I have never been to South Africa, but I have spent an insane number of hours in the past five years reading about the place – everything from postcolonial fiction to early voortrekker tracts, hefty sociological analyses to partisan political memoirs. I’ve read minutely-detailed academic debates about the symbolism of Afrikaner festivals and the impact of Gramsci’s theories of hegemony and subalternity on recent South African social history. And in all that reading I have come across some real gems.

If you’re planning a trip to South Africa (lucky dog you) or even if you just find the country as fascinating as I do, here are some great options to learn more. Happy reading!

The Primer:

Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela

Mandela’s autobiography is essential reading, and not just because of his status as the country’s long-time symbol of black resistance, his role as ANC leader and first post-apartheid President, and the fact that he is an all-around inspirational guy. It’s also a great way to pick up the key points of twentieth-century South African history: the rise of the far-right National Party in the inter-war years, the shift to full-blown apartheid from 1948, the 1960 Sharpeville killings, the Rivonia trial and the 1976 Soweto Uprising, and of course the events leading to Mandela’s release from prison and the country’s first free elections in 1994. Mandela’s memories of his childhood in the Transkeian countryside, his struggles as a black law student in Johannesburg, or the details of his exercise routine in prison, make these basics far more interesting than anything you’ll find in a comparable “Introduction to South African History.” Of course, some people (supporters of the rival Pan-African Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party in particular) will find the book hopelessly ANC-biased - but, as the saying goes, the winners write the history books.

The Mindbomb:

Country of my Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, by Antjie Krog

A high school writing teacher once asked us to write a “dirty poem” – that is, a poem on an ugly subject, one not normally deemed to be beautiful or particularly literary. The point of the exercise was to show us that even the ugliest subjects could be beautiful if the writing was good enough.

Country of my Skull is dirty poetry. Antjie Krog is a rare character on the South African landscape: an Afrikaans-language poet and strongly left-leaning Afrikaner. She spent the middle part of the 1990s covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for SABC radio, and the book is part-memoir, part-history. It includes transcripts from the TRC sessions (some of the most horrifying, gripping stuff I have ever read), interviews with both amnesty applications and their victims, and some thoughtful writing from Krog about the nature of radio journalism and the bizarre process of packaging decades of suffering into 30-second soundbites. Adding more layers to the book are Krog’s personal insights: her feelings of guilt, shock at what she is forced to hear (she had a nervous breakdown three days in) and of attachment to her people and her language, in spite of all the wrong they’ve done.

This is the book that started my obsession with South African history. I read Long Walk to Freedom in May 2003 and was intrigued; in June I picked up this book, and in July I walked into the Registrar’s Office and switched my major from Classics to History. And then I talked the two African history profs into letting me take all their upper-level seminars, despite my complete lack of prerequisites. The book is that good. An absolute must-read – although, fair warning, bring a box of Kleenex and a strong stomach.

The Academics:

There are shelves and shelves of academic works on the apartheid years, but not all are dry, dusty tomes about the country’s slow drift away from British influence or theory-heavy sociological studies on collective guilt and the herd mentality. The two I’ve chosen here are both fairly recent social histories, and both – despite being serious academic works – are fairly readable.

The Seed Is Mine, by Charles Van Onselen

A mixture of biography and social history, The Seed Is Mine tells the story of Kas Maine, an African farmer who managed for years, against all odds, to maintain a degree of financial independence and control over his own life. Kas lived from 1894 to 1985, and Van Onselen spent several years in the early 1980s interviewing him and the rest of the Maine family, as well as former landlords and neighbours, to put the book together – it comes in at 600+ pages, despite the fact that the national archives contain only a single reference to the man. Van Onselen’s goal was to tell a story of persistence and resourcefulness that the official record refused to acknowledge: “It seems to me,” he quotes from Tacitus in the preface, “that a historian’s foremost duty is to ensure that merit is recorded, and to confront evil deeds and words with the fear of posterity’s denunciations.” Oh hells yeah. Testify.

We Are Fighting the World, by Gary Kynoch

Personal bias declared: Gary was my South African history professor for the last two years of undergrad, and I think he is a living legend. But I actually read his book for the first time as an assignment when I was going to grad school in the UK, so it’s obviously not just me who thinks he’s worth reading. We Are Fighting The World is about the Marashea, or the ‘Russians’, a Basotho gang that thrived in the 1950s in the townships of Johannesburg and in the mines on the Rand. It deals with ethnic identity and how it fit into notions of a broader struggle between Africans and whites, the influences and mentality behind organized crime, and the question of political or nationalistic motives in criminal activity. Were these guys helping the struggle? Harming the struggle? Both? Were they a sort of township version of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, or a parasite on an already suffering black populace? It’s fascinating stuff. Gary is pretty much (along with Clive Glaser) the world’s leading expert on organized crime and vigilantism in South Africa. Every summer he goes to Soweto and basically walks around asking guys if they are or have been involved in gang activity, and if they’d like to tell him about it. Yeah, like I said – living legend.

The Novelists:

A ton of great literature has come out of the apartheid years and after. I focus here on three white novelists, all of whom grapple with the issues of guilt and identity that come from living on the right end of a brutal system, designed for the express purpose of improving the authors’ (and other whites’) lives.

J.M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize for his 1999 novel, Disgrace, about a university professor struggling to adapt to the new South Africa. He also won the 1983 Booker for The Life and Times of Michael K, and in 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Other novels include Waiting for the Barbarians and The Age of Iron.

Nadine Gordimer is another Nobel Prize winner (1991) who focuses on life in the peak apartheid years, the 1960s and 1970s. Try Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, or A World of Strangers. She typically emphasizes the consequences of unlikely friendships or encounters, and the way people on the ground are forced to assimilate or adapt to the political and public events of the time.

Alan Paton is the grand old man of troubled white South African novelists. His 1948 novel, Cry the Beloved Country, is credited with bringing some of the earliest international attention to the brutalities and inequities of the apartheid system. Also try Too Late the Phalarope or Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful. (Bonus points for best titles!)

And finally, The Philosopher:

I Write What I Like, by Steve Biko

Steve Biko was the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, a group that rose to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s before being violently put down. Biko’s thesis was essentially that no attack on the apartheid system could be successful until the dictates of the system had been overthrown, internally, by the Africans at which they were aimed. South Africa’s blacks, Biko argued, had in some ways begun to believe, or fear, that they really were inferior and deserved their status; he wrote prolifically to combat this idea, as well as organizing community projects aimed at increasing self-sufficiency, and I Write What I Like is a collection of his essays. Try “Fragmentation of the Black Resistance”, “The Definition of Black Consciousness’, or “Fear – an Important Determinant in South African Politics” for a taste of his ideas. Biko was in his lifetime, and continues to be, accused of reverse racism for his rejection of assistance from white liberals in South Africa. But a careful reading of “Black Souls in White Skins?” will, I hope, make clear that he was really saying there could be no true partnership between blacks and whites, despite the best intentions, in such a deeply unequal society.

Steve Biko was beaten to death in detention on September 12, 1977 – essentially for propagating a message about self-esteem and self-worth.