South African Transitions

This book addresses the multiple repercussions of South Africa’s democratic transition beginning in 1994 by examining a number of themes with local, national, regional, and global relevance: the politics of nation building, public memory, residential segregation, higher education, media, racism, trade unionism, women’s rights, and global climate change, to name only a few.

Drawing from the rich archive of previously published articles from the journal Safundi, South African Transitions documents both the country’s, and the journal’s mutual history over the past quarter century. Divided into five sections, the first part of the book explores the broad theme of South Africa’s transition to non-racial democracy by foregrounding issues of nationalism, diplomacy, rural change, social trauma, historical commemoration, and political feeling at local, national, and international levels. The second section focuses on the question of civil society, including essays on media, racism, histories of segregation, legacies of criminal violence, and comparative patterns of incarceration, underscoring the endurance of certain long-term problems and the emergence of new ones. Part three surveys the role of education in transforming South Africa, while part four situates South Africa’s opportunities and challenges within regional and global contexts to better understand the South African situation and its relationship to conditions around the world. The penultimate section has contributions that confront the present by identifying the struggles and crises of South Africa’s current political moment, including labor movements, the matter of land restitution, feminist activism, LGBTQI rights, and the Marikana Massacre of 2012. The book ends with an essay on the fire at Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town by historian Bill Nasson, a moment of contingent destruction that speaks of the Covid-19 pandemic and the burgeoning climate crisis at present.

Traversing across time and place, South African Transitions will be an indispensable resource for scholars, researchers, activists and policymakers, as well as those readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africa’s social, political, and intellectual transformations over the past several decades.

Christopher J. Lee has published eight books, including Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010, rev. 2nd edition 2019), Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (2014), Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015), Kwame Anthony Appiah (2021), and Alex La Guma: The Exile Years, 1966-1985 (2024). He is currently the Lead Editor of Safundi.

Andrew Offenburger is Associate Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is author of Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1880-1917 (Yale University Press, 2019), and is co-editor with Patricia Nelson Limerick on the forthcoming Translating Past to Present: Interpreters in the American West and Beyond (University of Nebraska Press). He is the Founding Editor of Safundi.