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In a committed anti-apartheid publisher like Ravan Press in the 1970s and 1980s, the selection of authors was usually based on political or ideological grounds as well as the quality of their writing. As a result, Ravan was harassed and subjected to censorship. But to what extent did Ravan's social position and capital inform the author-publisher relationship? One relatively well-known case is that of Miriam Tlali, described as 'the first black woman to publish a novel in South Africa'. Tlali's account of her relationship with Ravan has been described in very negative terms. However, her account changed over time and is not supported by other evidence. Based on archival sources and interviews, this article will explore the relationship between Tlali and Ravan Press, raising questions of the politics and power dynamics of literary publishing in the apartheid period. The article also raises questions about the methods used to write literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this essay is taken from the 1975 Penguin African Library revised edition of Antony Martin's 'Minding Their Own Business: Zambia's Struggle against Western Control'. This article exploits archival evidence to highlight Penguin's distinctive attitudes to and practices within the southern African market, particularly, but not exclusively, the major market of South Africa. The Penguin African Library itself contained not only many volumes on South Africa, but also pioneering works on Portuguese decolonisation, the Rhodesian question, and on South-West Africa. This article adopts the framework of a three-phase development in the motivation behind publishing for Africa: tutelage, radicalism and marketisation. The first of these phases is represented by the Penguin (Pelican) West African (later simply African) Series; while the later Penguin African Library illustrates the radicalism of what was then the editorial standpoint. These African Library mass-market paperbacks had a double intent: to inform western readers about a region which, from the early 1960s, dominated international headlines, and to reflect back to increasing numbers of self-aware and educated Africans aspects of the region hidden from them or about which they wished to know more. The degree of opposition to and compromise with colonial and apartheid regimes forms the subject of discussion, as do the reactions in the UK to continuing operations in the region, particularly after the expulsion of South Africa from the Commonwealth in 1961, the adoption of UN Resolution 1761 in 1962, and the growth of the Anti-Apartheid Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Penguin faced not just the commercial challenge of possibly losing an important export market but also the ethical dilemma posed by a belief in the transformational power of knowledge through the availability of good books at reasonable prices. The article concludes with a discussion of the resolution of that challenge and dilemma subsequent to the takeover of Penguin by Longmans in 1970, and the onset of the final phase of marketisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1780s, French merchants developed a systemic trade in slaves to and around the Cape of Good Hope. But a decade later the trade passed into the hands of a cosmopolitan group of merchants at Mozambique. These men developed various strategies as a way of raising the funds needed to acquire, outfit and insure slave ships. They particularly built up trade links with agents and partners in several ports of the western Indian Ocean and the south Atlantic. This article concentrates on the organisation and operation of the slave trade at Mozambique Island in the decade around 1800. It is particularly concerned to examine the role in this trade on the part of merchants at the Cape, who serviced slave ships and bought their human merchandise, and who mounted their own expeditions in search of slaves. It ends by suggesting ways in which new directions in the trade, following its piecemeal abolition, and the growing dominance of Brazil, contributed to long-term developments in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes two features without which social science research work in the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA – Centre for African Studies) at Eduardo Mondlane University during the period 1976–86 cannot be fully grasped. First, the conflicting, ambiguous and productive interactions between the Mozambican state's attempts to construct socialism, and the strategies of the South African ‘empire’ in trying to build a hegemonic bloc in the region, particularly in its radical form of maintaining an economic and military destabilisation policy in Mozambique. Second, the conflicting, ambiguous and productive interactions between the CEA the Mozambican state, and among CEA researchers, over their research interests, research priorities and primary political loyalties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1969, Portugal and South Africa signed an agreement that enabled the apartheid regime effectively to extend its tentacles of empire over the proposed dam at Cahora Bassa. Located in the heart of central Mozambique, far from the South African frontier, the dam became a security project masked as a development initiative. Cahora Bassa, including the massive lake behind the dam, rather than becoming the multi-purpose dam originally envisaged by Portuguese planners, was transformed into a strategic security project designed to blunt the advance into southern Mozambique of the liberation movement the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) and, by extension, its ally the African National Congress (ANC). In this way, the colonial regime and its apartheid ally hoped to prevent attacks against Mozambique's major colonial urban areas of Beira and Lourenço Marques. From Pretoria's perspective, it was preferable to fight the ANC in central Mozambique rather than along the Limpopo river – southern Mozambique's frontier with South Africa. The hydro-electric project at Cahora Bassa also ensured South Africa's energy security. The 1969 agreement guaranteed that 82 per cent of the electricity generated there would be exported to South Africa at well below the world price. This article examines the vital role played by South African interests in financing, constructing, and defending the dam site at Songo, which resulted in the dam's deterritorialisation and allowed South Africa to incorporate Cahora Bassa as an outpost of empire. It also explores the ways in which Pretoria held the dam hostage after Mozambique became independent, as part of a broader process of destabilising its socialist neighbour to the north. Even after the dismantling of the apartheid regime in 1994, the new ANC-led government resisted efforts to abrogate the colonial agreement, and Songo remained a foreign enclave. Although Mozambique regained sovereignty over the dam site in 2007, even today, most of the electricity generated by Cahora Bassa is exported to South Africa, at a price that remains a state secret. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]