Why did the ANC fail to deliver redistribution? A review of Shadow of Liberation by Vishnu Padayachee and Robert van Niekerk (Wits University Press: Johannesburg, 2019)

South Africa’s apartheid regime created terrible inequalities in incomes and wealth. The ANC’s objective as set out in the Freedom Charter and elsewhere was a South Africa where the entire people of the country could enjoy not just equality under the law, but also within the economic sphere. Why on earth was the vast wealth that the white minority had accumulated and protected under apartheid rule not redistributed? Some transitional phase might be expected, but 25 years? These are the questions that two long-standing ANC members and activists aim to answer in their book, Shadow of Liberation. Part of the explanation – Padayachee and van Niekerk argue – is that the ANC had not, over the years, paid sufficient attention to analysing the South Africa economy and what would be required to transform and diversify it, to move from the inequalities of apartheid to a less unequal society – as envisaged in the Freedom Charter.