Books published by Wits University Press

This book explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives - historical, bibliographic, literary-critical, sociological, and cultural studies.

In the twenty years of transitional and democratic politics in South Africa, Susan Booysen constantly traversed two worlds, as direct observer and analyst-researcher.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) is the most influential sociologist of our time. His works take in education, culture, sport, literature, painting, class, philosophy, religion, law, media, intellectuals, methodology, photography, universities, colonialism, kinship, schooling and politics.

Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness philosophy, was killed in prison on 12 September 1977. Biko was only thirty years old, but his ideas and political activities changed the course of South African history and helped hasten the end of apartheid. The year 2007 saw the thirtieth anniversary of Biko's death. To mark the occasion, the then Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Mosibudi Mangena, commissioned Chris van Wyk to compile an anthology of essays as a tribute to the great South African son. Among the contributors are Minister Mangena himself, ex-President Thabo Mbeki, writer Darryl Accone, journalists Lizeka Mda and Bokwe Mafuna, academics Jonathan Jansen, Mandla Seleoane and Saths Cooper, a friend of Biko's and former president of Azapo. We Write What We Like proudly echoes the title of Biko's seminal work, I Write What I Like. It is a gift to a new generation which enjoys freedom, from one that was there when this freedom was being fought for. And it celebrates the man whose legacy is the freedom to think and say and write what we like.

South Africa's future is increasingly tied up with that of India. While trade and investment between the two countries is intensifying, they share long-standing historical ties and have much in common: apart from cricket, colonialism and Ghandi, both countries are important players in the global South. This book explores this relationship further.

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa was highly prominent in the surge of trade union power of the 1980s. This book tells how its activities built workers' rights and deeply eroded the apartheid state, by revisiting the formation of the powerful modern day union movement.

In this wonderfully original, intensely personal yet deeply analytical work, Carli Coetzee argues that difference and disagreement can be forms of activism to bring about social change, inside and outside the teaching environment.

Explores some of the key features of popular politics and resistance before and after 1994. This volume explores continuities and changes in the forms of struggle and ideologies involved, as well as the significance of post-apartheid grassroots politics.

Focuses on a talented, brave, but tiny minority of whites - liberals, radicals, communists, Trotskyists, humanists, Christians, idealists - who rejected the growing racism of post-war South Africa and worked to breach the dividing line between black and white.

Explores the images of Africa and Africans that evolved in ancient Egypt, in classical Greece and imperial Rome, in the early Mediterranean world, and in the early domains of Christianity. This book provides a survey of the special place that Aksumite Ethiopia has held in European and African conceptual worlds as the site of 'worthy Ethiopia'.

Charts the musical world of a notorious period in world history, apartheid South Africa. This book explores how music was produced through, and was productive of, key features of apartheid's social and political topography.

African headrests have been moved out of the category of functional objects and into the more rarefied category of 'art' objects. Styles in African headrests are usually defined in terms of western art and archaeological discourses, but this book interrogates these definitions of style through a case study of headrests of the 'Tellem' of Mali.