Twenty years after South Africa’s first democratic election, the nation’s politics are more fractious than ever before. The lofty dreams of the early days of the post-apartheid era have dissolved into cynicism in the face of incessant police violence, the quashing of dissent, and the spread of corruption. To many South Africans today, politics is a failed enterprise, the preserve only of the corrupt, the self-interested, the incompetent and the violent.

They are wrong.

With South Africa’s Insurgent Citizens, Julian Brown mounts a powerful, polemic argument against that sort of despair. Politics is alive and well in South Africa – if you know where to look. Brown reveals a new kind of politics, in the streets and the courtrooms, a politics created by a new kind of citizen, one that is neither respectful nor passive, but insurgent.

South African politics, Brown argues, may be fractured – but it’s in those very cracks that a powerful new movement is beginning to grow.

About the author

Julian Brown teaches Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was educated at the
University of Natal and Oxford University. He is a member of the Wits History Workshop, and lives in
Johannesburg with his husband.