No White Lies - Black Politics And White Power In South Africa, by Kim Heller

The author’s views on post-apartheid South Africa are forthright and discomforting. Her opening focus is the Rainbow Nation, a concept she describes as ‘a still-born democracy’, and The New Dawn as ‘dark days indeed’. This is strong political meat that cries out for careful ingestion.

“It is difficult to find a more honest and brutal assessment of South Africa’s new political dispensation. Kim writes that ‘the Rainbow Nation, consummated without revolutionary romance in 1994, has since been unmasked as a deceptive act of seduction to ensure that white power and privilege maintained a choke on the throat of the South African economy’. For those that wallow in ideological confusion and limbo, these articles shoold serve as an antidote to the emasculation of the South African revolution. For now, black politics is entangled in apartheid thinking, with no possibility of escaping colonial entrapment” – Professor Sipho Seepe

“Kim is one of the few political commentators who has had the courage to call out white South Africans for paying lip service to the project that we should all be seized with – which is to uproot the vestiges of colonialism and apartheid which continue to negatively affect so many in South Africa. Kim’s work is important because it exposes how the government of the day, even though black, continues to pander to the interests of the dominant white minority” – Phakamile Hlubi-Majola