Latest News

2011-02-07 : 3 GOOD READS

I love reading and 3 books concerning this News Letter really caught my eye this month:

Fair Trade Revolution by John Bowes (Source: Plutobook.com)

Fair Trade has come a long way in the last 20 years. The Fair Trade Revolution celebrates the movement's achievement and takes up the challenge of improving more lives through fair dealing with producers.

Fair Trade is now mainstream, with large companies like Cadbury's and supermarkets such as Sainsbury's producing and stocking many Fair Trade products. The authors of this collection, many of whom were responsible for the initial success of Fair Trade, emphasise the importance of ensuring that farmers and other producers remain the main beneficiaries. Punchy chapters, illustrated with many real-world examples, cover all the important issues including the tensions between large and small operators, the impact of recession, environmental policy and the danger of large operators embracing Fair Trade more in word than in practice.

Written by the leading lights of the Fair Trade movement, including Harriet Lamb (Executive Director of the Fairtrade Foundation) and Bruce Crowther (Establisher of the world's first Fair Trade Town) this book will inspire activists and consumers to keep making the right choices.

My Hungry heart, Notes from a Namibian Kitchen by Antoinette de Chavonnes Vrugt (Source www.Michaeloliver.co.za)

Antoinette de Chavonnes Vrugt has produced an enchanting book packed full of her food ideas and "Notes from a Namibian Kitchen”. Those of us who have visited Namibia and have eaten richly and well will just love this book, filled with Antoinette’s personal favourites.

Richly coloured and stunningly illustrated with Hentie Burgers photography. He is well known as a wildlife and landscape photographer and does brilliantly in this his venture into illustrating Antoinettes recipes.

There’s fish off the Namibian coast, venison, and all sorts of what we regard as traditional South African foods. Maybe we should call them Southern African foods.

For me this is the sort of book I would like to keep on the coffee table for visitors to see, but it is going to be in the kitchen where I will certainly be cooking from it.

Well presented with a hard cover – my goodness it is a pretty and yet so practical book

The Covenant by American author James A. Michener (Source Wikipedia.org)

(This one is on my bedside table at the moment and I'm absolutely loving it!!)

The novel is set in South Africa, home to five distinct populations: Bantu (native Black tribes), Coloured (the result of generations of miscegenation between persons of European descent and the indigenous occupants of South Africa along with slaves brougt in from Angola, Indonesia, India, Madagascar and the east Coast of Africa), English, Afrikaner, and Indian, Chinese, and other foreign workers. The novel traces the history, interaction, and conflicts between these populations, from prehistoric times up to the 1970s.

Michener writes largely from the point of view of the Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers and French Huguenot immigrants who traveled to South Africa to practice freedom of worship in the Calvinist tradition, and other European groups (such as the Germans), all of whom were absorbed by the Afrikaans-speaking Dutch Reformed Church. The Afrikaners, whose Dutch ancestors first established a trading and refueling stop at Cape Town in the 17th century to service ships moving between Holland and Java, and whose ranks were augmented by Huguenot and other northern European immigrants, considered themselves the "New Israelites".

They found in the Old Testament verification for their belief that God favored their conquest of the new land. Their strict, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible supported them through the Great Trek of the 19th century; battles against Zulu and other Bantu tribes, who also laid claim to lands to the north; the Anglo-Boer War (when small guerrilla bands of a few hundred Afrikaner farmers were able to hold off tens of thousands of British regulars); and their institution of Apartheid in the 20th century, when they insisted on racial purity, separatism, and white supremacy, per the moral expectations of the God of Israel in the Old Testament and their own determination to keep political power in the hands of Whites of European descent.

Michener demonstrates that the Afrikaner oppression of Blacks was partly due to Dutch animosity towards the English, who assumed political and financial control of southern Africa in 1795 and fought against the traditional way of life, including slavery, pursued by Afrikaner farmers, or Boers. As one Bantu character observes, "no matter whether the English or the Dutch win, the Blacks always lose."

Both historical and fictional characters appear throughout the novel. The experiences of the fictional van Doorn family illustrate the Dutch and Huguenot heritage of South Africa, and in the 1970s also illustrate the differences between liberal and conservative Afrikaners. The fictional Saltwood family represents the English settlement of the area. The Nxumalo family illustrates the area's black heritage and culture. African Zulu leader Shaka appears in the novel, during the chapter on the Mfecane.

[author: Isabelle Dechamps]

Contact details

Newsletter