Content area
Full Text
Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa, by Jeremy Seekings and Nicoll Nattrass. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. 446 pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 0300108923.
Through much of recent history, South Africa has held the unenviable title of being one of the most unequal societies in the world. A long history of institutionalized racial inequality culminated in the apartheid system, created by the National Party after it took power in 1948. Under apartheid, a stark racial hierarchy was enforced through policies of racial residential segregation, unequal investment in schooling, and race-based restrictions on hiring and wages, ensuring a dramatic advantage for whites even through decades of major economic expansion. In 1994, the African National Congress was elected, committed to reducing entrenched racial inequality. In Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass skillfully draw together the limited available data sources to explain why inequality has failed to decline since the end of apartheid, despite the best intentions of the new government.
Seekings and Nattrass argue that even under the institutionalized racial discrimination of apartheid, the major axis of inequality shifted from race to class, leading to a cleavage between labor market "haves," those people with skills and social capital that ensure employment stability, and "have nots," those with little education, limited skills, and too few connections to urban areas and...