Books

The book thus takes issue with the characterisation of the South African state as “developmental”. The crucial aspect of care is missing from the practice for this to be the case. Thus, while the grants address the immediate survival needs of many South Africans, social justice requires quite a different approach, an approach of care that would grant agency and dignity to recipients.

Ndabaningi Sithole: A Forgotten Founding Father is a biographical mapping of the political and intellectual contributions of Rev Ndabaningi Sithole to the liberation of Zimbabwe.

A lively debate on the relationship between the university and society in a developing country like South Africa is emerging. Academic Interaction looks at the main results of a research study on university interaction with external social partners. It centres on definitional boundaries around whether engagement requires new forms of knowledge that differ from traditional academic modes and around who is defined as 'the community' at local, regional, national or international levels. There is general agreement that the field is conceptually under-specified and theoretically rather thin.

The rise of commercialism poses many challenges to the integrity of the South African media in the post-1994 era. To maintain profitability, many publications have developed a range of strategies to attract advertising, in particular, developing the content that advertisers most desire - content that creates what Herman and Chomsky called a buying mood for their products. These include niched supplements, special sections and advertorial pages (surveys) as well as a new trend in paid-for content in the South African print media, identified in this study: the development of a third arm.

The Africa in Focus series is an initiative of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) that creates a forum for African scholars to frame research questions and examine critical issues affecting the African continent in the 21^st century. The series should inspire robust debate to help inform the orientation of public policy in Africa.

An introduction to the lives and works of five exceptional African intellectuals based in the former Cape Colony in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this unique work aims to recount and preserve a part of African intellectual heritage which is not widely known. Ntsikana, Tiyo Soga, John Tengo Jabavu, Mpilo Walter Benson Rubusana and Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi were pioneers within the African community, contributing their thoughts and intellect to various fields, including literature and poetry, politics, religion and journalism.

With increasing numbers of computers and diffusion of the internet around the world, localisation of the technology and the content it carries into the many languages people speak is becoming an ever more important area for discussion and action. Localisation, simply put, includes translation and cultural adaptation of user interfaces and software applications, as well as the creation and translation of internet content in diverse languages. It is essential in making information and communication technology more accessible to the populations of the poorer countries, increasing its relevance to their lives, needs, and aspirations, and ultimately in bridging the digital divide. Localisation is a new and growing field of inquiry. This book identifies issues, concerns, priorities, and lines of research and is intended as a baseline study in defining localisation in Africa and how it is important for development and education in the long term. Techies, geeks, P2P experts, etc. as well as researchers and development organizations, this book is for you.

African Parliaments offers an indepth analysis of parliamentary development in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the continent's post 1990s democratic resurgence. In particular, it illustrates how African parliaments struggle to serve as part of the machinery of government while exercising the function of holding government accountable.

This monograph outlines the origins and nature of the conflict in Burundi. It discusses the problems of establishing democracy in a region where ethnic conflict has occasioned genocide, traces the peace process in detail and assesses the prospects for the future. In aprticular, it looks at the role played by South Africa in the peace process since 1999.

The struggle to free South Africa from its apartheid shackles was long and complex. One of the many ways in which the apartheid regime maintained its stranglehold in South Africa was through controlling the freedom of speech and the flow of information, in an effort to silence the voices of those who opposed it. United by the ideals of freedom and equality, but also nuanced by a wide variety of persuasions, the 'voices of liberation' were many: African nationalists, communists, trade-unionists, pan-Africanists, English liberals, human rights activists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews, to name but a few.