Showing titles in Africa

What happens when we consider Africa through a feminist lens and feminism through an African one? And what does it mean to centre selfhood in this journey? In this shining, wide-ranging inquiry, Minna Salami explores these questions through an unhesitating and incisive vision of African feminist...

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE WINNER OF IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE ‘The most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read’ SALLY ROONEY The Western world has turned its back on refugees, fuelling one of the most devastating human rights...

In the spring of 1999, in the beautiful hills of the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, a young white farmer was shot dead on the dirt road running from his father's farmhouse to his irrigation fields. The murder was the work of assassins rather than robbers; a single shot behind the ear, nothing but his gun stolen, no forensic evidence like cartridges or fingerprints left at the scene. Journalist Jonny Steinberg travelled to the midlands to investigate. Local black workers said the young white man had it coming.

In 1972, when Alexandra Fuller was two years old, her parents finally abandoned their English life and returned to what was then Southern Rhodesia and to the beginning of a civil war. By the time she was eight, the war was in full swing. Her parents veered from being determined farmers to being blind drunk, whilst Alexandra and her sister, the only survivors of five children, alternately take up target practice and sing Rod Stewart songs from sun bleached rocks.

As a young, ambitious soldier, Winston Churchill managed to get himself posted to the 21st Lancers in 1899 as a war correspondent for the Morning Post - and joined them in fighting the rebel Boer settlers in South Africa. In this conflict, rebel forces in the Transvaal and Orange Free State had proclaimed their own statehood, calling it the Boer Republic.

A ground-breaking and essential work of history – the first of its kind to closely examine the British Royal Family’s connection with the transatlantic slave trade The Crown's Silence is the untold story of the British royal family’s relationship to slavery from the reign of Elizabeth I to...

Cecil John Rhodes became one of the most influential people in the history of the British Empire. He made a fortune in South Africa by leading the world's most important diamond mining company, De Beers. While he was a busy entrepreneur, he was also a member of the Cape Colony's legislature and served as prime minister from 1890 to 1896, a key period for the development of racial discrimination.

Did white South Africa crack, or did its leadership yield sufficiently, and just in time, to avert a revolution? The transformation has been called a miracle, belying gloomy predictions of race war in which the white minority went into a laager and fought to the last drop of blood. Why did it happen? David Welsh views the topic against the backdrop of a long history of conflict spanning apartheid's rise and demise and the liberation movement's suppression and subsequent resurrection.

Overseas Press Club Award Winner 2016 A shocking investigative journey into the way the resource trade wreaks havoc on Africa, ‘The Looting Machine’ explores the dark underbelly of the global economy. Africa: the world’s poorest continent and, arguably, its richest. While accounting for...

On January 22, 1879, a massive Zulu host attacked the British Army's 24th Regiment in its encampment at the foot of the mountain of Isandlwana. It was the first major encounter in the Anglo-Zulu War and a disastrous defeat for the colonial power. Later that afternoon the victorious Zulus would strike the tiny British garrison at Rorke's Drift.

A century before Britain became involved in this terrible business, whole villages and towns in European countries were being depopulated by slavers, who transported the men, women, and children to Africa, where they were sold. This is the forgotten slave trade, one which saw over a million Christians forced into captivity in the Muslim world. Starting in the ancient world, Simon Webb traces the history of slavery in Europe, showing that the numbers involved were vast and that the victims were often treated far more cruelly than black slaves in America and the Caribbean.

CAPE TOWN’S POPULAR high-end night spots attract an array of clientele, from young partygoers to politicians, models to moguls. In parallel with this is a sleazy underworld where control of the lucrative nightclub-security scene is the ultimate prize, for which some are prepared to pay using extortion and murder as the main currencies. South Africa’s private-security sector is massive, an informal police force increasingly relied on as confidence in traditional policing wanes. But it’s an industry tainted by ties to underworld figures and events.

In winter of 1912, Henri Matisse was struggling. Once the vanguard leader, the Parisian avant-garde now considered him passé. His important early collectors had stopped buying his work and were fully championing Picasso, and he had exhibited little in the last few years. In the face of Cubism...

An epic history of a doomed civilization and a lost empire. The devastating struggle to the death between the Carthaginians and the Romans was one of the defining dramas of the ancient world. In an epic series of land and sea battles, both sides came close to victory before the Carthaginians finally succumbed and their capital city, history, and culture were almost utterly erased.

Livingstone's first book revolutionized the way European readers saw Africa and made him a hero in England. He returned again to the Zambesi with his brother Charles and others, this time with more equipment and funds. Again he faced hippopotami, crocodiles, impossible terrain, and disease, but his greatest enemies on this trip prove to be human. The British eventually lost faith in the expedition, but Livingstone proved in the end to have had tremendous foresight.

With an introduction by Rory Stewart Winner of the Guardian First Book award, a first-hand account one of the defining outrages of modern history. All at once, as it seemed, something we could have only imagined was upon us - and we could still only imagine it. This is what fascinates me most in...

The definitive story of the making and legacy of Paul Simon's Graceland In 1984, Paul Simon was at a professional and personal crossroads. His marriage was failing, his career was in danger of declining and the music scene was shifting to a world of synths, drum machines and music videos. But a...

Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the West and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the repercussions of European colonialism in Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

These are the combat experiences of the first Marine to command a special operations task force, recounted against a backdrop of his journey from raw Second Lieutenant to seasoned Colonel and Task Force Commander; from leading Marines through the streets of Mogadishu, Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul to directing multi-national special operations forces in a dauntingly complex fight against a formidable foe.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. With the passing of Nelson Mandela, ‘the father of the nation’, comes the end of an era, and the moment to look back on his remarkable saving, and remaking, of South Africa. After years of oppression and racial inequality, concentrated...