munchowuzhere777

Fight Night

Fairgrounds Holding

Gaborone, Botswana

August 08, 2026

Billie Holiday, New York City, 1958

Under apartheid, publishing radical books was an act of resistance. Ravan Press, (founded in 1972 by Peter Randall and others) amplified banned voices, Black Consciousness writers, and critical texts that commercial publishers wouldn’t touch.

Ravan published the first novels by authors like J.M. Coetzee and Miriam Tlali, often risking raids and censorship to do so. Its work was one part of a broader liberation struggle across Southern Africa, building political awareness from the grassroots up.

See more primary sources in the Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa collection on JSTOR, with an emphasis on materials from Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.