The New Apartheid

South Africa’s story is often presented as a triumph of new over old, but while formal apartheid was abolished decades ago, stark and distressing similarities persist. Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh explores the edifice of systemic racial oppression — the new apartheid — that continues to thrive, despite or even because of our democratic system.

This new apartheid is a privatised, decentralised, 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. Mpofu-Walsh names our malaise by tracing its impact on our use of space, law, wealth, technology and punishment.

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.