Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa

Clifton Crais is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Emory University. He is author of over one hundred works, including Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (2008) - on the woman more famously known as the 'Hottentot Venus' and the subject of a feature film, 'Venus Noire' - The Politics of Evil: Magic, Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1992). He is also editor of The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (2003), co-editor of Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (1995) and Area Editor of the Encyclopedia of World History (8 volumes, 2008). Crais is nearing completion of History Lessons, a work that combines memoir, historiography and the neuroscience of memory, and a documentary history of South Africa. Long-range works include a history of violence and explorations of fiction and creative non-fiction concerning memory and narrative.

'With brisk economy, this book provides a fresh and compelling explanation of the origins of rural poverty in nineteenth-century South Africa. It is indispensable reading for anyone who is seriously interested in understanding the persistence of crushing poverty in the South African countryside today.' Ivan Evans, University of California, San Diego

• 1. Famished roads; 2. Maize and markets; 3. Poverty and plenty; 4. The politics of land and the crises of the twentieth century.