept to themselves, however, was how their officers had attempted to use Silver as an informer to infiltrate syndicates built on 'vice', only to have him outwit them as he moved in the dangerous space between police and prostitutes. A disturbed adolescent, youthful predator and adult misogynist driven by dark biblical and medieval obsessions, Silver's mental universe remained largely hidden from his family, other gangsters and police handlers. In this first reconstruction of the life of a dangerous psychopath, Charles van Onselen situates the private life of one man amidst the demi-monde of the Atlantic world to identify the most infamous serial killer of all time - for Joseph Silver's darkest secret of all lay in London, in Whitechapel, in the autumn of 1888.
Ali Bacher has been described at the best-known cricket official in the world and, as such, has attracted as much admiration as opprobrium. He is considered to be the most influential personality in the history of South African cricket. It is a story that is told with pace and is not short on colour. It includes the views of people most relevant to the issues being covered, by way of example: those ANC officials who viewed Ali Bacher as an enemy, agreed to engage him in clandestine meetings and then embraced him as a comrade; insiders in and around SA cricket who have dealt with him on subjects ranging from the masterminding of Rebel cricket tours in the 1980s to dealing with the Match Fixing scandal of the 1990s; and what went into organising the biggest Cricket World Cup of all in South Africa in Feb-March 2003. It is a story that covers his more than four decades in the forefront of SA cricket, including the most remarkable years in the history of South Africa. It will draw on this historical detail but will strongly project as a story of modern-day cricket challenges.
Harold Wilson was Prime Minister for almost eight years - the longest period spent in office this century until Mrs Thatcher. He fought five general elections and won four. While he was at Number Ten, Wilson held together the unruly elements of Left and Right in a Parliamentary party often at odds with itself, challenged the power of the trade unions, faced repeated economic crises and a devaluation, was abandoned by his own Cabinet and had to concede defeat. His period in office was one of the most momentous and controversial of the country's post-war history. His resignation took almost everyone by surprise and rumours still circulate about its cause. Philip Ziegler is the first historian to have access to Harold Wilson's personal archive, including much official documentation that will not become available for a decade or more. Although he has the blessing of his subject,
A biography of Pik Botha, one of South Africa’s most colourful public figures, and at a stage the longest serving Foreign Minister in the world.This biography reads like a novel: exciting, moving and humorous.
