DURBAN - APARTHEID did not die but was privatised. This is the view of author Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, whose book The New Apartheid is set to hit the shelves on July 28.
“Our generation needs to define what our overarching problem and struggles are because they go beyond poverty and unemployment,” said Mpofu-Walsh, who spoke to the Daily News on Sunday.
Mpofu-Walsh’s provocative book is aimed at challenging not only the status quo but to help shed some light on the core issues haunting South Africa.
Mpofu-Walsh said that the book centred on the proposition that “apartheid did not die, but was privatised”.
He explored in five different chapters and critiques the apartheid patterns that continue to find expression in society.
According to Mpofu-Walsh, The New Apartheid is both a razor-sharp survey of the South African crisis and a call for far-reaching change.
“Unless we understand the new apartheid, we cannot start the urgent task of dismantling it. While apartheid was abolished decades ago, stark and distressing similarities persist.
“This new apartheid is privatised, the decentralised and self-replicating vestige of the apartheid state. For the people of South Africa, it means poverty or paradise, separated by an inch of glass and a line of code.”
The host of SMWX, a digital channel featuring various public figures, said that he invoked apartheid because many like him were affected by it and continued to suffer its consequences.
“Our experiences cannot be closely compared to those generations before us. Still, apartheid touches my life. I suffered shame and ridicule, especially in my early years, simply because my father, senior advocate Dali Mpofu, was black and my mother Theresa Oakley Smith, white. My experiences of racism are numerous, if I recount.”
He added: “If apartheid still affects me, what of those still yet to taste the fruits of freedom? Why then should I not speak apartheid’s name when apartheid knows my name so well?”
Mpofu-Walsh argues in the book that apartheid retreated into a private sphere despite the inauguration of a democratic republic, and while the burdensome management of the South African state remained public, real power had increasingly devolved to the private realm, exempt from democratic control.
Daily News