In 2005, William Kentridge’s production of The Magic Flute premiered at La Monnaie in Brussels. It went on to venues in France, Italy, Israel and the United States to critical acclaim. In September 2007 it will open in Cape Town and Johannesburg. These performances in South Africa will be the culmination of a remarkable artistic journey that included the creation of the opera, an outpouring of drawings and prints on themes related to the production, and the completion of a seminal project, commissioned by Deutsche Guggenheim, called Black Box, that was unveiled in Berlin in 2006 before moving to the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

William Kentridge Flute traces the process of Kentridge’s creation of The Magic Flute, his astounding collaborations that produced Black Box, and the host of other works that flowed out of preparations for these two important productions. The book, edited by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, contains an interview with the artist, essays by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Stéphane Roussel and Kate McCrickard, gorgeous full-colour photographs of the productions, pages from Kentridge’s preparatory notebooks, and images of the many prints and drawings executed while Kentridge was working on the opera and Black Box.

Written by graphic designer Michael MacGarry, and featuring the work of leading design professionals, and targeted at designers, A Primer in South African Graphic Design features design fundamentals and principles; practical advice and guidance; designing for and within the local context; example of work by designers; Q & A with experienced local design professionals; and a glossary of highly-relevant resources and information.

The book provides an intelligent balance of educational material relevant to design students and practical content to help young professionals embark on their careers, whilst providing sufficiently advanced material and content to appeal to mid-level and experienced designers and allied industry practitioners alike.

SKILL SET: Knowledge Resource and Educational Series is a new multi-volume series for specialised design disciplines. Using a practicable, outcomes-based approach, Skill Set will provide instruction in various fields of design, including graphic design, stage design, fashion design and industrial design - serving as a resource for both amateurs and professionals alike. Though neither a textbook nor a design manual, the book will help develop specific skills, intelligent design solutions, and effective project outcomes. It will be a resource on the fundamental principles of graphic design, a source of inspirations and ideas, a business tool for designers, and a much-needed critical showcase of local graphic design.

The Skill Set series will feature content relevant to both a local and international context, as well as commentary and work by leading local design professionals. The series is aimed at a broad audience that includes learners at secondary schools and tertiary institutions, as well as emerging and experienced professionals.

This first title will be officially launched at the Design Indaba 2009.

Author Michael MacGarry is a graphic designer, writer and artist based in Johannesburg. He began his design career in Dublin and London before returning to South Africa to work with The Trinity Session as designer, copywriter, and researcher. He is currently Senior Designer at Fever Identity Design. MacGarry has an MFA from the University of the Witwatersrand, and is also a visual artist who has exhibited locally and internationally. He is owner of www.alltheorynopractice.com and is a founder member of art-collective AVANT CAR GUARD. As a writer, MacGarry has been published in several local magazines, and recently co-published, along with Lloyd Gedye, a limited-edition magazine titled The Pavement Special.

OTHER DESIGN BOOKS AVAILABLE FROM OUR BOOKSTORES

Design Books distributed by David Krut Publishing

Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, New York
Design for the Other 90%
Piranesi as Designer
Design Life Now

TATE Publications, London
Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From Bauhaus to the New World
Pop Art
Julian Opie
Internet Art
The Stage of Drawing

Further Titles available from our Bookstores

10 x SA Fashion Week
An A – Z of Type Designers
Craft Art in South Africa
Design Like You Give a Damn
Design Thinking
Design, Writing, Research
The Designer’s Desktop Manual
Inspiring Designers: A Sourcebook
Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design
Modern Architecture and Design
Notes on Book Design
Ogilvy on Advertising
Points for Departure
Thinking with Type
Understanding Design

Universal Principles of Design
The Visual Dictionary of Fashion Design
Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone Wire Basket

