I met author Barbara Masekela in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1967. We met again briefly in Cape Town in 1992. This remarkable memoir tells the story of the first 21½ years of her life, all of it new to me.
It is the story of a young black girl of mixed family heritage growing up in apartheid South Africa when I was growing up as a young white boy in the same country.
I can’t wait to read the volumes that must surely follow Poli Poli.
Poli Poli is a remarkable history that speaks to African identity, close family bonds, belonging, struggle and sacrifice, women's rights, and femininity, and is written with the lyricism and transporting detail of one of the country's greatest wordsmiths.
Barbara Masekela powerfully conveys the realities of life under apartheid and illustrates the features and characteristics of life in a coal mining location like KwaGuqa in the forties, Alexandra township in the fifties, and one of the oldest girls-only schools in Kwazulu-Natal, Inanda Seminary.
The memoir follows her grandmother, a beer brewer and seller who lived through the immediate aftermath of the…
This book is described as "a deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela's relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela." That it certainly is, both deeply researched and shattering.
I found it page-turning but also deeply disturbing, recalling the Latin cautionary phrase "de mortuis nil nisi bonum." On the other hand, perhaps that injunction to express nothing but good of the dead should not apply to public figures like the Mandelas, both of them proper subjects for a responsible historian like Steinberg.
In the early 1990s, Barbara Masekela served as Nelson Mandela's Chief of Staff. This book contains revealing lengthy extracts from an interview Steinberg conducted with her in 2018, after both Mandelas had died.
'Gripping and profoundly moving' DAMON GALGUT
'Deft and operatic' OBSERVER
From one of South Africa's foremost nonfiction writers, a deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela's relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Drawing on never-before-seen material, Steinberg reveals the fractures and stubborn bonds at the heart of a volatile and groundbreaking union, a very modern political marriage that played out on the world stage.
One of the most celebrated political leaders of the twentieth century, Nelson Mandela has been written about by many biographers and historians. But in one crucial area, his life remains largely untold: his marriage to Winnie. During…
My Brilliant Friend is the first novel in a series of four entitled the Neapolitan Quartet. Set in a poor neighbourhood of Naples, it is a marvelous evocation of the childhood and teenage years of two Italian girls, Elena and Lila, their friends and enemies, and their families.
Having myself had a stab at describing young female friendships, I couldn’t put it down. I shall certainly look out for the second in the series, The Story of a New Name.
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Now in B-format Paperback
From one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, comes this ravishing and generous-hearted novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime. The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but…
Ama says, "I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave; inside me, here and here, I am still a free woman."
During a period of 400 years, European slave traders ferried some 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the Americas, teaching a slave to read and write was a criminal offense. Hardly any stories of the enslaved and transported Africans have survived.
Based on thorough research, this novel is an attempt to recreate just one of those stories. It is a story, just one of a possible 12 million or more.
