Böcker utgivna av Wits University Press

Restless Infections is a collection of critical essays exploring artistic interventions in urban spaces, focusing on place-making and the politics of space in South Africa. The writers examine seminal artworks by South African artists, addressing diverse forms of expression such as site-specific performances, immersive installations, film, photography, and online performances.The book is divided into three sections: The Restless City, Public Art for Multiple Publics, and Land, Home, Belonging. It introduces new perspectives on public sphere performance, such as Khanyisile Mbongwa's re-imagining of township alleyways for public encounters and Mbongeni Mtshali's study of everyday performances that challenge colonial and neo-colonial spatial organization.The title, Restless Infections, is derived from the popular Infecting the City public art festival, symbolizing the persistent state of restlessness in a city still grappling with the legacies of colonialism, inequality, and racial segregation. This restlessness is tied to a desire for economic and political stability, expressed through transient art forms like Santu Mofokeng's billboard photography.The book shifts the focus of public art discourse in South Africa from static forms like monuments and statues to dynamic, temporary interventions that question the concept of publicness. These interventions engage with protest, public intimacy, audience interaction, and the disrupted topography of apartheid cities.As the first scholarly volume to read public spheres through a multi- and interdisciplinary lens, Restless Infections argues that the diverse artistic modes explored are essential to understanding the complexities of publicness in South Africa.

Kielezo cha Insha is the earliest guide to essay writing in Kiswahili, published by Wits University Press in 1954. After Tanzania's independence in 1961 the book was not available for several decades because of the political and economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The book covers pertinent issues in composition writing, including the purpose and types of composition, preparation, structure, language and style, cohesion, objectivity and punctuation. It includes 60 model essays together with Robert's thoughts and perspectives on the issues he addresses. The topics include some of the issues current at the time, such as;secret marriages, culture, the environment, language and nationhood, patriotism, womens oppression, health, and the meaning of life and death. After being out of print for more than sixty years, Wits University Press has reissued the text as a testament to its enduring historical value. Kielezo cha Insha is an example of Robert's educational and pedagogical writing at its best.

In 2022 Wits University Press marked its centenary, making it the oldest, most established university press in sub-Saharan Africa. While in part modelled on scholarly publishers from the global North, it has had to contend with the constraints of working under global South conditions: marginalisation within the university, budgetary limitations, small local markets, unequal access to international sales channels, and the privileging of English language publishing over indigenous languages.This volume explores what the Press has achieved, and what its modes of reinvention might look like. In widening and deepening our understanding of the Press as an example of a global South scholarly publisher, this volume asks how publishing can contribute to a broader understanding of Southern knowledge production. Featuring contributions from scholars, publishers and authors this multi-voiced volume showcases the history of the Press's publishing activities over 100 years: from documenting its evolution through book covers and giving credence to some of the leading black intellectuals and writers of the early 20th century and the success of those works in spite of their authors' racial marginalisation, to the role of women, both in publishing and in the spaces afforded to women's writing on the Press's list.The collection concludes with essays by contemporary authors who detail not only their experiences of working with Southern publishers, but also the politics and influences governing their decisions to choose the Press over a Northern publisher. Publishing from the South shows the strategies deployed by the Press to professionalise Southern knowledge making, and in the process demonstrating how university presses in the global South support the scholarly missions of their universities for both local and global audiences.

