Archive for the ‘Book Excerpts’ Category
by Thando on Jan 14th, 2013
On his website, Shaka Sisulu has shared an excerpt from his book, Becoming, which is part of The Youngsters Series.
In this extract, Sisulu recalls a trip he went on to Congo-Brazzaville when he was eight, where he and his peers were treated like royalty. Soon the children started to squabble over the attention they were receiving, which taught him “that people are people – flawed, and dangerous when endowed with too much power”.
This experience formed his views on leadership: that it consists of many people doing their best and that it shouldn’t be left to a select few.
I visited Congo-Brazzaville when I was eight-year-old. It was an intriguing experience. I was with a group of pioneers all my peers. Despite our tender ages we were considered the first ‘South African delegation’ they had ever hosted.
We were treated like royalty, ferried around the city, with newsmen following us and putting our pictures in the newspapers and on the evening news, and were guests at the one of the seven presidential palaces. We stayed in plush hotels and dined at places I could tell the adults were impressed by. My clothes were too small for me by the time I went back home a month or so later.
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by Thando on Jan 10th, 2013
In an extract he published on his blog, from the Youngsters series book, In My Arrogant Opinion, Khaya Dlanga reflects on what being a child raised by a single mother, and not having a father as a role model or one that could help raise him, feels like.
His own father died when he was very young, and he’s often thought about how so many black children basically go without having a father in their lives. Dlanga says that the percentage of young women raising children on their own has risen significantly and that one of his greatest fears “is being a bad husband or a bad father”. We previously published another excerpt from In My Arrogant Opinion.
Many young black South Africans carry around bitterness towards their fathers for a variety of reasons. One of the major reasons is because their fathers have been fathers in name only, and not in actions. The only thing they seem expert in is making babies – and then abandoning them. I have heard many people simply call their fathers sperm donors. I have heard people refer to their fathers as ‘that thing’. The great bitterness towards fathers has less to do with hate than deep-seated disappointment. It is because they know what fathers are supposed to do. When they don’t do what they are meant to, bitterness sets in. But this does not mean that they hate their fathers. A myriad of contradictory feelings settle upon many children directed at their fathers.
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by Thando on Sep 4th, 2012
Women24 and Pan Macmillan are giving away five copies of The Agony Chef: Recipes and Advice for Life’s Pickles and Predicaments by Kate Sidley. They have also shared an excerpt from the book in which the Agony Chef presents the perfect dinner party recipes for newly-single women.
To stand a chance of winning one of the five copies of the book answer the following question:
Think of 3 tricky social situations and come up with the perfect recipe name for them.
‘When things go awry, reach for the carbs,’ said Buddha. Or maybe someone else with a tummy. Whoever. The point remains: certain foods are very comforting. Break-ups, bereavements, work problems, family fall-outs – there are few crises that are not improved with the appropriate culinary self-medication.
I’m not saying it’s a cure; more of a palliative. But one should take comfort where one finds it, and better the doughnut than the gin. Or, in extreme cases, both.
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by Thando on Aug 22nd, 2012
Earlier this month, Alan Knott-Craig Jr and Gus Silber’s Mobinomics: Mxit and Africa’s Mobile Revolution was released as a mobi-book on the social networking platform Mxit. The FunDza Literacy Trust, which encourages the use of Mxit as a literacy tool, has made the first chapter of the Mobinomics mobi-book available to read online for free:
Tuesday evening in Stellenbosch. It’s raining. A soft mist sweeping in from the roof of the mountains, falling like a benediction on the rows of green that will one day be turned into wine. One day.
For now, the traffic in Dorp Street heading out of town is heavy and sluggish, as it always is at this hour.
People who’ve lived in Stellies all their lives will tell you that the town isn’t what it used to be. They’ll say it’s become a place of bustle and noise, and outsiders rushing in to make a quick buck. I don’t know about that. The bucks aren’t quick in Stellenbosch.
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by Thando on Aug 13th, 2012
Pan Macmillan invites you to whet your appetite with these sample pages from Kate Sidley‘s The Agony Chef: Recipes and Advice for Life’s Pickles and Predicaments.
In the extract below, Agony Aunt Delilah delivers humurous advice alongside a series of sumptuous recipes:
The Agony Chef – Sampler
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by Thando on Jun 26th, 2012
In this extract from South Africa: A Long Walk to a Free Ride, part of The Youngsters series, Nik Rabinowitz explains that the hardest thing about South African history is getting people to agree on it. Rabinowitz goes back millions of years to help today’s youth understand the country’s history, starting with the “tiny, hairy hominids roaming the West Rand of Joburg”:
‘Oh great,’ you’re probably thinking, ‘a history lesson. I have bigger things to worry about. Why should I care about ancient history when the present is changing all the time?’
Our generation is all about change: regime changes, party changes, road name changes, province changes, Facebook status update changes. History books get changed according to who is in power, so we don’t know where we’re coming from.
