DO SOUTH AFRICANS EXIST? Nationalism, democracy and the identity of 'the people'

261pp., paperback, Johannesburg, 2007

"Philosophically grounded, theoretically nuanced, politically controversial and yet urgently relevant, Do South Africans Exist? contains within its pages the four elements necessary to make it an absolute 'must read'. Focussed on the question of what constitutes South Africanness, what makes us a nation, its argument is relevant to probably every major debate about contemporary South Africa. Ultimately this book is about the South African political experiment and the potential for its consolidation." Adam Habib, Director of SOAS, University of London

"Do South Africans Exist? makes a spiky, original and distinctive contribution to the existing literature on nationalism and nation-building in South Africa. It traverses several disciplines - political philosophy, historical political science, and critical theory - and in doing so, reintroduces the particular case of African nationalism into the more general understanding of nations and nationalism. Chipkin uses lively, forceful prose to handle complex issues." Colin Bundy, Green College, Oxford

Ivor Chipkin is the founding director of the Public Affairs Research Institute linked to the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town. A former associate professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, he currently works with a think-tank on Government and Public Policy (GAPP). He is one of the authors (with Mark Swilling and others) of Shadow State, the Politics of State Capture.