Some of South Africa’s finest academic minds look back at twenty years of democratic rule.

How far have we really come? Is race still an entrenched issue in our country? Why does gender discrimination continue? Why are the poor in revolt? Is free expression under threat? What happened to South African Marxism? What drives Julius Malema? How have the unions experienced the post-apartheid years?

These (and many other) questions run through pages that, amongst other things, bring back the voices of both Neville Alexander and Jakes Gerwel. Analytical and accessable, this book continues a long tradition of engaging South Africa’s politics and society in a non-partisan, but critical, fashion.

It opens the way for innate explanations and provides insights that lie beyond the workaday accounts on offer by pundits.

This rich volume not only deals with political traditions but gives attention to religious and communal intellectual practices. The scope covers interpretations of traditions such as African nationalism, Afrikaner thought, Black Consciousness, Christianity, feminism, Gandhian ways, Hinduism, Jewish responses, liberalism, Marxism, Muslim voices, Pan Africanism and positivism. `Only by rethinking the ideas that made us can we re-imagine the world,’ says editor Peter Vale. The book’s real value comes from the fact that it takes a great leap to rectify large gaps in South Africa’s historiography. Powerful ideas, institutions and individuals have been central to various colonising and apartheid projects to directly control and subordinate much of the population. This form of extreme social engineering often fails, and generated unintended and unforeseen spaces for individual agency and competing ideas. The result was that even completely totalitarian systems of rule cannot completely stamp out individual human ingenuity and imagination.