BrightLights@BookBuddy

On the morning of Saturday, 3 November, 2018, we held the book launch for Oiva Angula's  SWAPO Captive at a Cuban-owned restaurant in Eros, a leafy suburb in the capital city of Windhoek. The previous two weeks had been a flurry of activity; organising, planning, calling and incessant to and fro mailing. Invitations to the launch were sent out via e-mail, posted on Facebook and Twitter. The posters were printed, the venue secured, the details fussed over and obsessed about until late at night. Determining what time of day the launch would take place was extremely important; Windhoek gets uncomfortably hot very quickly early in the morning during the summer months with a heavy heat after that lasts long into the night.  During the week before the launch, readers would come into our little bookshop, buy Oiva Angula's book and be simultaneously invited to attend the launch. Some honestly admitted that they were too scared to attend. Others shook their heads in silence and de...

''It's such a horrible and shameful story, not least his factual indictment (as a Christian) of the saga of the entire range of Christian churches internationally which shut eyes and ears to the truth rather than be accused of being racist, reactionary, etc. And no TRC, no official recognition in Namibia for the past thirty years. It's taken a generation for this book to be written and published (in South Africa), which speaks for itself.''  - Paul Trewhela , author of  Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (201 0) Penguin Random House and Book Buddy Namibia invite you to the official book launch and a discussion of Oiva Angula's memoir, SWAPO Captive: A Comrade's Experience of Betrayal and Torture .  Namibian author Oiva Angula will be in conversation with senior research associate and journalist, Frederico Links.  Book launch details   Date: Saturday, 3 November, 2018 Time: 09:30 - 11:30 Venue: El Barrio Tap...

Maria Elizabeth Mouton, alombekend as ''Moekie'', is 'n boorling van Rehoboth in sentraal Namibië, en het 'n groot liefde vir lees, en later ook skryf, vanaf kindsbeen. Sy het reeds op laerskool daarna gehunker om 'n Afrikaanse skryfster te word veral nadat sy op 'n dag daarvan te hore gekom het dat haar opstelle vir ouer kinders in ander klasse voorgelees word. 'n Handjievol jare l ater, toe 'n tiener, het sy liewer verkies om tuis te bly en 'n boek te lees as om met vriende uit te gaan.  Mettertyd het Moekie voor die kansel gestaan en ook moeder geword. Vir jare daarna het sy administratiewe poste by verskeie maatskappye beklee in Windhoek en ongeveer dertien (13) jaar gelede ingeskryf om Pastorale Studies te studeer by Bybelskool. Sy gradueer sewe (7) jaar later as 'n gekwalifiseerde pastoor, en bedien daarna met haar man die Woord tot en met hul aftrede en verhuising na Swakopmund.   As 'n lewenslange leser van A...

'I guess the best place to start a story is at the beginning. My name is Lindiwe Hani. I was born on 27 December 1980 to Limpho and Martin Thembisile Hani. My father was also known as Chris. My parents named me Lindiwe, which in isiXhosa means ''the daughter we have waited for''. In that year, a leap year, the world's population sat at 4 434 682 000, the Voyager 1 space probe confirmed the existence of a moon of Saturn that was to be named Janus (or Janusz) - how's that for prophetic - and Robert Mugabe was elected president of Zimbabwe.'  It took me a day and some to get over reading Lindiwe Hani's autobiography, Being Chris Hani's Daughter , because I desperately wanted to hang on to the fuzzy feeling of being a confidant to its brave author that developed as I read the book. This is precisely why some biographies are pure magic. They take the reader behind the scenes of major socio-political events and in the process, create a sense of t...

' 'And on this Christian holiday, Good Friday, the whole of South Africa became aware of the existence of Griekwastad. It all started when a fifteen-year-old boy named Don Steenkamp sped into town in his father's white Isuzu double-cab and screeched to a halt in front of the town's almost deserted police station. It was shortly before 19h00 when Don jumped out of the vehicle, dressed in black rugby shorts and a T-shirt, and ran into the station's charge office covered in blood...'' As a creole of African and European descent myself, Griekwastad ('Griquatown' in English) is a place of immense historical significance. Although South African history books still refer to them as 'bastards' (persons of multicultural heritage), the Griquas had been among the first of many groups of creole peoples to abandon European Dutch society at the Cape of Good Hope and, under the leadership of captains, migrated further inland to free themselves of coloni...

Zulu-speaking people ( Amazulu ) belong to one of the largest cultural and linguistic groups in southern Africa. There are an estimated 12,5 million Zulu-speakers currently thriving in South Africa, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Malawi, Botswana and Mocambique with the largest concentration of people in South Africa (approximately 10,5 million). The word iZulu means 'heaven' and the word zulu means 'rain', if translated into English (Amazulu means 'rain people'). The  Amazulu is not a homogenous group of people and consists of different clans who had settled in the mountainous and hilly rural areas of northern KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. This cultural and linguistic group is patrilineal and had migrated in a southerly direction along the eastern coast of Africa from the 9th century onward. According to notable archaeological finds, they initially came from an area in modern Cameroon. The largest of these clans was established by Zulu kaMalandela around 170...

The oldest human genome outside Africa can be found in the Aborigines of Australia. Scholars estimate that the ancestors of modern Aborigines migrated from Africa more than 70 000 years ago after the earliest human remains discovered in Australia were dated and found to be approximately 50 000 years old. Aboriginal tribes in Australia, similar to African nations, are very different from each other in terms of genetics, customs, cultures and languages. These tribes had evolved into separate and distinct social groups (or, nations to be precise) in isolation for thousands of years so that by the time contact was first made with Europeans, 250 distinct languages were spoken on the Australian continent. European settlement caused a collapse in Aboriginal population sizes. Three years after the arrival of Europeans on the continent, a smallpox epidemic decimated healthy Aboriginal populations causing massive depopulation. The systematic massacre and genocide of Aborigines during colonia...

The Mayan civilisation developed in central America around 2000 BC and collapsed around 1000 AD. Mayan territory stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to modern Honduras and El Salvador. It was a remarkable civilisation, socially sophisticated, ruled by dynasties, organised around religion with an extensive hierarchy of social stratification, in the form of classes. By all accounts, Mayan civilisation could hardly be described as peaceful and was characterised by political upheaval and, ironically, coup d'etats , still very much a feature of politics in modern South America. Mayan civilisation is chronologically divided into the following historical periods: archaic, pre-classic, classic and terminal classic. During the classic period of development, the Maya were concentrated in cities, similar to the modern metropolis. These were also the seats of their rulers. However, for reasons unknown, it was during the terminal classic period that Mayan civilisation deteriorated and disintegr...

Pre-colonial African stories are most interesting in that they were neither specifically designed for children nor did they exclude children as an audience. They were meant for everyone. It used to be that the elders in villages used stories (metaphor) as vehicles to convey information to other (adult) villagers, which, naturally, included children. I also have to mention here that many pre-colonial cultures considered children the incarnations of ancestors, sometimes spirits, and people who had passed away.   Pre-colonial stories, the oldest on the continent, had strong animal motifs featuring insects, reptiles, predators, elephant, rhino, buffalo with the abilities to speak human languages. The speaking-animal stories are ancient and originated in ancient African spiritual folklore when it was commonly believed that animals, forests, rivers, mountains had 'spirits', in other words, souls. In accordance with ancient folklore the spirits were generally peaceful but were r...