Speaking at the launch will be Benjamin Smith, director of the Rock Art Research Institute (RARI) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Event Details
Date: Thursday, 25 March 2010
Time: 12:30 PM for 1:00 PM
Venue: Natal Museum,
237 Jabu Ndlovu Street (Loop Street)
Pietermaritzburg
Guest Speaker: Benjamin Smith,
director of the Rock Art Research Institute (RARI)
People of the Eland: Rock Paintings of the Drakensberg Bushmen as a Reflection of their Life and Thought by Patricia Vinnicombe
EAN: 9781868144976 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
The Eland’s People: New Perspectives in the Rock Art of the Maloti-Drakensberg Bushmen edited by Peter Mitchell and Benjamin Smith
EAN: 9781868144983 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Wits Press and the Book Lounge are delighted to invite you to hear Harry Garuba and Chabani Manganyi discuss Bury Me at the Marketplace – the edited letters of Es’kia Mphahlele.
When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele, the idea of Mphahlele’s death was remote and poetic. The title, Bury Me at the Marketplace, suggested that immortality of a kind awaited the writer, in the very coming and going of those who remember him and whose lives he touched. It suggested, too, the energy and magnanimity of Mphahlele the man, whose personality and intellect as a writer and educator would carve an indelible place for him in South Africa’s public sphere.
That death has now come and we mourn it. Manganyi’s words at the time have acquired a new significance: in the symbolic marketplace, he noted, ‘the drama of life continues relentlessly and the silence of death is unmasked for all time’. The silence of death is certainly unmasked in this volume, in its record of Mphahlele’s rich and varied life: his private words, his passions and obsessions, his arguments, his loves, hopes, achievements, and yes, even some of his failures. Here the reader will find many facets of the private man translated back into the marketplace of public memory.
Despite the personal nature of the letters, the further horizons of this volume are the contours of South Africa’s literary and cultural history, the international affiliations out of which it has been formed, particularly in the diaspora that connects South Africa to the rest of the African continent and to the black presence in Europe and the United States.
This selection of Mphahlele’s own letters has been greatly expanded; it has also been augmented by the addition of letters from Mphahlele’s correspondents, among them such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Nadine Gordimer. It seeks to illustrate the networks that shaped Mphahlele’s personal and intellectual life, the circuits of intimacy, intellectual inquiry, of friendship, scholarship and solidarity that he created and nurtured over the years. The correspondence is supplemented by introductory essays from the two editors, by two interviews conducted with Mphahlele by Manganyi and by Attwell’s insightful explanatory notes.
Bury Me at the Marketplace: Es’kia Mphahlele and Company – Letters 1943–2006 edited by N Chabani Manganyi and David Attwell Book Homepage
EAN: 9781868144891 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Wits University Press and The Graduate School of Public and Development Management at Wits invite you to the launch of African Security Governance: Emerging Issues, edited by Gavin Cawthra.
Cawthra will discuss the results of research carried out over a number of years by the Southern African Defense and Security Management Network (SADSEM) on many new and emerging security issues. The broad discussion will include security governance.
The First Ethiopians explores the images of African and Africans that evolved in ancient Egypt, in classical Greece and imperial Rome, in the early Mediterranean world, and in the early domains of Christianity.
Inspired by curiosity regarding the origins of racism in southern Africa, Malvern van Wyk Smith consulted a wide range of sources, which led to a startling proposition: western racism has its roots in Africa itself, notably in late New-Kingdom Egypt as its ruling elites sought to distance Egyptian civilisation from its African origins.
Malvern van Wyk Smith is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Rhodes University.
Event Details
Date: Thursday, 18 March 2010
Time: 5:45 PM for 6:00 PM
Venue: David Krut Bookstore, Arts on Main,
Corner of Main and Berea Streets, Johannesburg
Guest Speaker: Professor Abebe Zegeye,
Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER)
The First Ethiopians: The Image of Africa and Africans in the Early Mediterranean World by Malvern van Wyk Smith
EAN: 9781868144990 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Born in England in 1936 and educated at Oxford, Currey spent his formative years in publishing in South Africa, working for Oxford University Press in Cape Town in the early 1960s. These were the years of the Sharpeville massacre and the Rivonia trial, and Currey got to know writers Dennis Brutus, Bessie Head and Alex La Guma through contacts on the radical monthly The New African.
