At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of Lusikisiki in the old Transkei lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is inconceivably poor. In the broader world, most would consider it entirely inconsequential.

It is to here that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of HIV/Aids. He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who runs a spaza shop who refuses to be tested for Aids despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral programme. It is this apparent illogic that becomes the key to understanding the dynamics that thread their way through a complex and traditional rural community.

As Steinberg grapples to get closer to finding answers that remain maddeningly just out of reach, he realizes that he must look within himself to unravel certain riddles.

Following on from the huge critical success of Midlands and The Number, both of which won the Alan Paton Award, Steinberg has written another masterpiece which will be simultaneously released in the United States and South Africa.

R145.00 | 9781868423668 | Feb 2010 • Paperback 198 x 129mm | 352pp South African rights | Category: Current Affairs

In the spring of 1999, in the beautiful hills of the Kwa-Zulu Natal midlands, a young white farmer is shot dead on the dirt road running from his father’s farmhouse to his irrigation fields. The murder is the work of assassins rather than robbers; a single shot behind the ear, nothing but his gun stolen, no forensic evidence like spent cartridges or fingerprints left at the scene. Journalist Jonny Steinberg travels to the midlands to investigate.

Local black workers say the young white man had it coming. The dead man’s father says the machinery of a political conspiracy has been set into motion, that he and his neighbours are being pushed off their land. Initially thinking that he is to write about an event in the recent past, Steinberg finds that much of the story lies in the immediate future. He has stumbled upon a festering frontier battle, the combatants groping hungrily for the whispers and lies that drift in from the other side.

Right from the beginning, it is clear that the young white man is not the only one who will die on that frontier, and that the story of his and other deaths will illuminate a great deal about the early days of post-apartheid South Africa.

Jonny Steinberg is a journalist and a scriptwriter. In the mid-1990s he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Oxford University where he graduated with a doctorate in political theory. He returned to South Africa in 1998 and worked for Business Day, writing on the constitutional court and the police. He left Business Day to write Midlands, which he did while based at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg. Steinberg is currently working on his second book.

The Best of Jonny Steinberg’s Business Day Columns
In this selection of columns, Jonny Steinberg wlks through Pollsmoor Prison on the eve of the invasion of Iraq and believes he sees in the jail’s corridors why the US’s impending war in the Middle East will fail.He meets a poverty-stricken old man who spends most of his state pension maintaining a black Mercedes Benz, and explains why this shows that government’s welfare programme is working. He tells us why he thinks Thabo Mbeki is an Afro-pessimist and why a South Africa ruled by Tokyo Sexwale will be as riddled with corruption as Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy.

Steinberg has an eye for the strangeness of our fractured country. For the last five years, he has been recording the things he sees on his travels across South Africa in his fortnightly column on Business’s Day’s leader page. Here are the best of those columns.

Title: Notes from a Fractured Country
The Best of Jonny Steinberg’s Business Day Columns
Author: Jonny Steinberg
ISBN: 978-1-86842-293-7
Format: Paperback
Pub Date: November 2007
RRP: R120,00

A country is policed only to the extent that it consents to be. When that consent is withheld, cops either negotiate or withdraw. Once they do this, however, they are no longer police; their role becomes something far murkier.

Several months before they exploded into xenophobic violence, Jonny Steinberg travelled the streets of Alexandra, Reiger Park and other Johannesburg townships with police patrols. His mission was to discover the unwritten rules of engagement emerging between South Africa’s citizens and its new police force.

In this provocative new book, Steinberg argues that policing in crowded urban space is like theatre. Only here, the audience writes the script, and if the police don’t perform the right lines, the spectators throw them off the stage.

In vivid and eloquent prose, Steinberg takes us into the heart of this drama, and picks apart the rules South Africans have established for the policing of their communities. What emerges is a lucid and original account of a much larger matter: the relationship between ordinary South Africans and the government they have elected to rule them. The government and its people are like scorned lovers, Steinberg argues: their relationship, brittle, moody, untrusting and ultimately very needy.

Sales Price: R120
ISBN: 978-1-86842-303-3
August 2008
B format paperback
183 pages
World Rights
Category: Current affairs

At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of Lusikisiki in the old Transkei lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is inconceivably poor. In the broader world, most would consider it entirely inconsequential.

It is to here that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of HIV/Aids. He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who runs a spaza shop who refuses to be tested for Aids despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral programme. It is this apparent illogic that becomes the key to understanding the dynamics that thread their way through a complex and traditional rural community.

As Steinberg grapples to get closer to finding answers that remain maddeningly just out of reach, he realizes that he must look within himself to unravel certain riddles.

Following on from the huge critical success of Midlands and The Number, both of which won the Alan Paton Award, Steinberg has written another masterpiece which will be simultaneously released in the United States and South Africa.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jonny Steinberg was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and received an MA in Politics from the University of the Witwatersrand. He continued his studies on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University's Balliol College, and completed a Doctorate in Philosophy (Politics) in 1999. He returned to South Africa and worked as a reporter and later senior writer at Business Day, a national daily newspaper, focusing on the South African Police Service, crime and the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He left Business Day in 2001 to research and write his first book, Midlands, but still writes a fortnightly column for the newspaper. In 2004 Steinberg published a second book, The Number. Both Midlands and The Number (both published by Jonathan Ball Publishers) were awarded the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for non-fiction, and Midlands also received the National Booksellers' Choice award.