Learn 2024

South Africa is most famous for its system of apartheid and, recently, the relatively peaceful transition into a democratic ‘rainbow nation’. Many international sociology texts use apartheid in South Africa as an illustration of racial inequality, with several providing this as an example of a modern racial caste system of inequality. Other sociologists would argue that focusing on caste obscures the functions apartheid had for providing the ruling capitalists with cheap black labour. They, instead, emphasize the importance of class analysis. As New South Africa has matured, we now have nearly two decades of hindsight to consider what the transition from apartheid has meant for patterns of inequality in South Africa in terms of race, class, gender, ethnicity and race. Anybody can see that poverty is still a feature of South African social landscape. This was very much evident in the unrest of July 2021. There is a global rise in inequality, discrimination, social divisions and social stratification.  In this sense, South Africa is a microcosm of the world and cannot be understood in isolation. We must go beneath surface understandings of poverty, discrimination and inequality to examine the social processes and theories that explain why we have such an inequitable social order.