SHADES OF DIFFERENCE, Mac Maharaj and the struggle for South Africa

650pp., maps, paperback, First SA Edition, Penguin Books, Cape Town, 2025

ISBN: 9781776392476

First published in the USA in 2007.

Foreword by Nelson Mandela.

A biography of SACP and ANC member Mac Maharaj (b. 1935). Maharaj was arrested in Johannesburg in 1964 on charges of sabotage and imprisoned on Robben Island. On his release in 1976, he went into exile in Zambia. From 1988 to 1990 Maharaj worked underground in South Africa as part of the ANC's Operation Vula. He served as joint secretary of CODESA, as one of the joint secretaries of the Transitional Executive Council, and as Minister of Transport in the first democratic executive led by President Nelson Mandela. At the end of his term, in 1999, he retired from active involvement, relinquished his positions in the ANC, and joined FirstRand Bank as non-executive director.

"... one of those seminal works that every South African should read. If you have read Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and other annals of our struggle, it is imperative to add this one to your collection because it provides a vital thread to understanding South Africa, then, now and into the future." Musa Zondi, The Sowetan

"An original and important work ... An entry for the reader into a wider understanding of the elements of the Struggle, the contradictions that had to be overcome to bring us freedom." Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize laureate

Padraig O'Malley is the John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation at the McCormack Graduate School of Global and Policy Studies, University of Massachusetts, the founding editor of the New England Journal of Public Policy, and a visiting professor of political studies at the University of the Western Cape. He is the author of Biting at the Grave. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.