Publications
A Long Walk to Purgatory: The Tales of Dante & Mashudu
Civic Struggles for a New South Africa Township Politics
Mzwanele Mayekiso Foreword by Mel King
Chariklia Martalas
UJ Press is proud to announce its two latest publications
Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa by Mzwanele Mayekiso. An insider’s account of an extraordinary period of national political transition, which is also a primer on a new radical philosophy, the street-smart Marxism that developed in South Africa’s sprawling townships between 1985 and 1995 and rendered them ungovernable for the apartheid state. Mzwanele Mayekiso, a young leader of the “civics” – as South Africa’s popular community organisations
are called – spent almost three years in prison as a result of the civics’ militant organising. Here, he interlaces his personal story with caustic assessments of apartheid’s hand-picked township leaders, with rebuttals of armchair academics, and with impassioned but self- critical analyses of the civics’ struggles and tactics. A Long Walk to Purgatory: The Tales of Dante and Mashudu , a drama text by Chariklia Martalas places Dante in the South African context. It works with the idea that dead poets must guide living poets
through the afterlife on a journey of poetic reckoning. It is now Dante’s turn to guide a poet, as he was once guided by Virgil. Dante comes to meet Mashudu, a South African poet in her Dark Wood. He comes to take her through Inferno and Purgatory where she meets South African characters along the way, including Jan Van Riebeeck and John Dube. Driving the play is the notion that poets need to know where they come from in order to play their role as aids to how a nation understands itself.
Both these titles are available from UJ Press in print and electronic format. Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa (https://doi.org/10.36615/9781776424283) A Long Walk to Purgatory: The Tales of Dante and Mashudu (https://doi.org/10.36615/9781776425686)
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