New Releases
An Image in a Mirror
“Nyakale.
This has always been my name. It lost vowels and consonants and got rearranged into “Kay” by my Grade Three teacher. “Easier to pronounce,” she said.
Aunty Mercy’s response was to accept. “After all, muwala wange, we are in this country, and ours is not to stand out but to survive.”
“Survive” sounds lifeless, inanimate, not like the survive of Aunty Mercy’s stories of growing up in Uganda. There, survival was active, done daily. In South Africa, the word had taken on a new meaning. No longer doing, but hiding to make existence easier. Gradually becoming chameleons. I learnt to lurk in the shadows. Drawing just enough attention, not too much. No sudden movements, everything calculated and measured.”
Upon giving birth to twin girls in rural Uganda, Nyakale’s mother decides to send one away to her sister in South Africa for a shot at a better life.
In the heart of this beautifully woven coming of age story, is the story of twins growing up in two different worlds one in rural Uganda and the other in South Africa. The novel follows theirs lives and journeys of navigating the politics of their respective worlds.
Nyakale and Achen grew up despising each other for what they imagine the other to have because of their mother’s drastic decision. When they finally meet , how mirrored will they feel by the other?
How to Steal a Country
How to Steal a Country describes the vertiginous decline in political leadership in South Africa from Mandela to Zuma and its terrible consequences. Robin Renwick’s account reads in parts like a novel – a crime novel – for Sherlock Holmes old adversary, Professor Moriarty, the erstwhile Napoleon of Crime,, would have been impressed by the ingenuity, audacity and sheer scale of the looting of the public purse, let alone the impunity with which it has been accomplished.
Based on Renwick’s personal experiences of the main protagonists, it describes the extraordinary influence achieved by the Gupta family for those seeking to do business with state-owned enterprises in South Africa, and the massive amounts earned by Gupta related companies from their associations with them.
The ensuing scandals have engulfed Bell Pottinger, KPMG, McKinsey and other multinationals. The primary responsibility for this looting of the state however, rests squarely with President Zuma and key members of his government.
But South Africa has succeeded in establishing a genuinely non-racial society full of determined and enterprising people, offering genuine hope for the future. These include independent journalists, black and white, who refuse to be silenced, and the judges, who have acted with courage and independence. The book concludes that change will come, either by the ruling party reverting to the values of Mandela and Archbishop Tutu, or by the reckoning it otherwise will face one day.
When Morning Comes
Written from the points of view of four young people living in Johannesburg and its black township, Soweto – Zanele, a black female student organiser, Mina, of South Asian background working at her father’s shop, Jack, an Oxford-bound white student, and Thabo, a tsotsi – this book explores the roots of the Soweto Uprising and the edifice of apartheid in a South Africa about to explode.
In the black township of Soweto, Zanele, who also works as a nightclub singer, is plotting against the apartheid government. The police can’t know. Her mother and sister can’t know. No one can know.
On the affluent white side of town, Jack Craven plans to spend the last days of his break before university burning miles on his beat-up Mustang, and crashing other people’s parties.
Their chance meeting changes everything.
Already a chain of events are in motion: a failed plot, a murdered teacher, a powerful police agent with a vendetta, and a secret network of students across the township. The students will rise. And there will be violence when morning comes.
Introducing readers to a remarkable young literary talent, When Morning Comes offers an impeccably researched and vivid snapshot of South African society on the eve of the uprising that changed it forever.
Indentured – Behind the Scenes at Gupta TV
“Why Zuma?” asked Atul Gupta. “We have close relations with everyone in the ANC. If Zuma is ever ousted, I can tell you for sure that the next one in line from the ANC would be close to us as well. We are ‘Banias’, and we know how to keep our business interests protected,” Gupta added.
A senior broadcast journalist from India is headhunted to lead the team that’s been tasked to launch the latest privately owned 24-hour television news channel in South Africa. He is lured with promises of a unique professional challenge where he will have the chance to empower young black reporters to tell the stories of ordinary South Africans; train technicians in using the world’s best news gathering technology and state-of-the-art broadcast systems; and create a world-class product across the African continent.
But soon he will learn how the influential family who had hired him and the highest office in the country are inextricably linked in a bid to create a propaganda tool that will not only advance a clear political agenda, but also position itself to loot state coffers of millions of rand. This and the flagrant disregard for the law by flouting work visa regulations and exploiting young black South Africans and migrant Indian workers are but a few of the issues that made him realise that he was caught in a web of lies, deceit and political thuggery.
Indentured: Behind the Scenes at Gupta TV is Rajesh Sundaram’s story of how he led a small team of Indian broadcast professionals and South African interns to launch the television news channel ANN7 under extremely tight deadlines and the power-grabbing and money-hungry mogul Atul Gupta and his cronies breathing down their necks.