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The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning
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About This Book
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?
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Reviews
"Glimmering throughout is the humanity she manages to find in all of it ..."
"Fairbanks is too good a writer to resort to crude psychologizing, but she repeatedly suggests that there is a terrible price to pay for trying to ignore how people see their own situations; the undeniable material facts of everything that happens to them is often inseparable from an emotional reality ..."
"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."
"Her curiosity seems boundless — a boundlessness that, translated into writing, can at times be distracting."
"Though these passages are necessary to convey the gravity of the situations, they will likely distress unguarded readers suffering from their own trauma."
"Less-knowledgeable readers will find concise and engaging points of entry ..."
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