Despite the frivolity of the holidays coming up, some seriously serious books landed on my desk in November. Fortunately two are written with a light touch. The others worthy but look extremely interesting. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. We’ll start with the two lighter reads. – Vivien Horler

Loony Birds, Lion Men, and the Snake that was a Gerbil – 20 of the Best Bush Tales from Southern Africa by David Bristow (Jacana)

Writer, editor and adventurer David Bristow collects stories. He actually produced the four-volume Stories from the Veld. Anything that comes in four volumes is a bit daunting, but in this book he has selected 20 of the best tales.

Describing a hunt for a lion wounded by an amateur hunter somewhere near Maun, Bristow writes of lion claws: “These weapons of mass destruction are usually around four centimetres long, hard as carbon steel and sharp as razors. They can do a large amount of harm to a soft-skinned body.

“Then come the fangs…”

His first chapter about lions and lion men segues into the story of Harry Wolhuter, Southern Africa’s first game ranger. If you’ve been to Skukuza rest camp’s library-museum in the Kruger Park, you will have seen the skin of the lion that attacked him, and the knife he used to kill it while he was being dragged off for supper.

It is an extraordinary story of derring-do.

But the book is not all about lions.

There’s a chapter on the Cradle of Humankind, a camping trip that Bristow went on as a young man that went awry, a chapter on the sad story of Krotoa who became Mevrou Eva van Meerhoff, another on the extraordinary history of Mapungubwe, and many besides. This is a treasure of a book.

Raising the Bar – The making of a judge, by Jeremy Pickering (Staging Post)

Jeremy Pickering figures he’s the only SA judge ever to have worked as a clown. He may also have been the only clown ever to have become a judge.

The temporary career took place while he was on a gap year in the UK, where to start with he had to bed down in the elephant trailer. He says they were pretty rustig.

He grew up on a dairy farm in the Eastern Cape, studied law at Stellenbosch University, took his gap year – he also worked on a farm as an assistant pig man – before returning to SA where he became a prosecutor in Grahamstown (now Makhandla), an advocate in Mthatha, and director of the Legal Resources Centre in the Eastern Cape before becoming a judge of the Eastern Cape Division of the High Court. He retired in 2019.

He is obviously a clever, serious and erudite man, but he is also extremely funny and his book is a delight.

Or as retired Constitutional Court Judge Edwin Cameron writes: “It is a delightful memoir – entertaining, richly populated and wittily written. I have read it with amusement and enjoyment.”

As for me, I was laughing out loud.

Unbroken Chains – A 5 000-year history of African Enslavement, by Martin Plaut (Hurst & Company, London)

Now things get a touch more serious.

Martin Plaut would seem to know what he’s talking about. He was the BBC World Service’s Africa Editor, and has published extensively on African affairs. He has been an adviser to the UK Foreign Office and the US State Department, and is a senior researcher at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.

But he started off by growing up in Cape Town, and studying law at UCT. After 1976 he left for exile in Britain, and London has been his home since.

Plaut wrote the biography of Dr Abdullah Abdurahman, the first black South African to win an election in the country, becoming a Cape Town city councillor from 1904 until his death in 1940.

Plaut wrtes: “Dr Abdurahman was the grandson of a slave, probably brought from Bengal. It troubled me that I knew so little about the slave trade across the Indian Ocean, which has been swamped by the Trans-Atlantic narrative, and so I decided to look at the subject in more detail.”

He writes of the slaves of the vast Sokoto Caliphate; the fate of the Oromo slaves from Ethiopia, captured and forced to march for weeks and months until they were sold in Arabia; and the men and woman of Irish villages captured and taken to North Africa as slaves.

“Each is a fragment of the African story of enslavement that has not yet concluded. Slavery continues to this day, with refugees trapped in Libya’s officially sanctioned detention centres still being sold to the highest bidder.”

This will be a tough read, but it looks seriously interesting.

Bosadi, by Kopano Matlwa (Jacana)

This is November’s only novel, and it opens dramatically: “I killed him. I sliced his neck open early on Christmas morning, while he slept with that pathetic look on his face.”

Matlakala was given the knife by one Rakgadi, who advises Matlakala to take it everywhere she goes. “It cuts like a hot knife to butter.”

And this proves to be the case. Matlakala says: “I was surprised at how easily the tissues split, did not resist being separated.”

Then there is Aunty, a Zimbabwean domestic worker, who watches as her employer’s marriage crumbles.

The two women, both lost and sad, develop a sort of sisterhood.

The cover tells us this story in told in alternating voices, and says: “Bosadi is a devastating exploration of gender, grief, immigration, violence and the impossible expectations that swallow women whole.”

It is written by the author who won the 2006/2007 European Award for her first novel Coconut.It was followed by Spilt Milk and then Period Pain, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.

Matlwa is a public health physician living in Johannesburg.

A Moon will Rise from the Darkness – Reports on Israel’s genocide in Palestine, by Francesca Albanese; ed by Mandy Turner and Lex Takkenberg (Pluto Press)

Francesca Albanese is the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Palestine and has been documenting Israel’s actions in Palestine and Gaza. She recently – and controversially – visited South Africa.

In her introduction, she writes her first challenging encounter with the concept of genocide in Palestine came in 2023 – I gather before the Hamas attacks – when an Israeli holocaust survivor asked her why she was not investigating the genocide of the Palestinian people. She says she instinctively resisted the term, thinking instead of Nazi-occupied Europe, Rwanda and Bosnia. But she came to understand genocide is not committed by method, but by intent.

“This realisation, immense and unsettling, revealed the false premise that a state born from genocide could not commit genocide itself. History demonstrates the opposite: unhealed trauma can inflict further wounds.”

Apart from a foreword by former special rapporteurs on Palestine: Richard Falk, John Dugard and Michael Lynk, there are three chapters: Anatomy of a Genocide; Genocide as Colonial Erasure; and  From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.

This will clearly not be a summer holiday read, but I suspect it is a profoundly important book.

All sale proceeds will go to UNRWA, the UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees.