After Mandela and Mbeki—The Future of South Africa

Mark Gevisser is one of South Africa’s leading nonfiction writers. His sweeping biography of former South African president Thabo Mbeki, just published in America under the title A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, won South Africa’s top literary prize, the Sunday Times Alan Paton award.

Gevisser is the South Africa correspondent for the Nation, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, the Village Voice, and the Guardian. He is also a curator; his latest exhibition, at Johannesburg’s Constitution Hill, examines the history of Johannesburg through the lives of eight of its gay, lesbian, and transgendered inhabitants.

Before coming to the New York Times in 2007, Marcus Mabry served as a Newsweek correspondent for 20 years. Among the posts he held was Johannesburg bureau chief and, later, chief of correspondents, overseeing 40 reporters. He is the author of Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power, and the memoir White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas: Coming of Age Black in White America. He is a frequent commentator on CNN and NPR.

As an Open Society Fellow, Jonny Steinberg wrote Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City (Jonathan Cape, 2011) about a Liberian diaspora community in a Staten Island housing project and the memories of civil war they carried with them to New York. The book narrates a history of the war as seen through the eyes of those fighting out its aftermath in a foreign country.

 Steinberg currently works as a senior researcher at the Institute for the Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, and is writing a book on the role of fear in shaping South African statecraft, past and present. His previous books look at everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy. Two of them, Midlands (Jonathan Ball, 2002), about the murder of a white farmer, and The Number (Jonathan Ball, 2004), about crime and punishment in Cape Town’s ghettos, won South Africa’s premier nonfiction literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize.

Steinberg has written extensively on South Africa’s criminal justice system for the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg. He has a doctorate in political theory from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.