Reveals the little known details of the assassination of an anti-apartheid activist by an apartheid spy and undercover police officerOn 28 June 1984 a parcel bomb sent by the apartheid security police exploded in an apartment building in Lubango, Angola, killing 36-year-old Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter Katryn. The Schoons were members of the revolutionary underground, exiled from South Africa and committed to both the African National Congress and to socialism. What many political activists had feared or suspected at the time was confirmed during the 1990s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the bomb targeting the Schoons was sent by Craig Williamson, an apartheid spy and high-ranking member of the South African security service.Apartheid Spies and the Revolutionary Underground is the first book-length account of the assassination of Jeanette and Katryn Schoon. Jeanette Curtis Schoon and Craig Williamson first met in 1973 on the Wits University campus. Jeanette was a passionate student radical and part of a network of white radicals fighting apartheid. Williamson had successfully infiltrated the student movement and rose within its ranks. He held positions of trust, first within the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and then, after pretending to 'flee' the country, as an office-bearer of the International Universities Exchange Fund in Sweden, which helped fund many South Africans in exile.The book uncovers how the lives of a group of white radicals intersected with and were impacted by the undercover security police and their operations both within and outside of South Africa. Intensifying political oppression caused many young radicals to flee South Africa in 1976; many of them, like Jeanette and her partner Marius Schoon, joined the African National Congress in exile. Williamson and the Schoons' paths, and those of their comrades, continued to cross: he was a guest in their homes, a supplier of funds for their projects, a witness for the prosecution in political trials and, ultimately, the hand that directed targeted assassinations.Williamson received amnesty for his role in the Schoons' murder, among other crimes. For the friends and family of the Schoons - and for all those seeking social justice - this was an unacceptable outcome and Williamson continues to walk a free man. This book attempts to show the limits of the TRC process to render healing from South Africa's apartheid past. That justice has not been served to the Schoons remains a tragedy in this story of the struggle against apartheid.

A history of the establishment and role of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), the public health organization in South Africa Fighting an Invisible Enemy narrates the founding in 2002 and growth of the internationally renowned centre of excellence for communicable diseases, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) in South Africa. In a continent riven with a panoply of formidable contagious pathogens, the book describes how the nascent NICD travelled a rocky road to maturity. Starting humbly, as did many of its sister public health institutions around the world, the road was strewn with daunting obstacles of financial restrictions, bureaucratic straitjacketing, international isolation during the apartheid era and, in later years, the calumny of governmental AIDS denial. Following the triumph of the eradication of the once-dreaded smallpox, the NICD now plays a crucial role in the global effort to eradicate poliomyelitis. While the country has the misfortune of the largest HIV/AIDS pandemic in the world, the Institute's HIV research unit has become a world leader. More remote from public notice are the laboratories and support epidemiologists carry out for ongoing surveillance of communicable diseases and the alerts they provide for any signal of an impending outbreak or pandemic. The Institute's value to public health was clearly shown in the recent Covid-19 pandemic. The maxim that we are only safe when everyone everywhere is safe, underlines the importance of international partnerships and the key role the NICD plays, not only for the country but also for global health. This is a flagship organization in public health in South Africa and this book paints a vivid portrait of its incredible accomplishments.

Revisits the work of Rick Turner, a South African political theorist, and addresses contemporary debates Rick Turner was a South African academic and anti-apartheid activist who rebelled against the apartheid state at the height of its power. For this he was assassinated in 1978, at just 32 years of age, but his life and work are testimony to the power of philosophical thinking for humans everywhere. Turner chose to live freely in an unfree time and argued for a non-racial, socialist future in a context where this seemed unimaginable. This book takes seriously Rick Turner's challenge that political theorising requires thinking in a utopian way. Turner's seminal book The Eye of the Need: Towards a Participatory Democracy laid out some of his most potent ideas on a radically different political and economic system. His demand was that we work to escape the limiting ideas of the present, carefully design a just future based on shared human values, and act to make it a reality, both politically and in our daily lives. The contributors to this volume engage critically with Turner's work on race relations, his relationship with Steve Biko, his views on religion, education and gender oppression, his participatory model of democracy, and his critique of enduring forms of poverty and economic inequality. They show how, in his life and work, Turner modeled how we can dare to be free and how hope can return, as the future always remains open to human construction. This book makes an important contribution to contemporary thinking and activism where the need for South Africans to define their understanding of their greater common good is of crucial importance.

Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater is a one-woman play inspired by the true story of a woman who served as a political assassin in the build-up to South Africa's first democratic elections. Zenzile Maseko, the protagonist, is a 60-year-old grandmother living in a women's hostel in Durban. Falsely declared dead by the Department of Home Affairs, she finds herself cast into a Kafkaesque nightmare that forces her to confront her past. Flown in on the wings of the Impundulu (the lightning bird), in Zulu folklore a shapeshifting bird associated with witchcraft and the harbinger of storms and death, Zenzile's story weaves a magical and terrifying tapestry. She draws on myth, religious symbolism and traditional beliefs as she shares the realities - at times brutal, at times forgiving - of survival in South Africa. Her story touches on what it means to live through political violence, the transition to democracy, the brutality of inequality, health epidemics like HIV/AIDS, patriarchy, and the apathetic bureaucracy of government departments. Ultimately, Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater offers a critical and unflinching look at the eddying cycles of violence and revenge that play out across generations. Yet it is most of all a story about regeneration and redemption that speaks to both the country's haunted past and its present-day complexities.Written with pathos and empathy, this playscript will appeal to teachers, high school learners, and tertiary students in theatre, drama and English studies.

Focuses on the challenges faced in accessing and providing abortion services in rural areas, even under progressive abortion legislation Accessing abortion services in rural areas under conditions of liberal abortion legislation is neither straightforward nor simple. As the South African example shows, the liberalization of abortion legislation was the first step in granting pregnant persons access to abortion care. Despite this and some progress in implementation, many challenges persist resulting in a lack of services, especially in areas where distances and transport costs are a factor. Drawing on the findings of a study conducted in three rural districts of the Eastern Cape, the authors highlight the complexities involved in understanding problematic or unwanted pregnancies and abortion services within these communities; the reported barriers to, and facilitators of, access to abortion services among rural populations; and preferences for types of abortion services. A key finding is the conundrum of costs versus confidentiality: lack of confidentiality involves additional costs to access services outside the area; high costs mean that confidentiality may have to be foregone, which leads to stigma. The authors place the findings within a reparative reproductive justice framework and present a comprehensive set of recommendations. Abortion Services and Reproductive Justice in Rural South Africa is an insightful and informative resource - the first of its kind - for scholars in health and sociology, reproductive health policy makers, national planners, health facility managers and providers, and activists.

The story of how Africa's mammals have helped shape the continent's landscapes over time to support an amazing diversity of life Africa is home to an amazing array of animals, including the world's most diverse assortment of large mammals. These include the world's largest terrestrial mammal, the African elephant, which still roams great swathes of the continent alongside a host of other well-known large mammals with hooves such as hippopotamuses, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and zebras. African Ark: Mammals, Landscape and the Ecology of a Continent tells the story of where these mammals have come from and how they have interacted to create the richly varied landscape that makes up Africa as we know it today. It gives an equal airing to small mammals, such as rodents and bats, which are often overlooked by both naturalists and zoologists in favor of their larger cousins. African Ark not only describes the diversity of African mammals and the habitats in which they live; it also explains the processes by which species and population groups are formed and how these fluctuate over time. A book on mammals would not be complete without attention placed on the impact of megafauna on the environment and the important roles they play in shaping the landscape. In this way, mammals such as elephants and rhinoceros support countless plant communities and the habitats of many smaller animals. The book brings in a human perspective as well as a conservation angle in its assessment of the interaction of African mammals with the people who live alongside them. African Ark is at once scientifically rigorous and accessible for the layperson and student alike, while drawing on the contributions of numerous zoologists, ecologists and conservationists dedicated to the understanding of Africa and its wildlife.

Shows how anti-Semitism has been distorted to serve the Israeli state Good Jew, Bad Jew is a critique by one of South Africa's foremost political theorists of mainstream understandings of Jewishness. Steven Friedman offers a searing analysis of the weaponisation of anti-Semitism in service of political objectives that support the Israeli state and global white supremacy. Looking specifically at the way in which language is used to shape identities, Friedman uses many examples to illustrate how anti-Semitism and anti-Semites are increasingly defined as anything and anyone that opposes the interests and policies of the Israeli state. The use of anti-racist language to defend racial domination distorts not only the meaning of what it is to be Jewish, but sheds light on how all dogmatic nationalisms function. Friedman uses India and South Africa as examples, but the analysis applies across the world too. Good Jew, Bad Jew does not offer a simplistic binary understanding of Jewishness and the actions of the Israeli state and ideology. It is a detailed, deeply researched and critical work that will appeal to both specialists and general readers looking for a considered view on how language shapes belief systems and how the powerful forces of racism and nationalism - and their opponents - are being misrepresented.

