Two new books take different roads to understand South Africa

What happens when you live past a miracle? South Africa, in its transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy and societal integration, defied international expectations. But as with most end-of-history narratives, history didn’t end in South Africa, or anywhere, in 1994. What happens post-apartheid?

South Africa, in the words of Eve Fairbanks’s newly published volume, “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Awakening,” is fixed “both liv[ing] after history and … still drowning in it.” But according to Evan Lieberman, we can’t just hang our hats on the ambiguity of this situation. As he notes in his new book, “Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa after Apartheid,” whether South Africa is deemed “a case of success or failure has enormous implications for how we think about the promise of democracy more generally.”