Africa: Crude Continent: The Struggle for Africa’s Oil Prize Paperback

Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society is an academic journal on African literatures and societies dedicated to interdisciplinary dialogue between literary and cultural studies, historiography, the social sciences, and cultural anthropology.

Late one night in July, 1963, a South African police unit surrounded the African National Congress headquarters in Rivonia and arrested a group of Movement leaders gathered inside. Eventually eight of them, including Nelson Mandela, who was already serving a sentence, Walter Sisulu, Dennis Goldberg, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoledi, Andrew Mangeni, and Ahmed Kathrada, were convicted of sabotage and, on June 12, 1964, sentenced to life in prison. Soon, these men became widely known as the “Rivonia Trialists.” Despite their imprisonment, the Trialists played active roles in the struggle against South Africa’s racist regime. Instead of being forgotten, as apartheid officials had hoped, they became enduring symbols in a struggle against injustice and racism.
Kathrada and his colleagues were classified as high security prisoners, segregated from others and closely watched. Every activity was regulated and monitored. Among the many indignities visited upon them, the prisoners were prohibited from keeping copies of incoming and outgoing correspondence. Kathrada, or “Kathy” as he is known, successfully hid both.
     Letters From Robben Island contains a selection of 86 of the more than 900 pieces of correspondence Ahmed Kathrada wrote during his 26 years on Robben Island and at Pollsmoor Prison. Some were smuggled out by friends; others were written in code to hide meaning and content from prison censors. These are among his most poignant, touching, and eloquent communications. They are testimonies to Kathrada, his colleagues, and to their commitment to obtaining human dignity and freedom for all South Africans.

He needed to hear Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by others   Electrifying essays on the history, complexity, diversity of a continent, from the father of modern African literature.

When Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress declared victory over the bitter injustice of apartheid, some thought South Africa’s future was assured. But despite Mandela’s mission of reconciliation, rampant inequality remains; race relations are uneasy, violence is endemic and many in the ANC appear to have lost sight of the liberation ideals. With the election in 2009 of Jacob Zuma, a charismatic populist embroiled in scandal, uncertainty over the trajectory of the nation has only intensified.

South Africa now stands at a crossroads, and award-winning journalist Alec Russell draws on his deep knowledge of the country to tell us how it got there and to give us a compelling account, revised and updated for this edition, of the journey from Mandela to Zuma.

Overexploitation of natural resources is often associated with poverty among local populations. A multi-disciplinary team studied artisanal fishers along the Kenyan coast on the Indian Ocean. The main focus of the research was on income diversification of fishers, the pressure on marine resources and the relation between the two. Income diversification did not reduce the pressure on the marine environment. Rather, indications are that many part-time fishers are entering the profession. Moreover, fishers with alternative employment stayed in-shore and used damaging gear more often. Policies to stimulate employment opportunities for coastal communities cannot be expected to lessen the pressure on marine resources and need to be planned carefully in terms of industry location, labour requirements and degree of coastal pollution.