My interest in site-specific research is not random. My mother escaped through the sewers of Breslau, Germany in 1945 (today known as Wroclaw, Poland). My father was born in a country that no longer exists. Their final destination was Johannesburg, South Africa. This is where I enter the narrative. I was born during apartheid and my interest in memory and identity is a result of my historical and political context.' Each one of us comes with a history, a complex web of DNA and a library of information that shapes who we are and how we view the world. How can we use our own complexities not only to engage with one another but to build it for story content? As an artistic researcher, filmmaker and educator, Tanja Sakota has often thought how to bring this subjective experience into pedagogical practice. Using paired themes of memory and forgetting, segregation and migration, perpetrators and victims, Sakota travels along a timeline of memory as she takes us on a journey through South Africa, Germany, Poland and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Using a camera and short film techniques, she hosts several workshops focused on interacting and engaging with remembering through different memory sites. The author sits at the core but the book is an interdisciplinary work shaped around films made by different participants using the camera to access and unveil personal interpretations of space and place. Questions that underpin the uncovering of memories are: How does one use a camera to unmask invisible memories hidden within sites? How does one remember events that one hasn't necessarily experienced? How does one use film to interrogate the past from the future present? As the journey evolves, workshop participants and readers alike enter into a conversation around practice-based research, autoethnography and film. Uncovering Memory is not a handbook offering a prescriptive method. Instead, it is a pedagogical text that offers an interactive approach for students and peers to consider, adapt or react to in their own teaching and learning practices. The narrative encourages readers to self-reflect as they explore their own memory using the camera and short film format as an engaging tool for research and knowledge production.

In South African higher education, the images of dysfunction are everywhere. Student protests. Violence. Police presence. Rubber or real bullets. Class disruptions. Burning tyres. Damaged buildings. Injury and sometimes death. Reports of wholesale corruption. Year after year, often in the same set of universities; the problem of routine instability seems insoluble. The financial, academic and reputational costs of ongoing dysfunction are high, especially for those universities caught-up in the never-ending struggle to overcome apartheid legacies. Any number of explanations have been ventured, including a lack of resources, shortage of capacity, rural location, corrupt officials, and endemic conflict. Corrupted takes a deeper look at dysfunction in an attempt to unravel the root causes in a sample of South African universities. At the heart of the problem lies the vexed issue of resources or, more pertinently, the relationship between resources and power: who gets what, and why? Whatever else it aspires to be--commonly, a place of teaching, learning, research and public duty--a university in an impoverished community is also a rich concentration of resources around which corrupt staff, students and those outside of campus all vie for access. Taking a political economic approach, Jonathan Jansen describes the daily struggle for institutional resources and offers accessible, sensible insights. He argues that the problem won't be solved through investments in 'capacity building' alone because the combination of institutional capacity and institutional integrity contributes to serial instability in universities. Rather, durable solutions would include the depoliticisation of university councils and appointments of academics with integrity and capacity to manage and lead these fragile institutions. This groundbreaking and long overdue study will offer a promising way forward for universities to better serve their communities and the country more broadly.

A look at the research methods in development across the global South Social science researchers in the global South, and in South Africa particularly, utilise research methods in innovative ways in order to respond to contexts characterised by diversity, racial and political tensions, socioeconomic disparities and gender inequalities. These methods often remain undocumented - a gap that this book starts to address. Written by experts from various methodological fields, Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences is a comprehensive collation of original essays and cutting-edge research that demonstrates the variety of novel techniques and research methods available to researchers responding to these context-bound issues. It is particularly relevant for study and research in the fields of applied psychology, sociology, ethnography, biography and anthropology. In addition to their unique combination of conceptual and application issues, the chapters also include discussions on ethical considerations relevant to the method in similar global South contexts. Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences has much to offer to researchers, professionals and others involved in social science research both locally and internationally.

