“Jeremy Seekings's history of the United Democratic Front (UDF) is a masterful compilation of information based on scores of interviews. Given the nature of the organization, record keeping was initially poor, while in later years files were often confiscated or destroyed. His has thus been a tedious job of reconstruction.”
African Studies Review
The new South Africa cannot be understood without a knowledge of the history of the UDF and its role in the transition to democracy.
This is the first major study of an organization that transformed South African politics in the 1980s. By coordinating popular struggles on the ground and promoting the standing of the African National Congress, the UDF played a central role in the demise of apartheid and paved the way for South Africa's transition to democracy.
Based on extensive documentary and interview sources, the book traces the UDF's birth, career, and dissolution. It is a remarkable tale of strategic and tactical decision-making: of how opponents of apartheid made choices that helped to seal the fate of white domination while avoiding the general bloodbath that always threatened.
Jeremy Seekings has a joint appointment as Professor of Political Studies and Sociology at the University of Cape Town. He is also Director of the Social Surveys Unit in the Centre for Social Science Research at UCT. He is the author of Heroes or Villains: Youth Politics in the 1980s (Ravan Press, 1993) and coauthor of From Race to Class: The Changing Nature of Inequality in South Africa.
Retail price:
$32.95 ·
Save 20% ($26.36)
US and Canada only
Share 
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Paperback
978-0-8214-1336-4
Retail price: $32.95,
S.
Release date: September 2000
400 pages
Rights: World (exclusive in Americas, and Philippines) except British Commonwealth, Continental Europe, and United Kingdom
Apartheid’s Genesis
Edited by Philip Bonner, Peter Delius, and Deborah Posel
Apartheid is synonymous in most people's minds with a virulent form of racial ideology and social engineering. Yet ideologies of racial domination and segregation long preceded apartheid, and cannot by themselves explain the shift in racial domination that apartheid involved. Focusing on the period 1935–1962, this collection explores the dynamics which molded apartheid.
African Studies · Africa · Southern Africa · South Africa · Nationalism · Race and Ethnicity · Apartheid · African History · History · 20th century
We Are Fighting the World
A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999
By Gary Kynoch
Since the late 1940s, a violent African criminal society known as the Marashea has operated in and around South Africa’s gold mining areas. With thousands of members involved in drug smuggling, extortion, and kidnapping, the Marashea was more influential in the day-to-day lives of many black South Africans under apartheid than were agents of the state. These gangs remain active in South Africa.
African History · Social History · 20th century · Violence in Society · South Africa · African Studies · Criminology · Global Issues
Trustee for the Human Community
Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization of Africa
Edited by Robert A. Hill and Edmond J. Keller
Ralph J. Bunche (1904–1971), winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, was a key U.S. diplomat in the planning and creation of the United Nations in 1945. In 1947 he was invited to join the permanent UN Secretariat as director of the new Trusteeship Department.
African Studies · African History · History · African American Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization
