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Extract: Trying to grasp something unfathomable

In ‘A Map to the Door of No Return’ Dionne Brand reads VS Naipaul as a sorrowfully spiteful narrator, full of the despair of exile

Living on the edge: Graeme Feltham’s posthumously published novel

You gotta be the morning aftertaste

Drug user, and later dealer, Fig lives in Yeoville in the mid-1990s. Not a novel for the faint-hearted

Challenging stereotypes: Author Ming-Cheau Lin has recently published her memoir, Yellow and Confused, in which she reflects on her experiences growing up as an Asian South African. (Grethe Rosseaux)

On always being the other

For Asian South Africans it’s difficult to find our way between two different cultures

Motala and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu listen to Nelson Mandela.

The doctor and his ‘subversive surgery’

‘Chota Motala: A Biography of Political Activism in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands’ recounts the doctor’s role in shaping politics

Liberation politics from the excluded

Liberation politics from the excluded

Here is an edited extract from Michael Neocosmos’ book Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics (Wits University Press)

Uproot

Uproot, plant seeds of change

An edited extract from South Africa’s Corporatised Liberation — A critical analysis of the ANC in power (Jacana) by Dale T McKinley.

‘We all have something to contribute to UCT’s growth. I want you to know that your concerns about UCT are important to me

Book extract: Bedknobs and Broomsticks – a dossier of credible lies

Edited extract from ‘Rogue: The Inside Story of Sars’s Elite Crime-busting Unit’, by Johann van Loggerenberg with Adrian Lackay..

UFS is embracing the challenge to transform education beyond the model that was established centuries ago

​Phiyega’s war on Booysen led to an unlikely – and surprising – alliance with McBride

Initially suspicious, the major general discovered another side to the tenacious IPID director — which in turn would lead to McBride’s suspension

The outcome of the ANC’s long-awaited KwaZulu-Natal conference was a win for the Thuma Mina crowd. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)

Born-free to fight Biko’s war

Liberation Diaries, which brings together essays by 50 South Africans, is billed as ‘the state of the nation address, by the people’. Here’s a sample.

Book extract: After apartheid comes ordinary

Achmat Dangor re-examines the ‘struggle years’ and their aftermath in a brand new collection of short stories, Strange Pilgrimages.

Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment

Book extract: Workers know what oppresses them

Michael Burawoy and Karl Von Holdt’s "Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment" examines ways to structure power.

Language and life in the time of darkness

Nadine Gordimer charts South Africa’s journey into an uncertain landscape in her new novel. We publish two extracts from the novel.

Book extract: Tutu’s voice vital for humanity

Book extract: Tutu’s voice vital for humanity

His Holiness the Dalai Lama talks about Archbishop Desmond Tutu in this edited extract from <i>Tutu: The Authorised Portrait</i>.