As the situation in South Africa deteriorated, and with states elsewhere in Africa gaining independence from European colonial control, Currey became more and more interested in the new generations of African writers then appearing across the continent, an interest that stood him in good stead when he went to work on the African Writers Series in 1967 at Heinemann in London.
Founded in 1962, the aim of the series was to promote the work of young African writers whose work was crying out for recognition both in Africa and abroad as the countries from which they came achieved independence. There was a need to make this work more widely known, even as Africa itself was undergoing something of a cultural renaissance as it emerged from European colonialism in the heady years of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature by James Currey
EAN: 9781868144723 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Johannesburg doesn’t have mountains, it doesn’t have a river, but it does have the Sterkfontein Caves
“When people around the world glibly ask, ‘What has Africa ever given to the world?’, a simple answer: ‘Humanity’. My study of fossils from Olduvai, Sterkfontein and Makapansgat led me to proclaim confidently that human beings, human culture, first appeared in Africa. This is a profound political, and not just an academic statement.”
- Phillip Tobias in conversation with Chris Thurman in an interview for The Weekender, 31st Jan 2009.
Boekehuis invites you to join them for a conversation between palaeontologist and professor emeritus Phillip Tobias, widely recognised as one of the world’s greatest researchers and one of South Africa’s most distinguished scientists, & Chris Thurman, lecturer in the English Department at Wits in Johannesburg.
About Prof Tobias
Palaeontologist Phillip Tobias is professor emeritus of anatomy and human biology at Wits University, prolific author and researcher, and one of South Africa’s most distinguished scientists.
Tobias’s major focus as an academic has been on human evolution and fossil hominids. He has been in charge of excavations at the Sterkfontein Cave since 1966, where some of the world’s major fossils, like Little Foot and Mrs Ples, have been found, and he has participated in almost all other major digs in southern Africa since 1945. He is the recipient of numerous international academic honours and professorships. He is the only person to hold three professorships simultaneously at Wits University – anatomy, human biology and palaeoanthropology.
His interview with Prof Tobias can be found here. At christhurman.net you can find other reviews and interviews by him of which the most recent is an article on The aesthetics of mining.
Event Details
Date: Saturday, 27 February 2010
Time: 12:00 AM for 12:30 AM
Venue: Boekehuis, Cnr. Lothbury and Fawley streets,
Auckland Park
Tobias in Conversation: Genes, Fossils and Anthropology by Philip V Tobias with Goran Štrkajl and Jane Dugard
EAN: 9781868144778 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Security governance in Africa is a thorny issue at best – and all the thornier when it comes to a world super power and its policies toward the continent. Edwin Cawthra takes an in-depth look at the issues surrounding security in Africa in African Security Governance. In the article below, Daniel Volman, the director of the African Security Research Project in Washington DC, analyzes President Barak Obama’s position on security towards Africa – according to Volman, it’s ultimately all about oil.
When Barack Obama took office as president of the United States in January 2009, it was widely expected that he would dramatically change, or even reverse, the militarised and unilateral national security policy toward Africa (as well as toward other parts of the world) that had been pursued by the Bush administration. For many, expectations about the Obama administration’s approach to Africa were raised even higher by the speech that Obama delivered in Ghana in July 2009 and by the tour of Africa that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made in August 2009. But, after one year in office, it is clear that the Obama administration is essentially following the same policy that has guided US military involvement in Africa for more than a decade.
