Twenty years after South Africa s first democratic election, the nation s politics are more fractious than ever before. The lofty dreams of the early days of the post-apartheid era have dissolved into cynicism in the face of incessant police violence, the quashing of dissent, and the spread of corruption. To many South Africans today, politics is a failed enterprise, the preserve only of the corrupt, the self-interested, the incompetent, and the violent.
With this book, Julian Brown mounts a powerful, polemic argument against that sort of despair. Politics is alive and well in South...