Title: Going Home
Author(s): Simmao Kikamba
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: NB Publishing
Publication date: January 1st 2005
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0795701772
ISBN-13: 9780795701771

Book Description
Going Home is a story told in the voice of a political refugee living in South Africa. It investigates the life of one particular immigrant, Mpanda from Angola, and his experiences of trying to make the best of being an unemployed foreign national in South Africa.There are four parts to the narrative. Part One: Mpanda is arrested and sent to the Lindela Repatriation Centre. Part Two: We learn of Mpanda's story: his return home to Angola from Zaire, his relationship with a woman called Isabel, his political involvement and embarrassment and his final decision to flee to South Africa. In Part Three, we follow his life as a refugee in South Africa. Finally in Part Four he is freed from detention and allowed to go back home - to Yeoville Going Home is a very moving debut novel, revealing the anguish of a man trying to survive in a country where nobody allows him to belong. Going home is a constant search for a home. Simao Kikamba is without a doubt a leading new voice in Southern African writing.

Title: Absolution
Author(s): Knopf Canada
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: NB Publishing
Publication date: March 27th 2012 (first published January 1st 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307401278
ISBN-13: 9780307401274

Book Description
In this stunning literary debut, Patrick Flanery delivers a devastating and intimate portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, and the perils of taking sides when the sides are changing around you.

Told in shifting perspectives, Absolution is centred on the mysterious character of Clare Wald, a controversial writer of great fame, haunted by the memories of a sister she fears she betrayed to her death and a daughter she fears she abandoned. Clare comes to learn that in this conflict the dead do not stay buried, and the missing return in other forms--such as the small child present in her daughter's last days who has reappeared, posing as Clare's official biographer. Sam Leroux, a South African expatriate returning to Cape Town after many years in New York, gradually earns Clare's trust, his own ghosts emerging from the histories that he and Clare begin to unravel, leading them both along a path in search of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Title: Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa
Author(s): Antjie Krog, Luke Mitchell (Editor), Charlayne Hunter-Gault (Introduction)
Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Broadway
Publication date: August 8th 2000 (first published 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0812931297
ISBN-13: 9780812931297

Book Description
Ever since Nelson Mandela dramatically walked out of prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years behind bars, South Africa has been undergoing a radical transformation. In one of the most miraculous events of the century, the oppressive system of apartheid was dismantled. Repressive laws mandating separation of the races were thrown out. The country, which had been carved into a crazy quilt that reserved the most prosperous areas for whites and the most desolate and backward for blacks, was reunited. The dreaded and dangerous security force, which for years had systematically tortured, spied upon, and harassed people of color and their white supporters, was dismantled. But how could this country--one of spectacular beauty and promise--come to terms with its ugly past? How could its people, whom the oppressive white government had pitted against one another, live side by side as friends and neighbors?

To begin the healing process, Nelson Mandela created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by the renowned cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Established in 1995, the commission faced the awesome task of hearing the testimony of the victims of apartheid as well as the oppressors. Amnesty was granted to those who offered a full confession of any crimes associated with apartheid. Since the commission began its work, it has been the central player in a drama that has riveted the country. In this book, Antjie Krog, a South African journalist and poet who has covered the work of the commission, recounts the drama, the horrors, the wrenching personal stories of the victims and their families. Through the testimonies of victims of abuse and violence, from the appearance of Winnie Mandela to former South African president P. W. Botha's extraordinary courthouse press conference, this award-winning poet leads us on an amazing journey.

Country of My Skull captures the complexity of the Truth Commission's work. The narrative is often traumatic, vivid, and provocative. Krog's powerful prose lures the reader actively and inventively through a mosaic of insights, impressions, and secret themes. This compelling tale is Antjie Krog's profound literary account of the mending of a country that was in colossal need of change.

Title: A History of South Africa
Author(s): Leonard Thompson
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: February 8th 2001 (first published 1990)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0300087764
ISBN-13: 9780300087765

Book Description
A leading scholar of South Africa provides a fresh and penetrating exploration of that country's history, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present, focusing primarily on the experiences of its black inhabitants. For this third edition, Leonard Thompson adds two new chapters that describe the transfer of power and the new South Africa under the presidencies of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.

Title: Diamonds, Gold, and War: The Making of South Africa
Author(s): Martin Meredith
Paperback: 570 pages
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Publication date: October 1st 2007
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1586484737
ISBN-13: 9781586484736

Book Description
Southern Africa was once regarded as a worthless jumble of British colonies, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world. But then prospectors chanced first upon the world's richest deposits of diamonds, and then upon its richest deposits of gold. What followed was a titanic struggle between the British and the Boers for control of the land, culminating in the costliest, bloodiest, and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century, and in the devastation of the Boer republics.

Martin Meredith's magisterial account of those years portrays the great wealth and raw power, the deceit, corruption, and racism that lay behind Britain's empire-building in southern Africa. Based on significant new research and filled with atmospheric detail, it focuses on the fascinating rivalry between diamond titan Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger, the Boer leader whose only education was the Bible, who believed the earth was flat, yet who defied Britain's prime ministers and generals for nearly a quarter of a century. Diamonds, Gold and War makes palpable the cost of western greed to Africa's native peoples, and explains the rise of the virulent Afrikaner nationalism that eventually took hold in South Africa, with repercussions lasting nearly a century.