History lies heavily on South Africa, and Adam Hochschild brings to bear a lifetime's familiarity with the country in an eye-opening work that blends history and reportage. Hochschild looks at the tensions of modern South Africa through a dramatic prism: the pivotal nineteenth-century Battle of Blood River -- which determined whether the Boers or the Zulus would control that part of the world -- and its contentious commemoration by rival groups 150...

A gay white South African recalls his coming of age at the end of apartheid in the late 1970s, describing his friend's activities as a death squad leader, his sister's victimization by their grandfather, and the brutality of his school.

"A decade in the making, The Inheritors tracks three ordinary South Africans over fifty years in a sweeping, exquisitely written look at what really happens after a country resolves to end white supremacy. Dipuo grew up on the south side of the mine dump that separated Johannesburg's Black townships from the white-only city. Some nights she hiked to the top. On the other side were glittering lights as well as, she knew, prejudice and hubris; on her...

Ben du Toit is a schoolteacher who always has considered himself a man of caring and justice, at least on the individual level. When his gardener's son is brutally beaten up by the police at a demonstration by black school children, he gradually begins to realize his own society is built on a pillar of injustice and exploitation.