Wits University Press

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...

An innovative connection between adaptive behavior and community ecology in herbivores The adaptation of herbivore behavior to seasonal and geo- graphic variations in vegetation quantity and quality...

African Dream Machines takes African headrests 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...

The African National Congress is light years beyond the liberation movement of old. It remains a juggernaut, but its control and dominance are no longer watertight. The ANC lives the contradictions...

This intriguing memoir details in a quiet and restrained manner with what it meant to be a committed black intellectual activist during the apartheid years and beyond. Few autobiographies exploring...

Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto illustrates how this rapidly growing, underfunded but surprisingly effective institution found the niche that allowed it to exist, to provide medical care to a massive...

Why does it matter that nations should care for their archives, and that they should develop a sense of shared identity? And why should these processes take place in the public domain? How can...

When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es'kia Mphahlele, the idea of Mphahlele's...

The contributors to this volume draw on a non-dogmatic Marxist approach to explain the systemic and conjunctural dynamics of crisis inherent in global capitalism. Their analysis asks what is...

As the dynamo of South Africa's economy, Johannesburg commands a central position in the nation's imagination, and scholars throughout the world monitor the city as an exemplar of urbanity in the...

Climate change affects us all, but it can be a confusing business. In this book, three scientists with several decades of experience in assessing the potential effects of climate change for the...

Composing Apartheid is the first book ever to chart the musical world of a notorious period in world history, apartheid South Africa. It explores how music was produced through, and was productive...

Drawing on rich and poignant interviews with mothers who have been diagnosed HIV-positive, Contradicting Maternity provides a rare perspective of motherhood from the mother's point of view. Whereas...

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,...

As Jacob Zuma moves into the twilight years of his presidencies of both the African National Congress (ANC) and of South Africa, this book takes stock of the Zuma-led administration and its impact on...

Dorothea Bleek (1873-1948) devoted her life to completing the 'bushman researches' that her father and aunt had begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This research was partly a...

A full color book featuring Tsonga and Shangaan art and culture Dunga Manzi / Stirring Waters features Tsonga and Shangaan art, culture and heritage, and accompanies an exhibition of the same name...

A companion to People of Eland that allows an overview of Drakensberg rock art Only 1000 copies of People of the Eland were printed in 1976. It was neither reissued nor reprinted. It has become one...

This original book is a much needed and far reaching exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds. Entanglement aims to capture the contradictory mixture of innovation and inertia, of...

This book explores the student discontent a year after the start of the 2015 South African #FeesMustFall revolt #FeesMustFall, the student revolt that began in October 2015, was an uprising against...

Fight for Democracy is a penetrating and critical scrutiny of the ANC's treatment of the print media since the inception of democracy in 1994. In this book, Glenda Daniels does not hide behind a veil...

A number of researchers have tried to characterise the anatomy and behavioural systems of early hominid and early modern human populations in an attempt to understand how we became what we are. Can...

The Gordonia region of the Northern Cape province has received relatively little attention from historians. In Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land dispossession and resistance in the Northern Cape,...

Notions of land and agrarian reform are now well entrenched in post-apartheid South Africa. But what this reform actually means for everyday life is not clearly understood, nor the way it will impact...

Land, Chiefs, Mining explores aspects of the experience of the Batswana in the thornveld and bushveld regions of the North-West Province, shedding light on defi ning issues, moments and individuals...

An interesting look at the combination of paleoanthropological finds and art Life of Bone brings into sharp relief, and interrogates, the abutting practices of the scientific and the artistic,...

In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more...

The current resurgence of Marxism is based on new sources of inspiration and creativity from movements that seek democratic, egalitarian and ecological alternatives to capitalism. The Marxism of many...

In the 1980s there was a surge of trade union power in South Africa. The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) was prominent and innovative in this assertion of muscle.Metal that...

The idea that the period of social turbulence in the nineteenth century was a consequence of the emergence of the powerful Zulu kingdom under Shaka has been written about extensively as a central...