All Rise: Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa

“Conyngham is the mover behind this book, but he found a whole bunch of different South African artists to do the art. It’s a collaboration. Although there is coherence across the chapters, you have some very different kinds of art, which is quite interesting. It’s about resistance and rebellion in South Africa, but it takes place almost entirely before apartheid (though the last chapter does go into the apartheid era). It’s a book that comes out of the archives of South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal. At the end of apartheid, the new government built this incredible Supreme Court, with an archive, to provide a beacon of law, if you will, for across the continent. You can go there, it’s open. Richard Conyngham looked in this archive and pulled out all these stories about resistance and rebellion. They’re not all about race. Some are about class and labor, which may be surprising to some people. But before 1948, that’s appropriate, because class mattered as well. They are sketches of stories of the people who make up South Africa. It’s about Indian resistance to being forced to register. It’s about mine workers who are on strike because of horrible conditions in the mines. It’s about the way that colonialism appointed these state-controlled chiefs, and the way people revolted against these chiefs acting as stooges to control their movement and labor.” Read more...

The Best Comics on African History

Trevor Getz, Historian