Raymond Suttner

Jacana Media is proud to make this important book available again, now with a completely new introduction. First published by Oceanbooks, New York and Melbourne and University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg in 2001, the book was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award in 2002. In the public imagination the struggle that saw the end of apartheid and the inauguration of a democratic South Africa is seen as one waged by black people who were often imprisoned or killed for their efforts. Raymond Suttner, an academic, is one of a small group of white South Africans who was imprisoned for his efforts to overthrow the apartheid regime.

South Africa's hard-won democracy was the main victim of the chaos in parliament during President Jacob Zuma's State of the Nation Address. In Recovering Democracy in South Africa, Raymond Suttner brings together the best of his recent thinking; he offers a fresh look at the wide range of contentious issues that currently preoccupy South Africans, from the threat to constitutionalism to problems with leadership and questions of ethics. The book is as much an in-depth engagement with our difficult present as it is a damning account of the politics of the Zuma era.

50 Years of the Freedom Charter is a new edition of a classic work, banned for possession under the apartheid government. The main body of the text, prepared initially in 1986, has been left unaltered, but the authors have added a substantial new introduction and a bibliography of some of the literature that was not then available within the country or emerged after publication of the book. This book offers an elaborately illustrated and fascinating account of the making of the historic Freedom Charter in South Africa in 1955. The material is presented largely through the words of actual participants, as recorded in interviews with the authors. It includes a significant section on the contemporary relevance of the Freedom Charter today.