Newspapers are censored and sanitised, so we don’t know where we stand. Twitter and Facebook are no use because they are full of people who lie and can’t spell.
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by Thando on Jun 14th, 2012
Auma Obama, sister of US President Barack Obama, released her autobiography, And Then Life Happens, in English in April this year.
Obama spoke to TODAY’s Ann Curry about the memoir, originally published in German as Das Leben kommt immer dazwischen, in which she describes meeting her brother for the first time.
TODAY has also published an extract from the book.
“Our father was someone from whom everyone expected too much,” I said, when we had finished eating. “He didn’t know how to defend himself against the many demands made on him. His sense of duty toward the larger Obama family was very strong. But the reverse was unfortunately not always the case.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Barack. We were now sitting in his living room. While we ate, I had tried to explain to my brother the phenomenon of the “chosen ones,” for he just couldn’t understand how a single person could be expected to assume responsibility for an extended family.
“I understand that it’s hard for you to grasp,” I replied. “I basically feel the same way. But it’s simply what our tradition requires. There were times when there wasn’t even enough money for my school fees, and I had to watch our father give away everything he had left to a relative. He was always confident that we would somehow get by.” Against my will, my words had sounded despondent.
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by Thando on Jun 13th, 2012
In an extract from his The Youngsters series book, In My Arrogant Opinion, Khaya Dlanga outlines the reasons why black people still talk about apartheid. The following piece was published in the latest issue of the Sunday Independent:
When we blame the legacy of apartheid most white people take it as a personal attack on them for having benefited from the system. Or they accuse blacks of refusing to take responsibility for whatever is going wrong in the country.
This is not the case. Blaming the legacy of apartheid is an attack on the system. We are not asking you to feel guilty. If anyone needs to get over anything, it is white people who walk around carrying guilt. This guilt might paralyse or even make them unwitting racists. Or worse, cause them to overcompensate, thus wiping away any sincerity in their efforts to balance the past. White guilt won’t solve the problems of this country. If anything, it will bring about resentment and that will take us back. We are not interested in moving backwards.
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by Thando on Jun 7th, 2012
Memeburn has published two extracts from the opening chapter of Alan Knott-Craig Jr’s Mobinomics: Mxit and Africa’s Mobile Revolution, written with journalist Gus Silber and recently released by Pan Macmillan.
In the first extract, Knott-Craig reveals how he nearly missed out on buying Mxit, having twice turned down the opportunity to buy a stake in the company under founder, Herman Heunis.
The second piece details his first encounter with Heunis and the development of World of Avatar:
Run a small business. Find a job. Educate a child. Pay your bills. Bank. Run a big business. Learn, teach, share, counsel, build. Connect.
In Africa, my home continent, there are about a billion people, and more than half of those hold in their possession the most powerful instrument of social, economic, and political transformation ever invented. We skipped the printing press, the telegraph and the fixed line. We leapfrogged every major breakthrough in communication technology, waiting for the ultimate.
The mobile phone.
In 2006, while I was running a wireless broadband service provider called iBurst, I had flown down to Stellies [Stellenbosch] on a mission to stake my claim to Mxit. A modest stake, but still.
The service at that stage had some 360 000 users, more than two-thirds of whom were in the dream marketing demographic of 12 to 25. And more than 10 000 new users were signing up every day.
Even so, it would have been crazy, back then, to project that Mxit would grow to almost 50-million users, in 120 countries, 23-billion messages a month and up to 50,000 daily signups by 2012. But that’s exactly what happened.
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by Thando on May 10th, 2012
Jay Naidoo, author of Fighting for Justice, wrote the foreword to the new edition of Emma Mashinini’s autobiography Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life, released by Picador Africa last month and launched at Constitution Hill last week. On his website, Naidoo invites you to read the foreword, in which he recalls his first encounter with the “indomitable Ma Emma”:
I clearly remember my first encounter with Emma Mashinini. The indomitable Ma Emma was standing in the hall at Khotso House, the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches – one of the few places we were able to meet – surrounded and dwarfed by workers. She spotted Jayendra Naidoo first, who was then working as an organiser in the Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa (CCAWUSA), and she embraced him warmly. She turned to hug me, too, and as she did, I felt her intense compassion and warmth as she whispered, ‘Welcome my son. Welcome to our family.’ It was, and has remained ever since, an intense and powerful connection.
Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life was first published in the United Kingdom in 1989. This autobiography of an inspiring individual started off as an attempt by Ma Emma to deal with the torture and devastation she had experienced under the apartheid system. Her friend Betty Wolpert suggested that it might be therapeutic for her to trace her journey and to find closure to a difficult past. In doing so, Ma Emma gives us insight into the life of a courageous woman: wife, mother, factory worker, trade unionist and friend who found herself at the centre of the fight for equal rights in the workplace.
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