Book Launch: Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries

Date: 27 May 2022

Time: 18:00 SAST

Place: The Commune, 14 Reserve street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg


Jacana Media, in partnership with The Forge invite you to an in-person launch of Spear Mandela and the Revolutionaries by Paul Landau 

Landau’s book is not a biography, nor is it a history of a militia or an army; rather, it is a riveting story about ordinary civilians debating and acting together in extremis. Contextualizing Mandela and MK’s activities amid anticolonial change and Black Marxism in the early 1960s, Spear also speaks to today’s transnational antiracism

protests and worldwide struggles against oppression. 

Author: Paul S. Landau is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland at College Park and a fellow of the History Centre of the University of Johannesburg. His two previous books, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (1995) and Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (2010), were both finalists for the African Studies Association Herskovits Prize. 

Discussant: Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi is an Associate Professor of History at Wits University. Lekgoathi has co-edited the book Guerrilla Radios in Southern Africa: Broadcasters, Technology, Propaganda Wars, and the Armed Struggle

Facilitator: Dr Vashna Jagarnath is a Director of both Pan Africa Today and Friends of the Workers. She is also Deputy General Secretary of the Socialists Revolutionary Workers’ Party.