The most recommended books about South Africa

The book is a deep dive into the education and skills needs of green transitions.

It builds on the rich insights of green skills planning through an analysis of case studies and shows why skills are one of the drivers to achieving a just transition to a green economy. The context of the book is South Africa, but application is worldwide.

Stronger synergies between skills and green transition policies are essential and the book presents a model for thinking about skills for a sustainable, just future.

Nobel-prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee is not known for dodging big questions and moral gravitas, and my pick here is no exception.

The Lives of Animals would seem to be the logical choice (and with it, the novel that eventually emerged from it, Elizabeth Costello of 2003). But I’m going with his earlier novel, Disgrace (published the same year as Lives, 1999), because I think it’s the stronger book, and by that I mean more unsettling, more challenging.

Disgrace captures how the most intense and meaningful episodes in our moral lives can nevertheless be opaque and, in a sense, unfathomable. And few books demonstrate in a “show don’t tell” way just how intertwined race, sexuality, and animality are in our moral drama.

Smith served in WW2 in the RAF and is more famous for his 633 Squadron series set in WW2, which coincidentally is one of the best WW2 flying movies. The flying scenes are as good as they get, the aircraft details and performance are accurate, the plot twisting, and the love relationships are…complicated. But in this book, you will identify with the hero and find yourself rooting for him as he battles Germans in the air and an enemy in his own squadron while on the ground. Gripping and fast-moving.

This novel is set in the beautiful, moody rainforests of South Africa’s Garden Route and captures the period of gold rush, ivory hunting, and logging at the end of the 19th century. The hero, Saul Barnard, is increasingly disturbed by the destruction of the ancient forest by miners, hunters, and woodcutters, and develops a relationship with one of the region’s reclusive elephants. It’s a novel that not only celebrates this wild corner of South Africa, but is an implicit cry for its conservation. I have spent time camping and hiking in those forests and have developed a love for their leafy embrace.

A great journey through how and why corporate South Africa is responding to the green transition.

It features case studies of leading national and multi-national corporations charting the sometimes bumpy road to integrating sustainability in business models.

From retail, energy, finance, insurance, and banking sectors businesses share the highs and lows of going green. 

The late Nick Wood, a science fiction writer, clinical psychologist, former journalist, humanitarian, and anti-apartheid activist born in Zambia and raised in South Africa, was always learning.

This is reflected in all his writing, including most of the stories in his collection. Largely science fiction stories in a variety of settings: from post-apocalyptic worlds, settled moons, and climate-changed earths, these stories are highly focused on the social and environmental aspects of humanity even in the most science fictional scenarios.

These stories, intersectional, emotionally resonant, exciting, thoughtful, and varied. Learning Monkey and Crocodile is a wonderful way to sample some of South Africa’s interesting science fiction corpus from a voice that has now left us, but which will not be forgotten.

Deon Meyer is one of South Africa’s best crime writers, and this novel is the second in a series featuring policeman Benny Griessel. Benny is a good cop and an ordinary guy. He’s also an alcoholic and his drinking has destroyed his family. Thirteen Hours is set in Cape Town and the action, as the title suggests, spans thirteen hours. A backpacker goes missing and the cops must find her before the bad guys do. It’s an edge-of-the-seat ride and I promise you’ll be cheering Benny on.

This book is described as "a deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela's relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela." That it certainly is, both deeply researched and shattering.

I found it page-turning but also deeply disturbing, recalling the Latin cautionary phrase "de mortuis nil nisi bonum." On the other hand, perhaps that injunction to express nothing but good of the dead should not apply to public figures like the Mandelas, both of them proper subjects for a responsible historian like Steinberg.

In the early 1990s, Barbara Masekela served as Nelson Mandela's Chief of Staff. This book contains revealing lengthy extracts from an interview Steinberg conducted with her in 2018, after both Mandelas had died.

For every dreaming rebel. This novel weaves together two tumultuous periods in history–the last decades of slavery and the start of grand apartheid–and the stories of two women bursting the seams of their existence.

In 1794, Katrijn van der Caab, a freed slave, finds herself on a farm where the master’s obsession with experimentation reflects a growing fixation with racial classification. In 1961, Sister Vergilius, a nun in rural South Africa, wants to escape the confines of her order even as the political and social strictures of the time hem her in still further.

This complex book demands commitment from the reader, but it is so beautifully written that phrases still linger in my mind. And the main characters were so compelling that I tracked down the author to ask her their fates!

Another classic lesbian novel.

Two Asian women living in South Africa in the 1950s meet and take hold of a beautiful opportunity to care for each other, despite both personal struggles and the broader challenges of trying to build a life during Apartheid.

There is tragedy and loss, and also hope and defiance; the two of them have little victories, both personal and political, that build toward a promising future, even if they haven’t quite made it there yet.