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Seven years since his death (2013), Nelson Mandela still occupies an extraordinary place in the global imagination. Internationally, Mandela’s renown seems intact and invulnerable. In South Africa, however, his legacy and his place in the country’s history have become matters of contention and dispute, especially amongst younger black South Africans. The essays in this book analyse aspects of Mandela’s life in the context of South Africa’s national history, and make an important contribution to the historiography of the anti-apartheid political struggle. They reassess: the political context of Mandela’s youth; his changing political beliefs and connections with the Left; his role in the African National Congress and the turn to armed struggle; his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and their political relationship. By providing new context, they explore Mandela as an actor in broader social processes such as the rise of the ANC and the making of South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution. The detailed essays are linked in a substantial introduction by Colin Bundy and current debates are addressed in a concluding essay by Elleke Boehmer. This book provides a scholarly counterweight both to uncritical celebration of Mandela and also to a simplistic attribution of post-apartheid shortcomings to the person of Mandela. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring A pathbreaking analysis of the relationship between Mandela the myth, and Mandela the historical figure, looking at the way images, stories, and politics have been combined to create the iconic image of Mandela that we know today. Boehmer explores the long trajectory of Mandela's life, explaining first the historical and political context of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and then the post-apartheid period of difficult reconciliation, including the shifts and changes in Mandela's reputation since the millennium. This innovative postcolonial reflection takes on board the more critical revisionist literature on Mandela that has emerged since 2015, looking at responses to his death in 2014, and the 2018 commemorations of the 100th anniversary of his birth. The first edition set a trend in scholarship on Mandela by reading his character and achievements through the lens of his influences, interests, and leading ideas. The second edition extends this focus with a far-reaching critical look at meanings of reconciliation and Mandela's ethic of reciprocity. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
The Rough Guide to Nelson Mandela is a fresh, honest overview of the life story and the impact of one of the world's greatest modern icons. It assesses the influence of his rural, traditional childhood on his later personality, and his early years as a revolutionary leader and master strategist; including his private life and troubled marriages. It explores his 27 years in an apartheid jail and reveals the inside stories of the white government's first secretive contacts with him and how he encouraged their intelligence chiefs to advise their political masters to abandon apartheid and negotiate a political settlement. The Rough Guide to Nelson Mandela attempts to explain Mandela's remarkable lack of bitterness and his commitment to reconciliation with the white minority after his release. Readers get a rare insight into Mandela's role in during the crucial negotiations period and his term as South Africa's first black president. It critically examines his iconic status and impact on the world stage. The Rough Guide to Nelson Mandela liberates Nelson Mandela from cloying myths and partisan portraits, pinpointing the true impact and legacy of one of the world's most recognizable figures.
South Africa’s higher education sector is rooted in the country’s divided past. A significant State-driven restructuring from around 1997 to 2005 resulted in what is largely the current configuration of public universities. But just over two decades later, for a variety of reasons, the higher education sector in South Africa appears beset with numerous challenges. Nelson Mandela University is one of the public universities that emerged from the restructuring process. The university is in an ongoing state of evolution, of becoming. It developed out of the amalgamation of the University of Port Elizabeth, Port Elizabeth Technikon and incorporation of the Port Elizabeth campus of Vista University as Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in 2005. In 2017, it was renamed Nelson Mandela University, after the world-renowned statesman, rather than the metropolitan area in which the university is primarily located. The renaming was conceptualised as more than a marketing opportunity to rebrand the university, but as an opportunity to reorientate the university, to reposition Nelson Mandela University as an engaged and socially-embedded university in the service of society, striving to be the academic expression of the values and ethos of its iconic namesake. Endeavouring to be something greater and different from the norm imbues its strategy, public statements and practices. The determination to ‘achieve Mandela University’ serves, or is intended to serve, as both an organising principle and a lodestar. A cross-section of writers from different backgrounds situates Nelson Mandela University within the contemporary historical moment from which it emerged and examines its subsequent evolution. While Nelson Mandela University has performed the usual work expected of any university, it has also sought to turn the university outwards, to achieve a higher purpose, framing itself as a values-based university on a journey to become something else. In Achieving Nelson Mandela University? the university attempts to give an account of itself. The book is an intellectual and scholarly reflection on where the university has come from and where it is seeking to go.
Definitive and gripping narrative history of the Communist Party of South Africa.
A deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela’s relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela that “does justice both to the couple’s political heroism and to the betrayals and the secrets that hounded their union” (The New Yorker). Drawing on never-before-seen material, Steinberg—one of South Africa’s foremost nonfiction writers—reveals the fractures and stubborn bonds at the heart of a volatile and groundbreaking union, a very modern political marriage that played out on the world stage. “Powerful, intimate.” —The Washington Post One of the most celebrated political leaders of a century, Nelson Mandela has been written about by many biographers and historians. But in one crucial area, his life remains largely untold: his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. During his years in prison, Nelson grew ever more in love with an idealized version of his wife, courting her in his letters as if they were young lovers frozen in time. But Winnie, every bit his political equal, found herself increasingly estranged from her jailed husband’s politics. Behind his back, she was trying to orchestrate an armed seizure of power, a path he feared would lead to an endless civil war. Jonny Steinberg tells the tale of this unique marriage—its longings, its obsessions, its deceits—making South African history a page-turning political biography. Winnie and Nelson is a modern epic in which trauma doesn’t affect just the couple at its center, but an entire nation. It is also a Shakespearean drama in which bonds of love and commitment mingle with timeless questions of revolution, such as whether to seek retribution or a negotiated peace. Steinberg reveals, with power and tender emotional insight, how far these forever-entwined leaders would go for each other and where they drew the line. For in the end, both knew theirs was not simply a marriage, but a contest to decide how apartheid should be fought.
