244pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Cape Town, 2022
“Written with brutal honesty and humility through the lens of a green-eyed ‘coloured’ in a country where Lagardien has never belonged, the book gives us a powerful and searing portrait of the annihilating consequences of race and identity politics as it courses through the apartheid era and the moral decay of racial essentialism in present-day South Africa.” Malcolm Ray, The Tyranny of Growth
“Deeply intimate, always honest and with searing insight, Ismail is as interesting as the times to which he was a front row witness.” Max du Preez, founder of Vrye Weekblad and author of A Rumour of Spring: South Africa after 20 years of democracy and The world according to Malema.
Journalist and political economist Ismail Lagardien worked as a reporter and photojournalist for the Weekly Mail and Sowetan in the late 1980s. Currently he writes for Business Day, the Daily Maverick and Vrye Weekblad.