A country is policed only to the extent that it consents to be. When that consent is withheld, cops either negotiate or withdraw. Once they do this, however, they are no longer police; their role becomes something far murkier. Several months before they exploded into xenophobic violence, Jonny Steinberg travelled the streets of Alexandra, Reiger Park and other Johannesburg townships with police patrols. His mission was to discover the unwritten rules of engagement emerging between South Af...

From the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning biographer and pre-eminent scholar, a revelatory new portrait of Cecil Rhodes, the man who built South African apartheid and shaped 19th-century colonialismCecil Rhodes, the tycoon and imperialist who left a wake of tragedy and violence in South Africa that is felt to this day, was heralded as a genius of entrepreneurship before he was dismissed as the racist architect of a colonial project.But Rhodes was ...

From the underworld of zama-zama goldminers to the tragicomic closure of a Cape Town Zoo, from stick fighting to punk rock, game lodges to fruit farms, cricket pitches to mermaids, The Interpreters: South Africa's New Nonfiction assembles a range of true stories that are often more far-fetched, and more compelling, than any fiction.Featuring J. M. Coetzee • Kimon de Greef • William Dicey • Alexandra Dodd • Madeleine Fullar...

In this selection of his Business Day columns, Jonny Steinberg walks through Pollsmoor Prison on the eve of the invasion of Iraq and believes he sees in the jail's corridors why the US's impending war in the Middle East will fail. He meets a poverty-stricken old man who spends most of his state pension maintaining a black Mercedes Benz, and explains why this shows that government's welfare programme is working. He tells us why he thinks Thabo Mbeki is an Afro-pessismist and why a South Afr...

**A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • THE SUNDAY TIMES LITERARY AWARD WINNER • AN LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • A WASHINGTON POST AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela’s relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela that “does justice both to the couple’s political heroism and to the betrayals and the secrets that hounded their union” (The New Yorker).Drawing on never-before-...

In January 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, two-thirds of the city’s population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militia, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world.This extraordinary book tells Asad’s story. Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad ...

The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing examines and critically retraces the field of policing studies by posing and exploring a series of fundamental questions to do with the concept and institutions of policing and their relation to social and political life in today′s globalized world. The volume is structured in the following four parts:Part One: LensesPart Two: Social and Political OrderPart Three: LegaciesPart Four: Problems and Problematics.

From the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning biographer and pre-eminent scholar, a revelatory new portrait of Cecil Rhodes, the man who built South African apartheid and shaped 19th-century colonialismCecil Rhodes, the tycoon and imperialist who left a wake of tragedy and violence in South Africa that is felt to this day, was heralded as a genius of entrepreneurship before he was dismissed as the racist architect of a colonial project.But Rhodes was ...

**A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • THE SUNDAY TIMES LITERARY AWARD WINNER • AN LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • A WASHINGTON POST AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela’s relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela that “does justice both to the couple’s political heroism and to the betrayals and the secrets that hounded their union” (The New Yorker).Drawing on never-before-...

What are Australia's 'barbecue stopper' conversations right now? What are the things we talk and worry about?the 2009 ABC Boyer Lecturer is our best-known military officer, General Peter Cosgrove - an Australian Everyman whose interests are our own. As a father, General Cosgrove is concerned about the world we will leave to future generations. As a proud Australian, he is interested in how migration changed our sense of national identity. As an ex-soldier his life was about guarante...

'A kind of epic poem, one that moves in circular fashion from passionate denunciation to intense autobiographical reflection ... should be required reading for every MP, peer, councillor, civil servant and commentator. The fury and sense of powerlessness that so many people feel at government policy beam out of every page.' The Guardian'It is not enough to read Harry's record of the struggles and hopes of a generation – we have to re-assert his pri...

The establishment of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a pioneering international event. Never had any country sought to move forward from despotism to democracy both by exposing the atrocities committed in the past and achieving reconciliation with its former oppressors. At the center of this unprecedented attempt at healing a nation has been Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whom President Nelson Mandela named as Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. With the f...