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

Crime is tearing South Africa apart.
Whether it is hijacking or rape, a home robbery or a husband’s explosion of rage, violence is so common that few lives have been left untouched by it. The result is a society deformed by its fears. Closeted behind locked doors and high walls, panic buttons at the ready, members of the middle classes live lives haunted by fear. The poor, who are both more likely to be victimized and less able to secure themselves, are just as traumatized.

This is a penetrating exploration of South Africa’s crime problem. Getting behind the statistics to offer a sober and sobering account of the scale of the problem and its evolution, it describes how government has sometimes sought to deal with the crisis and sometimes sought to deny its existence. The book ends with some suggestions of what needs to be done to deal with this scourge.

“Altbeker hits the nail on the head.” – Jonny Steinberg

Title: A Country At War With Itself: South Africa’s Crisis of Crime
Author: Antony Altbeker
ISBN: 978-1-86842-284-5
Format: Paperback
Pub Date: September 2007
RRP: R110,00

Living with risk is part of living in South Africa now. Violent crime and AIDS pose bodily threats. Dizzying shifts in race and class rock one’s sense of identity. Ethically, one is daily challenged by rampant need in the face of plenty. In fact, society as a whole feels as if it is a giant experiment that could very well go wrong. But it could also succeed.

In each of these narratives, something, or someone, is at risk. Written in registers of the unexpected – surprise, shock, bewilderment as well as uncertainty, scepticism and doubt – the pieces form a second wave of South African writing. They cut loose from the grand narratives of apartheid and the themes of confession and redemption born of the fledgling democracy. These personal, intimate accounts blow the lid off our South African age.

Contributors: Jonny Steinberg, Graeme Reid, Liz McGregor, Sarah Nuttall, Justice Malala, Deborah Posel, Jonathan Hyslop, Achille Mbembe, Makhosazana Xaba, Njabulo S Ndebele, Lara Allen, Fred Khumalo, Tom Odhiambo.

All of the contributors is associated with WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research), which produces cutting-edge work on contemporary South Africa and hosts journalists, writers and public intellectuals.

In Body Count Aids campaigner and journalist Peter Gill calls those responsible to account.
Meticulously researched, the book unearths new and shocking facts…

• How successive US presidents, including Bill Clinton (now a great Aids champion), failed to provide leadership against the pandemic.
• How George W Bush committed $15 billion to fighting Aids, but insists on a seriously flawed Aids prevention policy
• How Christian campaigners for sexual abstinence influence the US Aids programme – and how moral disapproval of prostitution and needle exchange put vulnerable people at risk.
• How sex, race and the politics of liberation fatally blinkered President Mbeki’s response to Aids in South Africa where one in five are HIV-positive, and how his health minister, a qualified doctor, says that garlic is a better treatment than drugs.
• How one African leader failed to respond to the death of thousands of men, women and children, and then declared: ‘the wages of sin are death’.
• How courageous Roman Catholic missionaries in South America and Africa stood up for condoms gainst the rigid opposition of their local superiors and the Vatican.
• How western pharmaceutical companies manoeuvred to protect their patents and profits against the interests of poor people.
• How Tony Blair’s Labour government vigorously promotes universal Aids treatment in Africa, but ignores the fate of many HIV-positive Africans in Britain. And how the Thatcher government did better than Labour in combating Aids.

The book includes unique interviews with politicians, church leaders, campaigners and HIVpositive people: Colin Powell, who as US Secretary of State was in charge of the Bush Aids programme, is now sharply at odds with the administration on the question of condoms; Dr Germán Velásquez, a World Health Organization official, who was assaulted and warned to‘stop messing with the pharmaceutical industry’; Zackie Achmat, HIV-positive South African activist, who refused to take his treatment until the government made antiretrovirals available to everyone; Father Valeriano Paitoni, an Italian missionary in Sao Paulo, who says that if Christ was on earth today, He would be saying ‘Use the condom.’

Peter Gill has recently led a major campaign against Aids in India for the BBC World Service Trust. He has been a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in south Asia and the Middle East, and has travelled widely in the developing world as a TV reporter for Thames Television, Channel 4 and the BBC.

BODY COUNT by Peter Gill is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN 1868422496
* Paperback
* R129,95
* July 2006

It was Philip Graham, legendary publisher of The Washington Post in the 1960s, who coined the epigram that the journalist’s role is to write ‘a first rough draft of history’.

It is a concept that has long fascinated veteran journalist Allister Sparks, because it means that a collection of those rough drafts can present a different kind of history, a contemporaneous history. With the perfect vision of hindsight, historians can reconstruct events as they actually turned out. But the question is, what did it look like at the time, when the future was anything but obvious?

No journalist has covered South Africa with the same insight and depth as Sparks. For many years his reporting and opinion pieces have been eagerly sort out by decision makers, analysts and the public at large.

First Drafts – a scintillating collection of Sparks’ writing - takes the reader on a journey through the tumultuous years of the past decade. In his inimitable style, Sparks writes on subjects that cut across the landscape both local and international. He tackles the failed Mbeki presidency, tracking the never-ending Zimbabwe crisis and the HIV-Aids debacle.

Sparks follows the extraordinary rise to power of President Jacob Zuma and a new political elite. He comments on the Arms Deal that won’t go away, the scourge of crime, the crisis in the judiciary, and a host of problems that bedevil South Africa. He also examines a number of foreign issues, particularly those that have a bearing on South Africa. He weighs in against the failure of US foreign policy during the Bush years; the fall from grace of Tony Blair in the UK; and the conflict in the Middle East.

R195.00 • ISBN: 9781868423460 • Nov 2009 • Trade paperback • 300 pages • World rights • Category: Current Affairs