PROMISES AND PERIL: The South African Crisis

“This book details the rise of the two different competing futures of South Africa: emboldened fascism or grassroots democracy organised around its resilient social movements.”
Adam Habib

“A fascinating and frank exploration of South Africa’s political crisis, and the delicate hope that still survives within it.”
Sizwe Mpofu – Welsh

SYNOPSIS

PROMISES AND PERIL: The South African Crisis is part memoir but mainly political analysis, weaving together personal experience with a critical account of the country’s ongoing crisis.

Drawing on influences from luminaries in South Africa and global thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Ali Shariati and others, Buccus examines how the promise of liberation gave way to corruption, inequality and repression.

Ultimately, PROMISES AND PERIL: The South African Crisis is a call to recover the moral clarity of the liberation struggle, to link local struggles with global justice, and to forge a politics that serves the many rather than the few.

FOREWORD

This work by Imraan Buccus is a deceptively accessible read for any audience, especially those in the trenches for justice in a rapidly changing world. It is a compelling work that makes a robust argument for both the promise and perils facing South Africa and the world. It contains neither excessive idealism nor despair, but a realism about the the challenges, while attempting to develop a toolkit that is unapologetically located on the left of the ideological spectrum, tempered by the persistent fault lines that have long beset the left.

— Ebrahim Rasool was South Africa’s ambassador to the United States from 2010 to 2015, and again in 2025 under the presidency of Donald Trump. He was declared a persona non grata by President Trump and expelled for describing him as a supremacist and refusing to have South Africa withdraw its charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice. (ICJ)