The Inheritors
An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning
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- $299.00
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- $299.00
Descripción editorial
Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
A dozen years in the making, The Inheritors weaves together the stories of three ordinary South Africans over five tumultuous decades in a sweeping and exquisite look at what really happens when a country resolves to end white supremacy.
Dipuo grew up on the south side of a mine dump that segregated Johannesburg’s black townships from the white-only city. Some nights, she hiked to the top. To a South African teenager in the 1980s—even an anti-apartheid activist like Dipuo—the divide that separated her from the glittering lights on the other side appeared eternal. But in 1994, the world’s last explicit racial segregationist regime collapsed to make way for something unprecedented.
With penetrating psychological insight, intimate reporting, and bewitching prose, The Inheritors tells the story of a country in the throes of a great reckoning. Through the lives of Dipuo, her daughter Malaika, and Christo—one of the last white South Africans drafted to fight for the apartheid regime—award-winning journalist Eve Fairbanks probes what happens when people once locked into certain kinds of power relations find their status shifting. Observing subtle truths about race and power that extend well beyond national borders, she explores questions that preoccupy so many of us today: How can we let go of our pasts, as individuals and as countries? How should historical debts be paid? And how can a person live an honorable life in a society that—for better or worse—they no longer recognize?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Apartheid's legacy of inequality and alienation is outlined in this searching debut from American-born journalist Fairbanks, who moved to South Africa in 2009. Documenting the fallout from the end of sanctioned white supremacy in 1994, Fairbanks focuses on Dipuo (no last names given), a former African National Congress militant who organized against the apartheid government in Soweto in the early 1990s and participated in violence against Blacks suspected of collaboration, and her daughter Malaika, a Black Consciousness activist who protests the ongoing marginalization of Black South Africans. Fairbanks also spotlights Christo, a white lawyer and ex-soldier who fought the ANC in the early 1990s—killing a Black civilian—and is now active in an Afrikaner cultural revival that casts whites as the besieged minority. Fairbanks's vivid reportage depicts a South Africa awash in racial unease and false consciousness: whites are beset by a sense of dispossession and imperilment—largely unjustified, she argues—tinged with guilt; Blacks, frustrated by intractable poverty and the ANC government's inability to deliver economic development, denounce systemic racism while wondering if their failures vindicate racist assumptions. Distinguished by its sympathetic yet clear-eyed viewpoint, this vital study lays bare the complex, agonizing predicaments that flow from South Africa's tragic past.