Thus, in its budget request for the State Department for the 2010 financial year the Obama administration proposed significant increases in US arms sales and military training programmes for African countries, as well as for regional programmes on the continent. These included the Foreign Military Financing Program (to pay for arms sales to African countries), the International Military Education and Training Program (to train African military officers in the United States), the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership and the East African Regional Strategic Initiative (to provide training and equipment to the military forces of countries in North Africa, West Africa and East Africa), the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement Program (to provide equipment, infrastructure and training to police and other law enforcement units in Africa), military training programmes to help implement peace agreements (in Sudan, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo), the African Contingency Operations and Training Assistance Program (to provide training and equipment to a number of African military forces to enhance their ability to conduct peacekeeping operations and other military activities), and to several anti-terrorism programmes including the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, the Terrorist Interdiction Program, the Counterterrorism Financing Program and the Counterterrorism Engagement Program (to provide training and equipment to African countries and build ties with key political leaders on the continent).
Co-editor of Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region, Dr Fatima Sadiqi will be directing an International Conference on Marginalized Women in March this year. The conference will take place in Morocco and will be dealing with the lives of “single mothers, divorced women, widows, household breadwinners, in brief women without men in a globalized world seriously threatened by the impact of the financial crisis”.
To celebrate March 8, Isis Centre for Women and Development (based in Fes, Morocco and directed by Dr Fatima Sadiqi) is organizing an international conference (March 8-10, 2010) on marginalized women: single mothers, divorced women, widows, household breadwinners, in brief women without men in a globalized world seriously threatened by the impact of the financial crisis.
Discussing these categories of women is still taboo in the overwhelming majority of the Arab-Islamic countries, sub-Saharan Africa and the countries of the global south. In addition to a couple of plenary sessions, the conference will feature workshops with grassroot activists, visits to three listening centers, life stories, and awards for some local marginalized women who have made it.
Aims of the Workshop
The main objectives of the workshop are:
1. Historicize the theme of “women and social taboos”. Focus will be put on the history of development.
2.Create linkages between scholars, research institutes, and universities.
3. Include MA and PhD students of human sciences especially gender studies and history in the workshop.”
Pumla Dineo Gqola, author of the soon-to-be-released What is Slavery to Me? reminds us that, as president, Jacob Zuma should be demonstrating a greater respect for woman:
I will admit right of the bat that I wish that when the president of the republic makes front page news almost weekly, it would be for more politically refreshing reasons. I have wished this about all presidents of a democratic South Africa, and while interesting news can also be infuriating news, I’d rather read about something Zuma did that involves more than his love and sex life. I am not so delusional that I expect a feminist president when none was really in the running (although I did vote nationally for the one person I do interpret as Pan-Africanist, feminist, humane, unbought, Patricia de Lille).
Newspapers have had a field day with rumours about an emminent split between the ANC and the SACP. Business Day took a closer look at the history between the two parties and, what those who are in the know think about the chances for the alliance.
David Everatt not only acknowledges the bond these two organizations have had for many years but also refers to the inherent power struggle within the union in The Origins of Non-Racialism.
Communists have historically been active members in the African National Congress (ANC) for most of its 98-year history, a reality that cannot escape detractors in and outside the tripartite alliance.
On Wednesday, South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Blade Nzimande — himself a national executive committee (NEC) member of the ruling party — made this point during a commemorative tribute to the late SACP leader Joe Slovo.
“Comrade Slovo is also the personification of the role played by many other communists in our liberation movement. He was a member and leader of both the SACP and the ANC. He personifies the fact that there is no contradiction in being a communist and a member of the ANC, and that … good communists must be in the ANC,” Nzimande said.
Wits University Press and the Natal Museum invite you to the launch of People of the Eland: Rock Paintings of the Drankensberg Bushmen as a Reflection of their Life and Thought by Patricia Vinnicombe and The Eland’s People: New Perspectives on the Rock Art of the Maloti-Drakensberg Bushmen, Essays in Memory of Pat Vinnicombe edited by Peter Mitchell and Benjamin Smith.
Wits Press and the Book Lounge are delighted to invite you to hear Harry Garuba and Chabani Manganyi discuss 
David Tresilian profiles James Currey and his book, 
Johannesburg doesn’t have mountains, it doesn’t have a river, but it does have the Sterkfontein Caves
