Books

I have thus far written three books, though I have a few book projects on the boil as we speak.

Cape Town: A Place Between

My most recent book is an accessible primer on the history, politics, culture, and prospects of Cape Town, the city I have now lived in for two decades. Based in part on my own diverse experiences in the city, but mainly on the research that I have conducted about it, the book aims to introduce readers to a city that befuddles and beguiles.

Cape Town is a place between. Between two oceans, between first and third worlds, between east and west. So too the majority of its citizens, a people between black and white, native and settler, African and European. This tween-ness complicates and perplexes. It threatens key conceptions we have about the histories, identities, and cultures of those who live on the continent.

By exploring these liminal spaces of tween-ness―between the Cape’s breath-taking beauty and its shattering violence, between its creative cosmopolitanism and its crude racial divisions, between its glitzy wealth and its grinding poverty―we can begin to understand the soul of this town. Haunted by its past, unsure of its future. Always emerging, never arriving. A sun-drenched peninsula best viewed through a prism noir.

Compact and concise, this book allows readers to quickly identify the unique pulse of the city, its throbbing historical, social, cultural and political beat that underlies the transactions between all Capetonians. It is not a guidebook, but a perfect companion to one, filling in the intimate details that other books leave out.

Published by Catalyst Press, 2020

Sugar Girls & Seamen

Stemming from my research on South African port culture, I wrote Sugar Girls & Seamen: A Journey into the World of Dockside Prostitution in South Africa which illuminates a shadowy sex trade focused on the women of Cape Town and Durban who sell their hospitality to foreign sailors.

Dockside “sugar girls” work at one of the busiest cultural intersections in the world. Through their continual interactions with foreign seamen, they become major traffickers in culture, ideas, languages, styles, goods, currencies, genes and diseases. Many learn the seamen’s tongues, develop emotional relationships with them, have their babies and become entangled in vast webs of connection. In many ways, these South African mermaids are the ultimate cosmopolitans, the unsung sirens of globalisation.

Based on fifteen months of research at the seamen’s nightclubs, plus countless interviews with sugar girls, sailors, club owners, cabbies, bouncers and barmaids, this book provides a comprehensive account of dockside “romance” at the southern tip of Africa. Through stories, analysis and first-hand experiences, it reveals this gritty world in all its raw vitality and fragile humanity. Sugar Girls & Seamen is simultaneously racy and light, critical and profound.

Published by Jacana, 2008 / Ohio University Press 2011

Seeking Impact and Visibility

More recently, as a researcher with the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) at the University of Cape Town, I was the lead-author of the book Seeking Impact and Visibility: Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa. It researches and addresses the challenge that many African scholars and universities face, in that their scholarly research is relatively invisible globally because, even though research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is falling in comparative terms. Traditional metrics of visibility, such as the Impact Factor, also fail to make legible all African scholarly production. Unfortunately, many African universities also do not take a strategic approach to scholarly communication to broaden the reach of their scholars work.

To address this challenge, the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was established to help raise the visibility of African scholarship by mapping current research and communication practices in Southern African universities and by recommending and piloting technical and administrative innovations based on open access dissemination principles. To do this, SCAP conducted extensive research in four faculties at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia.

Published by the International Development Research Centre and African Minds, 2014