Helen Plum Library

"Perfect for readers of The Secret Life of Bees and The Help, a perceptive and searing look at Apartheid-era South Africa, told through one unique family brought together by tragedy. Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a nine-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles...

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African...

In the hell that was Robben Island, inmates united courageously in an act of protest. Beginning in 1964, they requested the right to play soccer during their exercise periods. Denied repeatedly, they risked beatings and food deprivation by repeating their request for three years. Finally granted this right, the prisoners banded together to form a multi-tiered, pro-level league that ran for more than two decades and served as an impassioned symbol...

Anyone interested in the progress of the 'new' South Africa 20 years into its multiracial democracy need look no further than After Freedom—a powerful, well-researched, and thoroughly readable book. Newman and De Lannoy include hard demographic and economic data but it is their sustained and deeply personal interviews which prove both fascinating and discomforting." —Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of New News Out of Africa.

This DVD examines many of the extraordinary, intimate and epiphanous moments of Mandela's life

"When Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa, she knows that she does not love the man she is to marry there --her fiance Edward, whom she has not seen for five years. Isolated and estranged in a small town in the harsh Karoo desert, her only real companions are her diary and her housemaid, and later the housemaid's daughter, Ada. When Ada is born, Cathleen recognizes in her someone she can love and respond...

Provides in-depth analysis of the literary work Cry, the Beloved Country, as well as its importance and critical reception. Includes a chronology of the life and works of the author.

Examines the genocide and persecution of South African people, providing an historical background on Apartheid, a "separateness" of the races, beginning in 1948.

Little Nelson grew up learning about the racial divisions in South Africa and the unfair treatment of his people. As an adult, he protested against apartheid, a system that separated people based on the color of their skin... until he was imprisoned. But despite his long walk to freedom, Nelson never gave up the fight for justice and equality, and became an icon around the world. This inspiring story of the life of South Africa's first Black president...

On June 16, 1976, Hector Pieterson, an ordinary boy, lost his life after getting caught up in what was supposed to be a peaceful protest. Black South African students were marching against a new law requiring that they be taught half of their subjects in Afrikaans, the language of the White government. The story's events unfold from the perspectives of Hector, his sister, and the photographer who captured their photo in the chaos. This book can serve...