An annotated edition of a classic text by South Africa's first black psychologist, a collection of essays reflecting on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years Being-Black-in-the-World, one of N. Chabani Manganyi's first publications, was written in 1973 at a time of global socio-political change and renewed resistance to the brutality of apartheid rule and the emergence of Black Consciousness in the mid-1960s. Manganyi is one of South Africa's most eminent intellectuals and an astute social and political observer. He has written widely on subjects relating to ethno-psychiatry, autobiography, black artists and race. In 2018 Manganyi's memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist was awarded the prestigious ASSAf (The Academy of Science of South Africa) Humanities Book Award. Publication of Being-Black-in-the-World was delayed until the young Manganyi had left the country to study at Yale University. His publishers feared that the apartheid censorship board and security forces would prohibit him from leaving the country, and perhaps even incarcerate him, for being a 'radical revolutionary'. The book found a limited public circulation in South Africa due to this censorship and original copies were hard to come by. This new edition is an invitation to a younger generation of citizens to engage with early decolonialising thought by an eminent South African intellectual. While the essays in this book are clearly situated in the material and social conditions of that time, they also have a timelessness that speaks to our contemporary concerns regarding black subjectivity, affectivity and corporeality, the persistence of a racial (and racist) order and the possibilities of a renewed de-colonial project. Each of these short essays can be read as self-contained reflections on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years. Manganyi is a master of understatement, and yet this does not stop him from making incisive political criticisms of black subjugation under apartheid. The essays will reward close study for anyone trying to make sense of black subjectivity and the persistence of white insensitivity to black suffering. Ahead of its time, the ideas in this book are an exemplary demonstration of what a thoroughgoing and rigorous de-colonial critique should entail. The re-publication of this classic text is enriched by the inclusion of a foreword and annotation by respected scholars Garth Stevens and Grahame Hayes respectively, and an afterword by public intellectual Njabulo S. Ndebele.

Originally published: Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1935

Maps the university's current and future vision as it marks its centenary in 2022The University of the Witwatersrand occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of South Africans. It is a leading university renowned for its commitment to academic excellence, social justice and the advancement of the public good. Its history is inextricably linked with the development of Johannesburg, with mining and economic development, and with political and social activism across the country. Wits University at 100: From Excavation to Innovation captures important moments of Wits' story in celebration of the university's centenary in 2022. It explores Wits' origins, the space and place that it occupies in society, and its transformation as it prepares the ground for the next century. From its humble beginnings as a mining college in Johannesburg to its current position as a flourishing and inclusive university, Wits University at 100 is a story of innovation driven from the global South. In text and image, Wits is presented as a dynamic institution that thrives because of its people, many of whom, in one way or another, have shifted the world. The experiences, achievements and insights of past and present 'Witsies' come alive in this glossy, full-color book that maps the university's vision for the future.

This fifth volume in the New South African Review series takes as its starting point the shock wave emanating from the events at Marikana on 16 August 2012 and how it has reverberated throughout politics and society. Some of the chapters in the volume refer directly to Marikana. In others, the influence of that fateful day is pervasive if not direct.

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 labour of familial loyalty to Wilhelm, the acclaimed linguist and language scholar of nineteenth-century Germany and later of the Cape Colony, and to Lucy Lloyd, a self-taught linguist and scholar of bushman languages and folklore; but it was also an expression of Dorothea's commitment to a particular kind of scholarship and an intellectual milieu that saw her spending her entire adult life in the study of the people she called'bushmen'.How has history treated Dorothea Bleek? Has she been recognised as a scholar in her own right, or as someone who merely followed in the footsteps of her famous father and aunt? Was she an adventurer, a woman who travelled across southern Africa driven by intellectual curiosity to learn all she could about the bushmen? Or was she conservative, a researcher who belittled the people she studied and dismissed them as lazy and improvident?These are some of the questions with which Jill Weintroub starts her thoughtful biography of Dorothea Bleek. The book examines Dorothea Bleek's life story and family legacy, her rock art research and her fieldwork in southern Africa, and, in light of these, evaluates her scholarship and contribution to the history of ideas in South Africa. The compelling and surprising narrative reveals an intellectual inheritance intertwined with the story of a woman's life, and argues that Dorothea's life work - her study of the bushmen - was also a sometimes surprising emotional quest.