Join Jonathan Ball Publishers and Love Books for the launch of Three Wise Monkeys by Charles van Onselen.

Van Onselen will be in conversation with Jonathan Ball Publishers CEO Eugene Ashton at the launch.

Event details

Date: Thursday 30 March 2023
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Venue: Love Books, Melville, Johannesburg
RSVP: kate@lovebooks.co.za or 011 726 7408

Jonathan Ball and Love Books with be selling this extremely limited edition volume at less 10% on the night of the launch only! (Selling price: R1,500; Launch price: R 1,350.)

About the book

In some settings, such as Ireland, the contiguity of Catholic and Protestant states is often not conducive to good relations or neighbourliness. In colonial and imperial southern Africa, formal inter-state arrangements took place at the expense of a third party – subjected African peoples.

Three Wise Monkeys explores some of the contradictions, silences and oversights, and working misunderstandings that arise when an emerging Anglophone, Protestant, industrial and urbanising state – South Africa – develops side by side with Mozambique – a Lusophone, Catholic, commercial, rural colony – Mozambique.
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In three volumes, Charles van Onselen examines the intertwined relations between South Africa and Portugal’s chronically weak east coast colony, as expressed through the migrant labour system, the tourist trade, the rise and fall of LM Radio and the extraordinary tale of the Lourenço Marques Lottery.

These areas constituted zones of cross-cultural, transnational interaction that both states were reluctant to acknowledge formally, choosing instead to ‘see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil’ for much of the 20th century.

Three Wise Monkeys presents a striking new way of viewing the entangled, often hidden, economic, political and social dynamics that informed the rise of 20th-century South Africa, often at the expense of neighbouring Mozambique.

Categories Non-fiction South Africa

Tags Book events Book launches Charles van Onselen Johannesburg Jonathan Ball Publishers Love Books Three Wise Monkeys