In a work of painstaking and wide-ranging scholarship, backed up by fieldwork among the Kalahari hunter-gatherers, Louis Liebenberg explains how the art of tracking represents a crucial step in human evolution. Liebenberg examines the principles of tracking, and the classification and interpretation of spoor under difficult conditions. He also shows how the original speculative hypotheses of early hunter-gatherers have a direct line to the propositions of modern physicists who ‘track’ sub-atomic particles. In the book, the author argues that the art of tracking involves the same intellectual and creative abilities as physics and mathematics, and may therefore represent the origin of science itself. The book has been hailed as a real contribution to our understanding of the complexity involved in the process by which indigenous peoples track and hunt animals. It is insightful, detailed and well articulated.

The Art of Tracking, the Origin of Science

Liebenberg, Louis

Sports & Outdoors

David Phillip Pub

Every city has an unspoken side. Cape Town, between the postcard mountain and sea, has its own shadow-side lurking in its lap: a place of dislocation and uncertainty, dependence and desperation, destruction and survival, gangsters, pimps, pedophiles, hunger, hope and moments of happiness. This book therefore is an extraordinary and unsparing account of the coming of age on the street in Cape Town - a place of dislocation and uncertainty, desperation with glimpses of happiness. This novel won the coveted Commonwealth Writer's Prize.

Thirteen Cents

Literature & Fiction

Duiler, K. Sello

Contemporary

Nkosi’s biological mother was dying when Gail Johnson took the two-year old into her home. We are shown a moving portrait of a fight that is both intensely personal – as mother and son work to keep Nkosi’s ailing immune system from collapsing – and regrettably political, as they engage government policy and the ignorance of a sector of their community. Nkosi has become an international icon on issues related to HIV/AIDS and children’s rights. This book is a moving account of a fight that is intensely personal - even when it becomes political, as they engage government policy. Tensions erupt as a result of Nkosi having to straddle the disparate worlds of his white and black families. Gail is accused of using him to promote herself, yet many see her as a ministering angel. At the center of it all is a real boy, with pets to feed and homework to do, facing a premature death. What was it about his relationship with Gail that resulted in his short life becoming such a profoundly influential one? And what lay behind the controversy and grief that accompanied his lingering death at the age of twelve? Nkosi's spirit lives on. He has become an international icon of the fight against HIV/AIDS and for children's rights. He was posthumously awarded the World Children's Prize for Rights of Children - commonly referred to as 'The Children's Nobel Prize'.

Nkosi's Story

Biographies & Memoirs

Fox, Jane

Memoirs

On a visit to South Africa in 1981, Dave spent a month with the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. During this visit, he felt that he had finally returned to his roots and he started formulating his theory around the use of wilderness for spiritual practice. On later trips to Peru he came into contact with shamans and these meetings made him realize that the shamans had a deep knowledge of healing, that he, in spite of his medical training, was not privy to. On subsequent trips to Zimbabwe and South Africa Dave consulted various sangomas, and through the bone readings of the sangomas it was eventually revealed to him that he had been ignoring his destiny and needed to be trained or undergo thwasa. After finding an elderly Zulu mentor, Dave began his training at the beginning of 2000. During the months in training he had to undergo cleansing practices, practice bone readings, collect his own bones, connect with his ancestors and learn how to channel through the ancestors. After months of rigorous training in very basic circumstances, he returned to California as a qualified sangoma. Here he built in his garden a hut or ndumba in honor of the ancestors. He does bone readings for patients, but he remains an allopathic physician. Through dreams and bone readings it was revealed to him that he should not give up his Western practice, and that by remaining in the Western system, he believes that he is giving more credibility to the indigenous one. This is a thought provoking book written by someone who walks along two roads, who is on the one hand a surgeon of note and on the other a sangoma. The book explores the interconnectedness of life, balancing modern and indigenous, people and nature, physical and spiritual. David Cumes provide a marvelous guide in exploring the potent methods of healing, outside the so-called modern medical setting.

Africa in My Bones

Cumes, Dave

Professionals & Academics

How can African countries escape from marginalization, deepening impoverishment and state disintegration in the new era of globalization? Fantu Cheru draws on his experience of many different countries to argue for a way beyond the simple state-led versus market-driven approaches to Africa's development. The international financial institutions must stop their heavyhanded interventions and let countries decide their own development paths. African countries must work within the reality of globalization to renew democracy and improve governance; invest in education; revitalize agriculture, manage their cities, strengthen regional economic integration, and prevent yet more deadly conflicts. These require commonsense and non-dogmatic approaches, learning from local successes, entrepreneurship, and a new generation committed to a new kind of politics.

