"This is my story and the stories of other doctors who chose to walk away. Ours is a private anguish filled with the niggling suspicion that we should have been stronger, more committed, more able to handle the daily realities of practising medicine in South Africa." As a young medical student from Soweto, Maria Phalime had high expectations for life as a doctor. Then she started to practise and was confronted with inhuman hours, ov ...
Cay Garcia was given only a few hours to pack up her belongings and leave Riyadh for good. She had dared to confront her employer, a young Saudi princess, about the treatment of her staff. In this book, she shares the intrigues of Riyadh's expat community and exposes the nasty underbelly of the extravagant lives of Saudi Arabian royalty. This candid and vivid account of her time in the service of the princess is part travelo ...
In this, Es’kia Mphahlele’s second autobiography – published originally in 1984 – he recounts his return to South Africa after twenty years in exile and the challenges that he and his family faced in returning to the land of his birth before the momentous events of the 1990s. Filled with extraordinary, precise prose, Afrika, My Music showcases the kind of writing that earned Es’kia a nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year this ...
In 1948 the Dutch Reformed minister D.F. Malan led the National Party to victory and set up the policy of apartheid. Today grimfaced photographs of NP leaders like Malan and his successors have come to symbolise a system of racial oppression. Yet, when Malan was asked on his deathbed what he considered the most important service he had rendered during his political career, he answered, 'that I could serve my nation; that I could uni ...
Constitutional Court Justice Edwin Cameron examines and defends the role of the law in South Africa's continuing transition. Drawing on his own life experience, including childhood hardship, struggles with sexuality and stigma, he illustrates the power and the limitations of the law. Cameron argues with compelling elegance that the Constitution offers South Africa its best chance for a just future. 'A remarkable integration of ...
'The temerity of writing one's biography needs to be explained. It is a foolish act by any description. Why make oneself so vulnerable? I have reasons to tell my story. It is a story of loss, and storytelling is part of the struggle to transcend loss. It is also imperative in our deeply wounded society. The past cannot be undone: it has to be transcended.'
When Mamphela Ramphele was born in a rural village i ...
Dear reader, let me introduce myself: There are really several ways in which I could do this. If I wanted to create the illusion of exoticism, I could say that I was an Afrikaans writer living in a medieval village in the south of France. If I wanted to make a romantic impression, I could say that I lived in a Provencal stone house with lilac shutters, pink roses and lavender outside the kitchen window, and an enormous plane tree beside the gate ...
’n Dekade of wat gelede het Marita van der Vyver soos ’n wafferse prinses van ’n verre land deur Frankryk gereis en ’n vreeslik verleidelike padda leer ken. Omdat sy so graag in sprokies wil glo, het sy gehoop dat as sy hierdie slim padda soen, hy in ’n prins gaan verander. Dis mos hoe sprokies werk. En wat gebeur toe? Saam met haar prins sit sy huis op in ’n Franse dorpie. Hulle gaan woon in ’n ou kliphuis in Rue de l’eglise – ...
Die merkwaardige lewensverhaal van die Suid-Afrikaanse magnaat en weldoener dr. Anton Rupert word hier volledig en sonder doekies omdraai vertel. Dit is die verhaal van 'n seun uit die Karoo wat in die Depressie grootgeword het. Hy het nie soos Harry Oppenheimer, 'n ander Suid-Afrikaanse miljoener, ryk geerf of sy miljoene uit mynbou gemaak nie. Sy Rembrandt Groep was vervaardigers wat wereldbekend geword het met handelsmerke s ...