The South African past is rich with stories of courage, initiative and endeavour which have never become history because they are the stories of those excluded from power. This book seeks to transform some of these stories into history: in this case into the history of cricket in Natal, hitherto dominated by the official and the privileged.

"Somehow, Shakespeare always seems to have something to say to us." Nelson Mandela
The prison authorities on apartheid South Africa's Robben Island strictly censored the reading materials inmates received from the outside world. Yet, the prisoners cleverly managed to smuggle political literature disguised as religious texts, into their communal cells. The works of Shakespeare resonated deepest amongst the inmates for their anti-colonial and anti-apartheid inspirations, as much as for the power and beauty of their words. Through the memories and biographical accounts written by former...

In 1960, apartheid's planners created the 'Indian' township of Chatsworth, evicting people from established neighbourhoods around Durban and forcibly settling them into the grid of a modern racial ghetto. Making home within this architecture of exclusion, along streets without names, tens of thousands of new residents began building new lives and new communities, developing an urban space with a unique cultural vibrancy born of creativity and economic struggle. With the dismantling of group areas legislation from 1990, and within South Africa's continually changing political landscape,...

In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. "India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma," goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime.

The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi's first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal--a man who actually supported the British...