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8 top holiday reads

Tired of trying to keep up with the ongoing political shenanigans?

This holiday reading list should keep you distracted well into the new year.

The Fall of the ANC Continues

By Prince Mashele & Mzukisi Qobo


So for your reading pleasure, it might be worth contextualising what’s going down at Nasrec with a sally through the updated version of The Fall of the ANC by political scientist Prince Mashele and Mzukisi Qobo, columnist and academic at the University of Johannesburg.

Their central thesis is consistent with the book’s 2014 debut that the ANC will be unable to implement renewal and self-help as many of its representatives feel it can.

Given the likelihood of some significant political shrapnel following the elective conference, and the various schisms already taking place within the ruling party, this read seems well-timed.

The President’s Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and Out of Prison

By Jacques Pauw


South African publishing sensation The President’s Keepers by veteran investigative journalist Jacques Pauw is hard to omit from any reading list this year.

So popular it exhausted its initial print run, this deep dive into the forces that keep President Jacob Zuma in power suggests our leader is a much more compromised figure than we ever imagined.

Pauw links the lies and deceit of modern South African politics with a malign, subterranean mafia state which has tentacles that extend from the provinces to distant Russia.


A Brief History of Seven Killings

By Marlon James


The historical drama has been given fresh impetus by novels such as Hilary Mantell’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, the first two instalments of a trilogy that tracks the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s trusted and ultimately doomed advisor.

For a different take – completely different – on the genre, try Marlon James’ Brief History of Seven Killings, which looks at the events that led to and followed the attempted assassination of reggae star Bob Marley in 1976.

What’s startling about this 2014 masterpiece is the sheer ambition of its telling – much of it narrated in Jamaican Patois or Creole, as the linguists term it – which views the events of the time through the eyes of ghosts, witnesses, killers, drug dealers and beauty queens.

An incredible, dizzying read.


Slade House

By David Mitchell


British novelist David Mitchell is at his creepiest, compelling best in this novella – perfect for a lazy two-day read.

Since bursting to prominence with his genre-less Ghostwritten, Mitchell has time and again demonstrated an extraordinary gift for voice, narrative and an ability to slip between time and place without ever seen to be stretching for effect.

The story starts in 1979 and ends around Halloween in 2015 as every nine years, on the last Saturday of October, a “guest” is summoned to Slade House.

The whys and wherefores are duly explained. It’s very creepy. 


The Square and the Tower: History’s Hidden Networks

By Niall Ferguson


As perhaps an objective, interesting gloss of what’s going on in world politics – but told through this survey sweep of history – look no further than famed economic historian Niall Ferguson.

His latest work, The Square and the Tower, looks at the power of network, association and fellowship in order to explain how history is shaped and formed.

Starting with the illustrative notion of the structure of many old Italian towns, Ferguson explains how the large square where the people gather and a tower from which the elite rule is the starting format through which ideas are shaped. 


Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of the Marikana Massacre

By Greg Marinovich


Respected photojournalist Greg Marinovich picks through the countless articles, accounts and the commission of inquiry to redescribe the events of August 2012, which included the public gunning down of 34 miners engaged in protest activity at Lonmin’s Marikana mine.

The “Small Koppie” of the title is a collection of boulders 300m from Wonderkop Hill at Lonmin’s premises where other victims were found to have been murdered, shot dead at close range.

The lack of accountability has been notable with the South African Police Service, Lonmin and government reluctant to assume responsibility for the biggest killing in SA since the events of Sharpeville in 1960, in which police killed 69 people.


The Line of Beauty

By Allan Hollinghurst


For a take on a different type of political story, The Line of Beauty describes the events during the latter end of the Thatcher years.

Narrated through the eyes of Nick, recently sent up from Cambridge University, idealistic, impressionable and gay, Hollinghurst’s novel brings into life the decadence of the Eighties, the edges of which started to fray as the HIV/Aids epidemic took hold.

The monied class is superbly lampooned; political importance expertly miniaturised à la Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputian universe.

Hollinghurst has sometimes been criticised for agitprop gay literature, but this is just a beautifully and quite often sympathetically rendered piece of work. 


Hasta La Gupta Baby

By Zapiro


Sometimes you just want your excoriation neat.

Enter, please, the acerbic nib of cartoonist and satirist Zapiro, whose Hasta La Gupta Baby expresses for our visual delight all of the scant regard we have for the criminal cabal “running” our country into the ground.

And there has been plenty of fodder for Zapiro this year, including the tweeting out of Helen Zille, the expulsion from Cabinet of Pravin Gordhan, and the terrifying, exhilarating public shaming of Bell Pottinger, which was speared by the forces of public scrutiny it has so controversially marshalled for its own benefit down the years.

If you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, why not choose to laugh. 

This is an edited extract of an article that originally appeared in the 14 December - 17 January edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.

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