Helen Suzman: Bright Star in a Dark Chamber
By Robin Renwick
Why this book?
The best books on how the world works
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Browse the best books on the apartheid as recommended by authors, experts, and creators. Along with notes on why they recommend those books.
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By Robin Renwick
The best books on how the world works
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By Mark Mathabane
The best books to read for a clearer understanding of many facets of the human condition
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By Joseph Lelyveld
Move Your Shadow is a masterpiece of reportage. Lelyveld, a former executive editor of the New York Times, spent considerable periods in apartheid South Africa in both the 1960s and the 1980s. The sixties was the period of “baaskap”—“bosshood” apartheid, when the perverse racist cruelties of the system were imposed with a sledgehammer. I would call the eighties the era of “facelift” apartheid—why, the word was hardly used by the regime anymore.
To paraphrase Gramsci, the old world was dying, a new one struggled to be born. Monsters abounded. Nobody captured the period better than Lelyveld. The chapter on Philip…
The best books about Southern Africa as picked by a historian
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By Alan Paton
I wrote my first novel thirty years after I left South Africa. During the writing, I reread Cry, the Beloved Country. The tone of that book, the cadences of the language, almost biblical, as well as the emotional seriousness in the telling, crept into my own style.
This is a heartbreaking book, told from a very personal perspective, yet universal in its themes.
Can a work of art change the world? Perhaps not on the grand political stage, but most certainly it can change the way we see the world, and thus change us for the better.
The best books that taught me about life, about literature, and about South Africa
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By Nadine Gordimer
I stumbled across this coming-of-age story by one of my favourite South African writers in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford when I was an undergraduate. I hadn’t been able to lose myself in fiction for a couple of years because I was so immersed in academic reading (history, mostly) – but this novel got me back on the wagon. It was the first novel I’d read in a long time that really made me want to write, to tell a story that could move a reader in the same way. In it, a white, middle-class girl growing up in a…
The best books about smart girls figuring out hard stuff
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By Andre Brink
A true South African classic. Told from an Afrikaner point of view which is an unusual experience for me as someone with modern liberal sensibilities, this is a grown-up psychological and political thriller about loyalties, conflict, and betrayals set against the shadow of the Angola conflict and the beginning of the end of apartheid.
The best African set political thrillers
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