Martin Plaut is senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study at the University of London. He was Africa editor, BBC World Service News, until 2013. He has since published three books on South Africa and Eritrea, including Promise and Despair: The First Struggle for a Non-Racial South Africa. He has advised the UK Foreign Office and the US State Department on African affairs.
Listed in: African Studies · South Africa · Biography & Autobiography | Political · African History · Zimbabwe · World and Comparative History · Political Science, Africa · Biography, Heads of State · Africa
African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2
Cabral, Machel, Mugabe, Sirleaf
By Allen F. Isaacman, Barbara S. Isaacman, Peter Karibe Mendy, Sue Onslow, Martin Plaut, and Pamela Scully
This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Robert Mugabe, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2 complements courses in history and political science and serves as a useful collection for general readers.
Robert Mugabe
By Sue Onslow and Martin Plaut
For some, Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe is a liberation hero who confronted white rule and oversaw the radical redistribution of land. For others, he is a murderous dictator who drove his country to poverty. This concise biography, in a highly successful series, reveals the complexity of the man who led Zimbabwe for its first decades of independence.
Promise and Despair
The First Struggle for a Non-Racial South Africa
By Martin Plaut
The struggle for freedom in South Africa goes back a long way. In 1909, a remarkable interracial delegation of South Africans traveled to London to lobby for a non-racialized constitution and franchise for all. Among their allies was Mahatma Gandhi, who later encapsulated lessons from the experience in his most important book, Hind Swaraj. Though the mission failed, the London debates were critical to the formation of the African National Congress in 1912.With
