Truth Lies And Alibis

"This is a story of Winnie Mandela. On New Year's Eve in 1988, 14-year-old Stompie Seipei Moeketsi was beaten to within an inch of his life. He was stabbed and dumped in the veld on the outskirts of Soweto, and when he was identified six weeks later the trail led to Winnie Mandela and the feared Mandela United Football Club. With the world's eyes turned to South Africa and its hard-won transition story, an uncomfortable story of Winnie Mandela emerged as her trial, appeal and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission became entangled in a web of secrecy and lies, racial tension and political expediency. Was she above the law? How did Nelson Mandela try to protect her? What does it mean for politicians' respect for the rule of law in the democratic era? This exploration of the Mandela United Football Club's reign of terror throws up questions about the nature of justice and accountability - and how these differ for the 'important' and 'unimportant' people of this world."--

Internationally acclaimed biographies are mostly written by Anglophone biographers. How does biography function as a public genre in the rest of the world? Different Lives offers a global perspective on the biographical tradition by seventeen scholars of fifteen different countries.

The dangers of political violence and the possibilities of non-violence were the central themes of three lives which changed the twentieth century—Leo Tolstoy, writer and aristocrat who turned against his class, Mohandas Gandhi who corresponded with Tolstoy and considered him the most important person of the time, and Nelson Mandela, prisoner and statesman, who read War and Peace on Robben Island and who, despite having led a campaign of sabotage, saw himself as a successor to Gandhi. Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela tried to create transformed societies to replace the dying forms of colony and empire. They found the inequalities of Russia, India, and South Africa intolerable yet they questioned the wisdom of seizing the power of the state, creating new kinds of political organisation and imagination to replace the old promises of revolution. Their views, along with their ways of leading others, are closely connected, from their insistence on working with their own hands and reforming their individual selves to their acceptance of death. On three continents, in a century of mass mobilization and conflict, they promoted strains of nationalism devoid of antagonism, prepared to take part in a general peace. Looking at Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela in sequence, taking into account their letters and conversations as well as the institutions they created or subverted, placing at the centre their treatment of the primal fantasy of political violence, this volume reveals a vital radical tradition which stands outside the conventional categories of twentieth-century history and politics.

Crooked Keys: Truths, Lies and Alibis is a continuation of Hidden Compass: Hunting the Shadows Beneath and Eclectic Journey: Excerpts and Epitaph. These poems speak of life stages and interruptions, ciphers, and oftentimes cryptic perceptions which serve as a collection of the authors insights, reflections and experiences.

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE O’Connor, a vivacious, free-spirited young journalist known for her penetrating celebrity interviews, is bent on unearthing secrets long ago buried by the handsome showbiz team of singer Vince Collins and comic Lanny Morris. These two highly desirable men, once inseparable (and insatiable, where women were concerned), were driven apart by a bizarre and unexplained death in which one of them may have played the part of murderer. As the tart-tongued, eye-catching O’Connor ventures deeper into this unsolved mystery, she finds herself compromisingly coiled around both men, knowing more about them than they realize and less than she might like, but increasingly fearful that she now knows far too much.