South African academic, political commentator, and occasional musician Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh has written a second book: The New Apartheid. Since his 2017 debut Democracy and Delusion: 10 Myths in South African Politics (which won a prestigious South African literary award), Mpofu-Walsh has made a quick ascent as a public intellectual. By 2013, his star was already rising, and Mpofu-Walsh was named as one of the Mail and Guardian’s “Top 200 Young South Africans.” Now, he boasts a YouTube channel with 25,000 subscribers, makes regular appearances on podcasts and national talk radio, and has variously been described as “one of the most gifted writers of his generation.” Mpofu-Walsh is the son of Dali Mpofu, one of the country’s top lawyers and a grandee of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), South Africa’s third-largest political party. The New Apartheid was published in late July, only a few weeks after the country was gripped by violence triggered by the arrest of ex-president Jacob Zuma (whom his father represented in the countless legal proceedings to contest the Constitutional Court’s order of contempt). The book is now a bestseller.

Like in Democracy and Delusion, his new book’s overriding concern is South Africa’s nagging racialized inequality and its myriad ills. However, whereas Mpofu-Walsh’s task in the first book was comparatively modest, aiming only to disabuse South Africans of the myths of progress and stability that fully came undone following the tenure of Jacob Zuma, The New Apartheid is notable for its ambition. Mpofu-Walsh’s objectives are theoretical and programmatic:

South Africa needs a way to define its crises that captures their historical roots, their present complexity, and their future trajectories in a single frame. Only once we identify the problem can we define liberation. By defining the new apartheid, I have tackled this task and, in so doing, sought to define a generational mission.