Africans Way

This is a simple, readable and revolutionary story that requires urgent attention from Africans everywhere and at every social level.

A Dream of Azania by Ntokozo Mthembu could be the reminder that Southern African society has needed to hear.

The book resonates with the urgent message of how landless African/Black people have been dispossessed of their homelands. After painstaking and accurate analyses of how the majority has turned out to be merely existing below the towering and wealthy minority. There are solutions offered and there are also challenges that are facing African people at all levels of the labor and Capitalist market.

Mthembu writes from his own academic and personal experience as a Black African scholar who has seen and searched for the reasons why his own society has been deprived of taking advantage of all possibilities for socio-economic growth. A society without proper roots and a dubious level of ownership of their ancestral land is under serious threat. The book is a well balanced assessment of the labor, landlessness and pauperization of Africans who have been shifted around their homeland for political and economic gain. After reading the book, one is left with a sense that the Land and Worker question in SA needs to be addressed immediately.

This kind of book will not go down well with the puppet masters within our diverse and severly unequal society. There are those who would like to hide the simple truth revealed in it. Without a doubt the heartless and heedless captains of industrial capitalism will try to keep their slave-labor as far away from such knowledge as possible. A Dream of Azania is not an easy read, while the angry voice of the author is distinctive, the book also relied heavily on research conducted via all the possible methods, from surveys, one on one interviews, other publications and the all available research methods.

Passages such as this one: “Despite the commitment of unemployed people to respect the laws of the city in order to survive, their treatment remains racially motivated. This was confirmed by Ms Mazibuko, who has been trading in the market for more than six years, and who said that the traders were being victimized for trying to earn an honest living”,  would draw the attention of all who are interested in knowing the real inspirations of this book: To Free the mind of the oppressed.

As one of our fallen Phoenixes once noted:

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

And as the book points out in the final chapter, there is a way out of colonialism and Modern Day Slavery.

By: Menzi Maseko aka Ras Nabiy

There are many unsung heroes and heroines who in their own way assisted towards the liberation of South Africa. Nevertheless, icons like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, John Dube and INkosi Albert Luthuli continue to have a powerful influence in our fledgling democracy.

The book titled “Whisperings of a Gandhi follower”- the book highlights the impact of the life that Mahatma Gandhi had on Dasarath Bundhoo. Told through the rich, epic eyes of an ordinary leather worker- who also displays a powerful and enduring bond to his wife and family and the entire South African populace- merging a rich tapestry from humble beginnings to his achievements as a leader passionately engulfed with the love and admiration for the realisation of worker’s rights.

The journey starts in Plessislaer, in Pietermaritzburg- Bundhoo was well placed in a city that made world history as it is where Mahatma Gandhi was exposed to racial discrimination as he was forcibly thrown out of a first-class compartment in the local train; which then gave rise to his social activism. The book describes anecdotes from his life experiences and also showcases the author’s life pre and post the apartheid era. The book also seeks to unpack the ideologies of visionaries like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Junior of- Vasudeva Kutumba Kam or Ubuntu set against the backdrop of love, peace and the desire to elevate people’s lives to ideals more lofty and the realisation of justice and democracy for all.

“What is it that compels them to disown, by their deeds, the spirit not only of Ernest Galo, Steve Biko and Ahmed Timol but also of all those who gave up their lives so that we could enjoy a democratic culture, today?” (Page 23, accounting on Ernest Galo’s life and the impact the university politics and the students had)

South Africa’s political history is best described by people who were party to setting the wheels in motion and heralding the freedom of the masses. Prisms of Light is the ideal book to take you into the mind and the rich, political and intrinsic life story of Mewa Ramgobin who played a pivotal role in South African politics.

Titled Prisms of Light- Within my memory- the book is a recollection of events and the people who helped shape the prosperity of South Africa. It highlights the history during the time of bold resistance against apartheid and the ignored stories of the different people whose arrival, long before, began the phenomenon of our human mix active against racism in South Africa.

The Black of this Continent on a discovery mission
The grey-cloud vision
Searching to find peaceful places
in the traces of my African locks

Africans locked
by ammunition chains and gunshots...
The sweetest of dreams
never ceases to see
the beauty of a messed up reality.

Them who use 9mm guns
To gun down young lives
They use knives to slice
These children's young minds
Like their political speeches
Bodies lie... dead still
Dead yet still they kill

Who you ask,
They in masks
With bullet marks of their back
Yellow looks nice with Black
The mellow looking Blacks have unfortunate senseless facts

Stuff the Revolutionary Acts
They did nothing but inspire Man to combat
Creep under African skies
During twinkling nights like
Cats with 9 lives...

Bling-bling
Blood-bourne ka-ching
Benefiting none but the fake ghetto Kings
Of a continent that has now become so violent.

It was never like this you know... Africa use to be warm before there fell European snow.

By:  Tumelo Khoza