With a Preface reviewing some of the debates prompted by the earlier edition of this book.

Poverty and violence are issues of global importance. In Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa, Clifton Crais explores the relationship between colonial conquest and the making of South Africa's rural poor. Based on a wealth of archival sources, this detailed history changes our understanding of the origins of the gut-wrenching poverty that characterizes rural areas today. Crais shifts attention away from general models of economic change and focuses on the enduring implications of violence in shaping South Africa's past and present. Crais details the devastation wrought by European forces and their African auxiliaries. Their violence led to wanton bloodshed, large-scale destruction of property, and famine. Crais explores how the survivors struggled to remake their lives, including the adoption of new crops, and the world of inequality and vulnerability colonial violence bequeathed. He concludes with a discussion of contemporary challenges and the threats to democracy in South Africa.

In Colonial Survey and Native Landscapes in Rural South Africa, 1850 - 1913, Lindsay Frederick Braun explores the technical processes and struggles surrounding the creation and maintenance of boundaries and spaces in South Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The precision of surveyors and other colonial technicians lent these enterprises an illusion of irreproachable objectivity and authority, even though the reality was far messier. Using a wide range of archival and printed materials from survey departments, repositories, and libraries, the author presents two distinct episodes of struggle over lands and livelihoods, one from the Eastern Cape and one from the former northern Transvaal. These cases expose the contingencies, contests, and negotiations that fundamentally shaped these changing South African landscapes.

This book analyzes the origins of the crisis in Zimbabwe and why it has had such a profound impact on both the land issue and democratic politics in the Southern African region. In doing so, it contributes to the present debates around Mugabe, neo-imperialism and the stability in the region.

As the most influential and powerful country on the entire continent of Africa, an understanding of South Africa’s past and its present trends is crucial in appreciating where South Africans are going to, and from where they have come. South Africa changed dramatically in 1994 when apartheid was dismantled, and it became a democratic state. Since 2000, when the previous edition appeared, further big changes occurred, with the rise of new political leaders and of a new black middle class. There were also serious problems in governance, in public health, and the economy, but with a remarkable popular resilience too. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of South Africa contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about South Africa.

This book examines violence against the rural African population and Africans in general before apartheid became the justification for the existence of the South African state.

The impact of colonial dispossession and the subsequent social and political ramifications places a unique burden on governments having to establish equitable means of addressing previous injustices. This book considers the efforts by both Canada and South Africa to reconcile the damage left by colonial expansion, in part, looking back with a critical eye, but also pointing the way towards a solution that will satisfy the common need for human dignity

This unprecedented work is the first one-volume study of the history of Christianity in Africa. Written by Elizabeth Isichei, a leading scholar in this field, A History of Christianity in Africa examines the origins and development of Christianity in Africa from the early story of Egyptian Christianity to the spectacular growth, vitality, and diversity of the churches in Africa today. Isichei opens with the brilliance of Christianity in Africa in antiquity and shows how Christian Egypt and North Africa produced some of the most influential intellects of the time. She then discusses the churches founded in the wake of early contacts with Europe, from the late fifteenth century on, and the unbroken Christian witness of Coptic Egypt and of Ethiopia. Isichei also examines the different types of Christianity in modern Africa and shows how social factors have influenced its development and expression. With the explosive growth of Christianity now taking place in Africa and the increasingly recognized significance of African Christianity, this much-needed book fills the void in scholarly works on that continent's Christian past, also foreshadowing Christian Africa's influential future.

This book examines five hundred years of South African economic history.