Margaret Courtney-Clarke Books

The book highlights the vibrant art of the Ndebele tribe in South Africa, showcasing their intricate beadwork and wall paintings that reflect a rich cultural heritage. Margaret Courtney-Clarke documents her five-year journey with the Ndebele, capturing their dynamic and colorful compositions, which remain strikingly modern. The narrative also addresses the challenges faced by the tribe, including forced resettlement and the decay of their artworks, making her photographs crucial records of their artistic legacy amidst adversity.

Winner of the prestigious UK Literacy Association Academic Book Award for 2015 in its original edition, this fully revised edition of Learning to be Literate uniquely analyses research into literacy from the 1960s through to 2015 with some surprising conclusions. Margaret Clark explores the argument that young children growing up in a literate environment are forming hypotheses about the print around them, including environmental print, television, computer games and mobile phones. In a class where no child can yet read there is a wide range of understanding with regards to concepts of print and the critical features of written language. While to any literate adult, the relationship between spoken and written language may be obvious, young children have to be helped to discover it. This persuasive argument demonstrates the value of research in order to make informed policy decisions about children’s literacy development. Accessible and succinct, Professor Clark’s writing brings into sharp focus the processes involved in becoming literate. The effect on practice of many recent government policies she claims run counter to these insights. The key five thematic sections are backed up with case studies throughout and

How dispossession and climate change have wreaked destruction on the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert Following her 2017 book Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain, Margaret Courtney-Clarke (born 1949) now turns her lens to the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. The inspiration for When Tears Don't Mattercomes, in part, from her grandfather's photographs of almost a century earlier during his mandate as Secretary for South West Africa (now Namibia), some of which are reproduced here. More than 6,000 miles of formidable terrain takes Courtney-Clarke across bushveld, sand and salt pans to drought-stricken conservancies, farming communities that function as holding tanks for "cultural villages" and peri-urban squatments. Largely invisible to the outside world, the bushmen today are dispossessed of their land, sidelined by economic inequity and outdated mythologies that present them as living in an "uncontaminated" state. Courtney-Clarke's photographs lie at the crossroads between documentary and activism.

This book is Margaret Courtney-Clarke’s visual ode to her home country of Namibia, and describes the bare circumstances of ordinary Namibians, of women and men forced to negotiate ravaged lives. Returning to Namibia in 2009 after decades of living abroad, Courtney-Clarke encountered a changed country in the throes of unrestrained development, the Namib Desert desecrated, and peoples migrating from rural settlements to towns in search of a better life. “With strong memories of my formative years growing up on the edge of the Namib Desert,” she recalls, “I have returned to explore my obsession with this place and my lifelong curiosity for the notion of shelter.” These photos are the result of Courtney-Clarke’s travels over 30,000 kilometers across dusty plains, sand dunes and salt pans, through conservancies, homelands and forgotten outposts. They evidence her passionate concern for human enterprise and failure, and for an inhospitable environment infused with remnants of apartheid as well as hope.