REVIEWS OF SKILL SET 1: Graphic Design

Mail and Guardian

Designing Ways Magazine

Rica Hodgson was banned, detained, house arrested and exiled by the apartheid government. After 27 years in exile she returned to South Africa to become Walter Sisulu's secretary and to assist Nelson Mandela with projects close to his heart. In Foot Soldier for Freedom Rica traces her evolution from relative white privilege as a child of emigrant Jews to her entry into the struggle at the age of 23 when she joined the army to confront the global threat of fascism. She later became a member of the Springbok Legion, the Communist Party and the African National Congress, working full time for the movement. In Britain she worked with Canon Collins in the Defence and Aid Fund, helping to establish clandestine channels of funding for the defence of political prisoners and the support of their families. Rica's story is interwoven with the ups and downs of the South African struggle, her love affair and marriage to Jack Hodgson, her time in prison and the many wonderful people who shaped her life -- friends such as Ruth First and Hilda Bernstein, and leaders of the struggle, including Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Bram Fischer.
 

Jay Naidoo was a tireless anti-apartheid campaigner in the 1980s, serving as the first General Secretary of Coastu, South Africa's largest union federation and the backbone of the internal mass struggles against apartheid. In 1993, he stepped down to lead twenty leaders from Cosatu into parliament on an ANC ticket, and was asked by Nelson Mandela to work as the Minister responsible for the Reconstruction and Development Programme, and then as the Minister of Communications. In 1999 Jay moved away from politics and entered the world of business, setting up the J&J Group, an investment and management company. He remained engaged in the field of development and was appointed as the Chairman of the Development Bank of Southern Africa. In 2003 he became the Chairman of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, launched to fight the malnutrition facing 2 billion people around the world. Fighting for Justice is a gripping account of Jay's life, from his roots in a distant village in India to his present fierce engagement with global issues of social justice. It tells the story of a man from a working-class family living with the cruel realities of apartheid, his life-changing encounter with Steve Biko and his involvement in student, community and national politics. It is also a searingly honest recount of the painful personal choices Jay has had to make, and includes his intercontinental love affair with the French Canadian journalist and writer Lucie Page. Fighting for Justice weaves an enthralling tale of intrigue, pain and triumph as the issues of race, language and culture encounter the uncompromising terrain of political and social activism.
 

Agnes, the Van Wyks’ Zulu housekeeper, had a special friendship with young Chris in the late sixties to early seventies. He would defend her whenever she came to work with a hangover on a Monday morning and made a mess of the cleaning. In turn, Agnes never told on Chris when he played truant from school.

As the years passed, the two grew closer, swopping stories about coloureds and Zulus, life in Riverlea and Soweto, pass laws, politics and falling in love. She taught him to count in Zulu and he promised to teach her to read in English.

Whenever the clock ran against her, Agnes would stop almost in mid-sentence, grab a broom or cloth, and declare: ‘I have to rush. I have eggs to lay, chickens to hatch.’

What an odd, ungrammatical thing to say, Chris often mused. But many years later, he played a CD by Louis Jordan, a 1940s American jazz singer, and it all became clear.

Eggs to lay, chickens to hatch is Chris van Wyk’s second childhood memoir about growing up in Riverlea and his colourful interactions with the men and women who lived the African proverb that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. But mostly it is the story of a wonderful friendship between a young coloured boy and a Zulu woman.
 

Chris Hani's assassination in 1993 gave rise to one of South Africa's great imponderables: if he had survived, what impact would he have had on politics and government in South Africa? More pointedly, could this charismatic leader have risen to become president of the country? Hani was a hero of South Africa's liberation, a communist party leader and Umkhonto we Sizwe chief of staff who was both intellectual and fighter, a man who could inspire an army but carried a book of poetry in his backpack. Hani led MK into its earliest battles, and carved a formidable reputation as a thinker, debater and peacemaker. Hani: A Life Too Short tells the story of Hani’s life, from his childhood in rural Transkei and education at Fort Hare University to the controversial Memorandum of 1969, the crisis in the ANC camps in Angola in the 1980s and the heady dawn of freedom.
 