African Renaissance: Roadmaps to the Challenge of Globalization

Business & Money

CHERU, FANTU

International

For more than five decades Walter and Albertina Sisulu were at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. As secretary-general of the ANC, Walter was sentenced to life imprisonment with Nelson Mandela in 1964 and spent 26 years in prison until his release in 1989. While her husband and his colleagues were in jail, Albertina played a crucial role in keeping the ANC alive underground, and in the 1980s was co-President of the United Democratic Front. Their story has been one of persecution, bitter struggle and painful separation. But it is also one of patience, hope and enduring love. Walter and Albertina Thethiwe were born in small rural villages just a few miles apart in the Eastern Cape hinterland. From these humble beginnings, they would go on to become two of the country's most respected and beloved figures, among its greatest crusaders for human rights and dignity. For over five decades the pair - married in 1944 - were at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid and the injustices it wrought on black South Africans. The story is a moving love story against all odds. This book is the winner of the prestigious Noma African Literature Award and was a finalist of the Alan Paton Award.

Walter & Albertina Sisulu

Sisulu, Elinor

Short stories exploring the lives and circumstances of African women in South Africa, all told with insight humor and vitality, this collection is a forceful document of injustices. In the opening story, a woman leaves her mud hut--and her five young children--to flee to the misty mountains beyond her village. She had been awake at night, in despair, considering where their next meal would come from. Her move is incomprehensible--the youngest child is still nursing. Then one comment gives meaning to the whole: "To be a good mother I must leave." Her mother-in-law will take over, she hopes. It is only later that we learn, she has become hired help in a white household to earn money to support her family.This collection of superb short stories was voted one of Africa's Best 100 Books.

Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night

MaGoNa, SindiWe

All Under Heaven is the story of a Chinese family in South Africa from the early twentieth century to the first years of the twenty-first. It follows the lives of three generations in a country where Chinese once were classified 'non-white' and now are deemed not to have been 'previously disadvantaged'. Struggling with questions of identity and belonging, neither Western nor Western, not Asian, not African, the family lives in limbo. This is the universal story of families that leave behind their home and community, in search of a better life. But it is also a secret history that is long overdue. In charged and elegant prose, Darryl Accone tells the story of his Chinese-South African family over three generations, from the early 1900s to today. He writes about the young boy Ah Leong, who left China in 1911 for the unknown land of South Africa. He also tells the story of his Prussian great-grandmother, whose family tried to have her marriage to a Chinese merchant from Mauritius annulled. This book also relates the wider story of the Chinese in South Africa: a discreet and secret history that is long overdue in the telling. “Neither Eastern nor Western, not Asian, not African, classified non-white in the old South Africa but not deemed previously disadvantaged in the new, we live in perpetual bifurcation. Home is here, at the tip of Africa, but also across the sea, as it was for my Kong Kong, my grandfather.” This is beautifully written book, which, in the tradition of Maxine Hong Kingston, opens up a new world to the reader. A reading of All Under Heaven brings to mind sharply the question why, in a country made out of migrations, journeys, accidental arrivals, fateful crossings and dramatic generational counterpoint, there are so few books that take a multi-era, cinematic perspective, encompassing the far-flung locations and journeys out of which South African identity is made. A blend of fact and reconstructed fact, the manuscript draws on and includes community history, extensive clippings files on the Chinese in South Africa, memoir, family biography and autobiography in examining identity and the loss, rejection or lack thereof, as well as issues of assimilation and acculturation.

All Under Heaven: The Story of a Chinese Family in South Africa

Accone, Darryl

Community & Culture

This richly illustrated history of Cape Town under Dutch and British rule tells the story of its residents, the world they inhabited and the city they made - beginning in the seventeenth century with the tiny Dutch settlement, hemmed in by mountains and looking out to sea, and ending with the well-established British colonial city, poised confidently on the threshold of the twentieth century. This social history of Cape Town under Dutch and British rule traces the changing character of the city and portrays the varied lives and experiences of its inhabitants – black and white, rich and poor, slave and free, Christian and Muslim.  The story told in these pages is both immensely readable and endlessly interesting, and is sure to remain for long the definitive history of the city. The volume is illustrated throughout with a wealth of paintings, maps and photographs. The book is written for the general reader as well as academics.

Cape Town: The Making of a City

History

Worden, Nigel

Bickford-Smith, Vivian

Van Heyningen, Elizabeth

Asia

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