A revelatory and definitive account of how Nelson Mandela and his peers led South Africa to the brink of revolution against the postwar twentieth century’s most infamously racist regime. Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries brings to life the brief revolutionary period in which Nelson Mandela and his comrades fought apartheid not just with words but also with violence. After the 1960 Sharpeville police shootings of civilian protesters, Mandela and his comrades in the mass-resistance order of the African National Congress (ANC) and the Communist Party pioneered the use of force and formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or Spear of the Nation. A civilian-based militia, MK stockpiled weapons and waged a war of sabotage against the state with pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, and dynamite. In response, the state passed draconian laws, militarized its police, and imprisoned its enemies without trial. Drawing from several hundred first-person accounts, most of which are unpublished, Paul Landau traces Mandela’s allies—and opponents—in communist, pan-Africanist, liberal, and other groups involved in escalating resistance alongside the ANC. After Mandela’s capture, the Pan Africanist Congress planned to initiate street violence, and MK organized Operation Mayibuye, an uprising to be led by trained commandos. The state short-circuited those plans and subsequently jailed, exiled, tortured, and murdered revolutionaries. The era of high apartheid then began. Spear reshapes our understanding of Mandela by focusing on this intense but relatively neglected period of escalation in the movement against apartheid. Landau’s book is not a biography, nor is it a history of a militia or an army; rather, it is a riveting story about ordinary civilians debating and acting together in extremis. Contextualizing Mandela and MK’s activities amid anticolonial change and Black Marxism in the early 1960s, Spear also speaks to today’s transnational antiracism protests and worldwide struggles against oppression.
This book provides an important critical analysis of the autobiographies of nine major leaders of national liberation movements in Africa. By examining their self-narratives, we can better understand how decolonisation unfolded and how activist-politicians sought to immortalise their roles for posterity. Focusing on the autobiographies of Peter Abrahams, Albert Luthuli, Ruth First and Nelson Mandela (South Africa), Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria), Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia), George Mwase (Malawi), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Maurice Nyagumbo (Zimbabwe), and Oginga Odinga (Kenya), the book uncovers the social and cultural forces which galvanized the anti-colonial resistance movement in African societies. In particular, the book explores the disdain for foreign domination, economic exploitation and cultural imperialism. It delves into themes of African cultural sovereignty before the colonial encounter, the disruptive presence of colonialism, the nationalist ferment against European imperial domination, the achievement of political autonomy by African nation-states and the corpus of contradictions which attended postcolonial becoming. With important insights on how these key historical figures navigated the process of self-determining nationhood in Africa, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, history, and politics.
An outrageous miscellany of serious and light-hearted lies, myths, untruths, fibs and fabrications that tells the tall tale of South Africa. The fibs come thick and fast, like a burst sewerage pipe: • Why everything we've learnt about Shaka Zulu, 'Africa's Napoleon', is a pack of lies. • Back in the darkest of ages (the 1970s!), citizens were told that there were satanic messages if you played some of The Beatles songs backwards. • National icon Hansie Cronje was a paragon of virtue, and integrity ... until he wasn't. • President Nelson Mandela told us that we, as a nation, were 'special'. Turns out we aren't. Whether a fabulous fib, an artful con, a doctor's spin, or simply a bald-faced lie, there's something for everyone.
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contesting such characterizations, the contributors to this collection reassess classic theories of metropolitan modernity as they explore the experience of “city-ness” and urban life in post-apartheid South Africa. They portray Johannesburg as a polycentric and international city with a hybrid history that continually permeates the present. Turning its back on rigid rationalities of planning and racial separation, Johannesburg has become a place of intermingling and improvisation, a city that is fast developing its own brand of cosmopolitan culture. The volume’s essays include an investigation of representation and self-stylization in the city, an ethnographic examination of friction zones and practices of social reproduction in inner-city Johannesburg, and a discussion of the economic and literary relationship between Johannesburg and Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. One contributor considers how Johannesburg’s cosmopolitan sociability enabled the anticolonial projects of Mohandas Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. Journalists, artists, architects, writers, and scholars bring contemporary Johannesburg to life in ten short pieces, including reflections on music and megamalls, nightlife, built spaces, and life for foreigners in the city. Contributors: Arjun Appadurai, Carol A. Breckenridge, Lindsay Bremner, David Bunn, Fred de Vries, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Stefan Helgesson, Julia Hornberger, Jonathan Hyslop, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, Xavier Livermon, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Robert Muponde, Sarah Nuttall, Tom Odhiambo, Achal Prabhala, AbdouMaliq Simone