Capitalist Nigger excels as an explosive and jarring indictment of the Black Race. The title asserts that the Negroid race, as naturally endowed as any other, is culpably a non-productive race. The Black Race is a consumer race and depends on other communities for its culture, its language, its feeding, and its clothing. Despite enormous natural resources, Blacks are economic slaves because they lack the 'devil-may-care' attitude and the 'killer-instinct' of the Caucasian, as well as the spider web economic mentality of the Asian. Capitalist Nigger contends that only as 'Economic Warriors', employing the 'Spider Web Economic Doctrine', can the Black Race escape from their victim mentality.
 

The time has come to delve into the story of South Africa’s turbulent history – a story of exploration and conquest, rampant growth and war, oppression and ultimately, liberation.

This selection of writings, from the most illuminating, entertaining and significant works written about the country and its diverse people, covers almost five centuries – from the earliest encounters between colonists and the original inhabitants to the discovery of unimaginable wealth on the diamond and gold fields, from the Boer War and its bitter legacy to the greater tragedy of apartheid and its eventual demise.

South Africa’s rich history – a story of exploration and conquest, of racial oppression and, ultimately, liberation – deserves to be told in the raw. Here, then, are the words not so much of historians, biographers and journalists but of settlers, explorers, hunters, travellers, missionaries, soldiers and politicians as well as of novelists, playwrights and poets.

The writers are settlers, explorers, administrators, missionaries, hunters, travellers, novelists, playwrights, poets and politicians. They include Jan van Riebeeck, the first Dutch governor of the Cape, whose journal is the most detailed account in history of a colony's founding; Mazisi Kunene, the Xhosa poet, who chronicled the rise of Shaka, the Zulu empire builder, in epic verse; W C Scully, who took part in the diamond rush at Kimberley that set South Africa on the path to unimaginable wealth; Jan Smuts, the Boer War general who, with Cecil Rhodes, the arch Imperialist, was one of the architects of apartheid; and Nelson Mandela, apartheid's most famous victim, who became its nemesis. The novelists include two Nobel prizewinners, Nadine Gordimer and John Maxwell Coetzee.

All have been eye-witnesses to South Africa's long journey from subjugation to freedom.

Botsotso was founded in South Africa in 1994, following the end of Apartheid, by the Botsotso Jesters, a poetry performance group. Its first printed manifestation was as an insert in the New Nation a now defunct weekly newspaper’s demise, Botsotso became a magazine in its own right and a publishing house.
This anthology of 12 poets gives a platform outside South Africa for the first time for this adventurous, multi-cultural inter-disciplinary literary and art project. Co-editor and Botsotso founder Allan Kolski Horwitz contributes an introductory essay providing the political and social context.
 

SAARTJIE BAARTMAN was twenty-one years old when she was taken from her native South Africa and shipped to London. Within weeks she had made the headlines and become the talk of the social season of 1810, hailed as The Hottentont Venus for her exquisite physique (not least her shapely  and irresistible bottom) and sugestive semi-nude dance. As her fame spread to Paris, Saartjie became a lighting rod for late Georgian and Napoleonic  attitudes toward sex and race, exploitation and colonisation prurience and science.

  But celebrity brought unexpected consequences. Abolitionists initiated a High Court lawsuit to win Saartjie's freedom that electrified the English public. In Paris, a team of scientist subjected her to a humiliating ordeal as they probed the mystery of her sexual allure. Stared at, stripped, pinched, painted, worshipped and ridiculed, Saartjie came to symbolise the erotic obsession at the heart of colonialism. But behind the costumes, caricatures and the glare of publicity, this young Khoisan woman  was a real person beginning to understand the true nature of her fate. Nearly two centuries  after her death, Saatjie made headlines once again as Nelson Mandela launched an international campaign to have her remains returned to the land of her birth.

In this scintillating, vividly written and meticulously researched book, published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain  and its dominions, the full arc of Saartjie's extraordinary life and death is traced for the first time-a story that still resonates today.