The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning

Summary

An insightful, immersive history of the world’s most dramatic racial reckoning—the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa—exploring what happens after a country declares its ended white supremacy.

The end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 appeared to accomplish in one day what the United States and Europe have been moving slowly toward for centuries: the handover of political, economic, social, and intellectual power to members of the demographic of groups they colonized or enslaved. In the spirit of reconciliation, white South Africans were told to forget their sins, and Black South Africans to forget their suffering. But what then? What happens after a country declares it miraculously put an end to white supremacy? Journalist Eve Fairbanks takes you on a journey to find out.

Following three ordinary South Africans from the 1970s to today, The Inheritors offers an intimate look at the country’s long, fraught, and continuing racial reckoning. First, we meet Dipuo, who was organizing protests in Soweto against the apartheid regime by the age of seventeen. She was so devoted to her activism she was reluctant to fall in love because it felt like a betrayal to her cause and would prove that the apartheid wasn’t as dehumanizing as it truly was. Next, we encounter Chirsto, a farm boy who, at nineteen, was drafted into the South African army and tasked with enforcing apartheid, meeting the double standards of being a Black soldier of a white government. Finally, we are introduced to Dipuo’s daughter, Malaika, born in the 1990s, who wonders why, if the movement her mother fought for won, do the two of them live in a shack and sleep on the floor?

With extraordinary insight, suspenseful storytelling, and breathtaking prose, Fairbanks weaves together these narratives to paint a larger portrait of race, memory, and reckoning in South Africa. It’s a story of three very different people with one singular thing in common—all are trying to live honorably in challenging times—and grapple with the fact that changing a country’s constitution is easier than changing its citizens’ minds.