Abstract
BestRed, an imprint of HSRC Press, in partnership with
the UJ Library, invites you to a discussion with
MICHAEL SCHMIDT, the author of A Taste of Bitter Almonds:
Perdition and Promise in South Africa. ABOUT THE BOOK: A Taste of Bitter Almonds is a challenging new view from the ground on race and
class that interrogates the continuities between apartheid’s autocracy and today’s troubled democracy
in the world’s most unequal society. The book’s themes of identity, dispossession, and reclamation are
grounded in the colonial era: examining the multiracial nature of settler colonisation and the First Nations
Genocide sets the scene for an exploration of the maintenance of apartheid geography and conditions of
exclusion under democracy, from zama-zama coal-miners and poor whites, to prostitutes and pogromists,
witches and wastrels, lesbians and land claimants.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Schmidt is an investigative journalist, anarchist militant, free press
activist and published historian. He is the co-author, with Prof Lucien van der Walt, of Black Flame: the
Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (USA, 2009), and the author of Cartography
of Revolutionary Anarchism (USA, 2013), and of Drinking with Ghosts: the Aftermath of Apartheid’s
Dirty War (SA, 2014). He founded the Professional Journalists’ Association of South Africa, and The Ulu
Club for Southern African Conflict Journalists, and is the former executive director of the Institute for the
Advancement of Journalism. He is working on an international multimedia project on massacre and memory
with Lebanese writer Rasha Salti, and continues to write for the mainstream and alternative press.
FACILITATOR: Prof Ylva Rodny-Gumede, Head: Department of Journalism, Film and Television, UJ
DATE 12 April 2016
TIME 16:30 for 17:00
VENUE APK Library Auditorium 6th Floor), University of Johannesburg
(corner Kingsway and University Road, Auckland Park, Johannesburg)
RSVP Before Monday 11 April 2016 to Theodorah Modise licevents@uj.ac.za or 011 559 2264.