MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Tested by legacies of colonialism and apartheid
STEVE ANDREW recommends a comprehensive and revealing narrative about the most significant communist party in Africa
CPSA leadership meets in Cape Town in 1930. (L to R) bottom row: Bill Andrews, WH Harrison, Sidney Bunting. Johnny Gomas holds Lenin portrait. Second row: Gana Makabeni (above Harrison), Rebecca Bunting (third row fourth from right), Douglas Wolton (top row fourth from right)
[CPSA]
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
Red Road to Freedom: A history of the South African Communist Party 1921-2021
by Tom Lodge
James Currey £70
BUILDING on earlier seminal texts such as RE Simons’s voluminous Class and Colour in South Africa and Michael Harmel’s more celebratory account Fifty Fighting Years, Tom Lodge’s latest work is a monumental, fascinating and painstakingly researched book that provides by far the most up-to-date and comprehensive history of the South African Communist Party.
Unlike liberal and Trotskyist commentators, Lodge also emerges as a critical but undoubtedly sympathetic observer who skilfully captures a dramatic and compelling story that has film-like qualities.
Lodge kicks off his book by demonstrating how the organised left in South Africa can effectively date its history back to the 1890s, a period in which a myriad of socialist, anarchist and syndicalist organisations began to be formed.
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