Middleburg is a coming of age memoir recollecting the authors childhood experiences of growing up in a small town in apartheid South Africa. M. J. Poynter provides a scathing attack of the apartheid regime as seen from the perspective of an English immigrant who finds himself growing up in a culture of conflicting values. The novel breaks new ground in terms of providing an examination of oppression from the perspective of a white minority. Here the instruments of apartheid are viewed from the experiences of someone who is not segregated in terms of race but who is excluded by nationality and culture. Told through a series of amusing anecdotes the novel documents many of the events taking place in South Africa during the 1980s and provides an insightful observation of the popular culture relating to that period. His recollection of events captures a sense of morbid nostalgia in which themes of horror are contrasted with images of the comic and the bizarre. Set against a backdrop of brutal oppression this rights of passage demonstrates how the human spirit can at least find the resolve to laugh in the face of adversity!

On 6 September 1966, inside the House of Assembly in Cape Town, Dimitri Tsafendas stabbed to death Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s Prime Minister and so-called “architect of apartheid”. Tsafendas was immediately arrested and before he had even been questioned by the authorities, they declared him a madman without any political motive for the killing. In the Cape Supreme Court, Tsafendas was found unfit to stand trial on the grounds that he suffered from schizophrenia and that he had no political motive for killing Verwoerd. Tsafendas spent the next 28 years in custody, making him the longest-serving detainee in South African history. For most of his incarnation he was subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment by the prison authorities. From 2009 to 2018, Harris Dousemetzis extensively researched the assassination of Verwoerd and the life of Tsafendas. For this research, he travelled to South Africa, Mozambique, Greece, France, and Turkey, and interviewed about 150 people who either knew Tsafendas or Verwoerd or were involved with the case of the assassination. He discovered about 12,000 pages of documents on the case, most of them previously unpublished, in archival collections in South Africa, Portugal and the UK. Dousemetzis collaborated with prominent South African jurists, psychiatrists and psychologists, and concluded his research, by writing the Report to the Minister of Justice in the Matter of Dr. Verwoerd’s Assassination. The report conclusively proved that Tsafendas had assassinated Verwoerd for political reasons and that the apartheid authorities had orchestrated a massive operation to declare him insane and apolitical. This ground-breaking report and this book corrected the historical record regarding Verwoerd’s assassination and Tsafendas. The Man Who Killed Apartheid, based on Dousemetzis’s groundbreaking research, chronicles in detail Tsafendas’s life and conclusively demonstrates that he was a perfectly sane and deeply political person with a long history of political activism. At the same time, the book exposes the lie at the heart of apartheid’s posture on the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd and provides a rare picture of how the racist regime operated and what it was like to live and die under apartheid.

In the late 1970s, South African mental institutions were plagued with scandals about human rights abuse, and psychiatric practitioners were accused of being agents of the apartheid state. Between 1939 and 1994, some psychiatric practitioners supported the mandate of the racist and heteropatriarchal government and most mental patients were treated abysmally. However, unlike studies worldwide that show that women, homosexuals and minorities were institutionalized in far higher numbers than heterosexual men, Psychiatry, Mental Institutions and the Mad in Apartheid South Africa reveals how in South Africa, per capita, white heterosexual males made up the majority of patients in state institutions. The book therefore challenges the monolithic and omnipotent view of the apartheid government and its mental health policy. While not contesting the belief that human rights abuses occurred within South Africa’s mental health system, Tiffany Fawn Jones argues that the disparity among practitioners and the fluidity of their beliefs, along with the disjointed mental health infrastructure, diffused state control. More importantly, the book shows how patients were also, to a limited extent, able to challenge the constraints of their institutionalization. This volume places the discussions of South Africa’s mental institutions in an international context, highlighting the role that international organizations, such as the Church of Scientology, and political events such as the gay rights movement and the Cold War also played in shaping mental health policy in South Africa.

Literature selections are unabridged Introduce students to the world of literature World Literature opens the door to culturally diverse writers from around the world. Complete works and excerpts capture student interest and encourage engagement with the text. The carefully designed text and many special features, such as the Student Passport to World Cultures, help students understand the world of literature. Lexile Level 880 Reading Level 3-4 Interest Level 8-12

This volume details the struggle for national independence of Afrikaner Calvinism against British imperialism, providing an enlightening study of the complex relation between religion and society.

First Published in 1990. Volume Two of Studies of Economic History of South Africa, looks at the Lesotho and Swaziland regions. The unfolding history and historiography of Southern Africa pose profound challenges for both analysis and praxis in the last decade of the twentieth century. These challenges are reflected in the range of investigations and contradictions, some of which are treated here, which together constitute an intellectual and political conjuncture. This collection of studies deals with the countries which were not included in the companion book on the economic history of the Front- Line States. Most of the space in the present volume is devoted to South Africa, primarily because of its importance to the region but also because contributions to the economic history of that country in English are very extensive as compared to the other states of Southern Africa.