International African Library
2 primary works
Book 10
This is a remarkable chronicle of the struggles of many people - black and white - whose lives have been rooted in one district of the South African highveld over the last hundred years. Thaba Nchu (Black Mountain) was the territory of an independent African chiefdom until it ws annexed by the Orange Free State republic in 1884. By 1977, one-third had emegred as part of 'independent' Bophutswana with consequent 'inter-ethnic' antagonisms. As a result, on and adjoining piece of bare veld, there had developed the largest slum in South Africa, Botshabelo - a massive concentraion of poverty and unemployment. The sorties told by the inhabitants of the slum in 1980 led to this book. Detailed archival evidence and contemporary oral history illuminate all the important themes of the political economy of the rural highveld of South Africa from the mineral revolution of the late nineteenth century to the erosion of apartheid in the late twentieth century.
Book 31
A detailed and highly readable study of medicine murder in the mid-twentieth century Medicine murder involved the cutting of body parts from victims, usually while they were still alive, to be used for the preparation of medicines intended to enhance the power of the perpetrators. A 'very startling' increase in cases of medicine murder apparently took place in Basutoland (now Lesotho), in southern Africa, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It gave rise to a dramatic crisis of late colonial rule. Was this increase a real one? If so, why did it happen? How far does it explain the crisis? What other factors contributed? This book offers some comprehensive answers to these difficult, complex and controversial questions and a highly readable analysis of how the crisis arose and of how it fell away. The authors draw sensitively and critically on many different and often conflicting sources of evidence.