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Title details for The Inheritors by Eve Fairbanks - Available

The Inheritors

An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning

by Eve Fairbanks
Janina Edwards
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available
Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction

This "elegant" and "unfailingly empathetic" narrative (The New York Times) follows three ordinary South Africans living through the most extraordinary reckoning with race and power any modern country has ever faced.
Dipuo, who grew up in apartheid-era Johannesburg's largest Black township, conceived her only daughter, Malaika, on the mine dump that separated the Black city from the white one. Christo, one of the last white men drafted to police that boundary, would come to realize—one night on the same mine dump—that everything he had been taught to believe was collapsing to make way for something unprecedented. For Malaika and her peers would be born to a historic destiny: to grow up and live in a Black-led society.

All three—Dipuo, Christo, Malaika—and so many other South Africans would make new lives while facing huge questions: How can we let go of our pasts? How can we, as individuals, pay historic debts? And what will people who care passionately about being good do when the meaning of right changes overnight?

The Inheritors tells a story about the unexpected fates that lie ahead for other countries now facing their own reckonings over history, race, and power. Written at the intersection of politics and psychology and told through an unorthodox blend of "richly drawn" lives and "incisive observations" (The New York Review of Books), acclaimed journalist Eve Fairbanks brings a coming world "vividly into focus" (The Washington Post). "Resonant with the current American situation," The Inheritors "draws out tangled emotions with such skill and sensitivity" (The New York Times) to arrive at subtle truths and new revelations about our responsibilities to the past—and to the future.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 19, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781797142685
      • File size: 347884 KB
      • Duration: 12:04:45

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 9, 2022
      Apartheid’s legacy of inequality and alienation is outlined in this searching debut from American-born journalist Fairbanks, who moved to South Africa in 2009. Documenting the fallout from the end of sanctioned white supremacy in 1994, Fairbanks focuses on Dipuo (no last names given), a former African National Congress militant who organized against the apartheid government in Soweto in the early 1990s and participated in violence against Blacks suspected of collaboration, and her daughter Malaika, a Black Consciousness activist who protests the ongoing marginalization of Black South Africans. Fairbanks also spotlights Christo, a white lawyer and ex-soldier who fought the ANC in the early 1990s—killing a Black civilian—and is now active in an Afrikaner cultural revival that casts whites as the besieged minority. Fairbanks’s vivid reportage depicts a South Africa awash in racial unease and false consciousness: whites are beset by a sense of dispossession and imperilment—largely unjustified, she argues—tinged with guilt; Blacks, frustrated by intractable poverty and the ANC government’s inability to deliver economic development, denounce systemic racism while wondering if their failures vindicate racist assumptions. Distinguished by its sympathetic yet clear-eyed viewpoint, this vital study lays bare the complex, agonizing predicaments that flow from South Africa’s tragic past. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Agency.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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