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.

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Book details

• Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature by James Currey
  EAN: 9781868144723
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Photo courtesy African Writing

“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.

About Chris Thurman

Chris Thurman is since 2008 lecturer in the English Department at Wits in Johannesburg. His most recent publication is Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life, University of Kwazulu Natal Press (2010).

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
• RSVP: by Thurs 25th, boekehuis@boekehuis.co.za,
  011 482 3609

Book Details

• Tobias in Conversation: Genes, Fossils and Anthropology by Philip V Tobias with Goran Štrkajl and Jane Dugard
  EAN: 9781868144778
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Image courtesy University of the Witwatersrand

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).

• Read the complete article at Pambazuka

Book details

• African Security Governance: Emerging Issues edited by Edwin Cawthra
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781868144839
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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.”

• Read the complete article at Caleidoscop.org

Book details

• Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region edited by Fatima Sadiqi, Amira Nowaira, Azza El Kholy, Moha Ennaji
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781868144907
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Image courtesy Riadzany

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).

• Complete post at Loudrastress

Book details

• What is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial memory and the postapartheid imagination by Pumla Dineo Gqola
  EAN: 9781868145072
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Photograph of Pumla Gqola by Victor Dlamini

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.

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Book details

• The Origins of Non-racialism: White opposition to apartheid in the 1950s by David Everatt
  EAN: 9781868145003
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The Origins of Non-racialism: White opposition to apartheid in the 1960s

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Much has been made about South Africa’s transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. “Memory” features prominently in the country’s reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What is slavery to me? links with that research in its concern with South Africa’s past and the meaning-making processes attendant to it, but reads specifically memory activity which pertains to colonial slavery as practiced predominantly in the Western Cape for three centuries by the British and Dutch.

What is slavery to me? is the first full-length study of slave memory in the South African context, and examines the relevance and effects of slave memory for contemporary negotiations of South African gendered and racialised identities. It draws from feminist, postcolonial and memory studies and is therefore interdisciplinary in approach. It reads memory as one way of processing this past, and interprets a variety of cultural, literary and filmic texts to ascertain the particular experiences in relation to slave pasts being fashioned, processed and disseminated.

Much of the material surveyed across disciplines attributes to memory, or “popular history making”, a dialogue between past and present whilst ascribing sense to both the eras and their relationship. In this sense then, memory is active, entailing a personal relationship with the past which acts as mediator of reality on a day to day basis. The projects studies various negotiations of raced and gendered identities in creative and other public spaces in contemporary South Africa, by being particularly attentive to the encoding of consciousness about the country’s slave past.

This book extends memory studies in South Africa, provokes new lines of inquiry, and develops new frameworks through which to think about slavery and memory in South Africa.

About the author

Pumla Dineo Gqola is Associate Professor of Literary, Media and Gender Studies at the School of Literature and Language Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Book details

• What is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial memory and the postapartheid imagination by Pumla Dineo Gqola
  EAN: 9781868145072
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Photo courtesy Victor Dlamini

By the end of the day, yesterday, it was clear that we wouldn’t get a legal agreement. We were too close to the midnight deadline set by the United Nations, and countries were still stuck on the main issues of emissions cuts and climate compensation.

A draft of a new document, the “Copenhagen Accord” had been circulating all day—so we knew for sure that we’d see a political agreement come out of the climate summit.

What we didn’t expect was that Barack Obama would call a press conference close to midnight (with only White House press allowed into the room) in which he announced to the world that this agreement had been reached!

• Read the complete article (and look for other entries in the page’s sidebar)

Book details

• Scorched: South Africa’s changing climate by Leonie Joubert
  EAN: 9781868144372
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• Boiling Point: People in a Changing Climate by Leonie Joubert
  EAN: 9781868144679
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• Invaded: The Biological Invasion of South Africa by Leonie Joubert
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  EAN: 9781868144785
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Invaded: The Biological Invasion of South Africa

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The list of correspondents in Bury Me at the Marketplace, Es’kia Mphahlele’s selected letters – now released in a new edition by Wits Press – is astonishingly wide in scope, ranging from the likes of Jack Cope and Njabulo Ndebele to Philip Tobias and Langston Hughes. The names alone reveal just how large an impact Mphahlele had in the wider worlds of literature and politics.

We’ve stumbled upon another means of appraising Mphahlele’s life through his letters: the Google Books keyword index of the original edition of Bury Me at the Marketplace – a list that makes for a fascinating and oddly familiar browse through South African history; one that, for all its seeming randomness, gels into a coherent picture:

• More information at Google Books

The last interview that Es’kia Mphahlele gave, meanwhile, was to the writer Madala Thepa, who published it in the winter 2008 issue of Wordsetc:

He is sitting on a flimsy chair attached to a table without much heft to it. His arms are resting on the table. He is wearing shorts and the operation scars on both knees are visible. On the table is a glass with red liquid inside it, filled to the brim and placed between his hands. On the wall is a portrait of the author wearing a dashiki, the cabinet in the living room is set with sculptures and some other plastic arts. It’s not really a storehouse of art, books and papers. The house looks like a retired school principal’s house – neat, clean, bare. He is watching television with his grandchild. The only action he can muster is a nod, to which Stephina, his helper, responds by jumping to her feet to lower the volume.

“You finally found the place,” he says in a low, grave voice. “So tomorrow let’s meet at 10 in the morning then.”

At 9.30am I am lurking outside Es’kia’s house with a colleague photographer. Stephina answers the door. Es’kia is called. He plods in a circle when he walks, like he has left something behind. The interview is conducted in Sepedi, his language. I’m thinking I should not fall into bear pits of rigid translation methodologies. I’m hoping to be faithful to the quality of his words.

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Book details

• Bury Me at the Marketplace: Es’kia Mphahlele and Company, Letters 1943–2006 edited by N Chabani Manganyi, David Attwell
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781868144891
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Photo courtesy AfricanSuccess.org