Ten books that explore South Africa’s identity

Lauren Francis-Sharma is the author of Book of the Little Axe, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed novel ’Til the Well Runs Dry. She was a MacDowell fellow and is the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College. She resides near Washington, DC, with her family.

Francis-Sharma's new novel is Casualties of Truth.

At Lit Hub she tagged ten books that offer a broad "glimpse into what makes this fascinating country [South Africa] so unique and so complex." One title on the list:

Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, The New Apartheid

The New Apartheid by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, published in 2021, is a critical analysis of “post-Apartheid” South Africa. If you want some reasons for why we haven’t seen as much change as we had hoped after the “Apartheid era,” part of those answers can be found in this book.

Mpofu-Walsh delves into the deficiencies of the South African constitution, often hailed as one of the most progressive in the world, which for example fails to frame “justice” as a fundamental value or address historical dispossession of land.

For sure, there are shortcomings in Mpofu-Walsh’s arguments and the confidence he evokes is that of one who has the clarity of hindsight, but in a dense but passionate text, the young Mpofu-Walsh writes convincingly of the predictable failures of the Black post-Apartheid administration, a body that hoped to build itself on the principles of social justice, yet failed to see how its negotiations in the early 1990s with the white Apartheid government would thwart this goal.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue