Dying for Freedom

Jacob Dlamini is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University.

"In this clear-eyed book Jacob Dlamini explores the roots of anti-apartheid passion, showing how activists made their commitment into a matter of life and death. At once sweeping and intimate, this profound work of history allows us to look again at martyrdom: as a political purpose that shaped people's vocations, as an orientation around which a movement cohered, as a tragedy that deprived families and communities of much-loved people. This little book is full of profound insight, and I hope that it will lend to its readers a new understanding of how much the struggle against apartheid cost."Derek Peterson, University of Michigan"Dying for Freedom is a powerful and punchy work that will generate debate in the undergraduate classroom and graduate symposium. In the highly accessible prose that we have come to expect from the leading writer of his generation, the walking dead are awakened. No longer bodies in suspended states, the dead are legible, historical, and deeply powerful."African Studies Review"An innovative and thought-provoking study that places important conversations about death on the intellectual table."The American Historical Review"An incisive review of necropolitics in the history of South Africa's political life."The Thinker"Historian Dlamini has added yet another thought-provoking volume to his consistently iconoclastic works."Diana Wylie, H-Africa

• IntroductionChapter 1: Defying DeathChapter 2: Dead and ProudChapter 3: Refusing to DieChapter 4: The Unmournable DeathChapter 5: A Dignified CorpseConclusion