South African academic, political commentator and occasional musician, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, has written a second book: The New Apartheid. Since his 2017 debut Democracy and Delusion (which won a prestigious South African literary award), Mpofu-Walsh has made a quick ascent as a public intellectual. By 2013, his star was already rising and Mpofu-Walsh was named as one of the Mail and Guardian’s “Top 200 Young South Africans.” Now, he boasts a YouTube channel with 25,000 subscribers, makes regular appearances on podcasts and national talk radio, and has variously been described as “one of the most gifted writers of his generation.” Mpofu-Walsh is the son of Dali Mpofu, one of the country’s top lawyers and a grandee of the Economic Freedom Fighters, South Africa’s third-largest political party. The New Apartheid was published in late July, only a few weeks after the country was gripped by violence triggered by the arrest of ex-president Jacob Zuma (whom his father represented in the countless legal proceedings to contest the Constitutional Court’s order of contempt). The book is now a bestseller.

Like in Democracy and Delusion, his new book’s overriding concern is South Africa’s nagging racialized inequality and its myriad ills. However, whereas Mpofu-Walsh’s task in the first book was comparatively modest, aiming only to disabuse South Africans of the myths of progress and stability that fully came undone following the tenure of Jacob Zuma, The New Apartheid (hereafter TNA) is notable for its ambition. Mpofu-Walsh’s objectives are theoretical and programmatic:

South Africa needs a way to define its crises that captures their historical roots, their present complexity, and their future trajectories in a single frame. Only once we identify the problem can we define liberation. By defining the new apartheid, I have tackled this task and, in so doing, sought to define a generational mission.

The idea of a “generational mission” originates in Frantz Fanon, and it is unsurprising that Mpofu-Walsh sees his own one as being in need of clarification. In Mpofu-Walsh’s summary from elsewhere:

When the “Must Fall” movement emerged in 2015, it shook the ANC’s “Rainbow Nation” rhetoric which had dominated South African politics since the end of apartheid. The Fallists exposed continuities between South Africa’s disappointing democratic present and its monstrous apartheid past, turning these issues into the country’s central political debate. South Africa’s universities, their colonial monuments and financial barriers, became prisms through which apartheid’s afterlives were sharply refracted.

But since the end of the “Must Fall” movements, there has been scant effort from its organic intellectuals to develop and apply “Fallist” arguments beyond the confines of the campus. As a former activist in #RhodesMustFall while a doctoral student at Oxford University, Mpofu-Walsh’s intervention is notable in this regard. It eschews the often turgid prose of the decolonization discourses usually associated with Fallism for straightforward argument, and adopts mostly a sociological register rather than a literary or philosophical one. This occurs, in significant part because Mpofu-Walsh dispenses with decolonization altogether as a political and analytical template. Instead, he argues for  “The New Apartheid” as the proper object of critique.

“Apartheid did not die, it was privatized” is the “simple thesis” that Mpofu-Walsh promises to pursue in TNA. At face value this is indeed a simple thesis. It contends that, under democracy, social hierarchies are shaped more by market forces than legal statutes. Or in Mpofu-Walsh’s slightly off kilter phrasing “privilege is now policed by price rather than prose.”. With these bearings, Mpofu-Walsh would appear to be departing the Fallist paradigm altogether and placing himself firmly in the grooves of a more conventional Left critique of the post-Apartheid regime, centered on the capitalist economy.

But this is not at all the path that the book takes. No sooner is Mpofu-Walsh’s simple thesis introduced than it is made considerably more complicated. In order to get at the privatization of Apartheid, he contends, we have to account for the way that it was also “de-legislated, digitised, fractalized, internalized, deracialized and de-territorialized.”

The book’s substantive chapters consequently span a bewildering array of themes and sub-topics. The first, on Space, explores the persistence of informalized segregation in urban areas,  the rise of student protests, the continued influence of traditional leaders, the emergence of a dual legal system and the failures of land reform.

The second chapter, titled “Law,” critiques the constitution’s conception of justice, argues that “private law facilitates privatized apartheid” and then swings into an analysis of the negotiated transition. A third chapter on “Wealth” examines the National Party’s early turn to neoliberalism, changing structures of ownership and finance post-Apartheid, the capture of the ANC by big business and the contours of recent macroeconomic policy. The fourth chapter on technology begins by comparing current forms of “digital categorization” (e.g. facial recognition) to Apartheid-era systems of surveillance. It then describes potential sources of bias in the algorithms of major digital platforms before launching into a headspinning disquisition on the “privatization of the self,” which touches on everything from genetic editing to the increased use of glass in corporate architecture to Adam Catzavelos. A final empirical chapter, “Punishment,” looks at why South Africa has such a persistently high crime rate and then examines various injustices and disparities in policing and incarceration.