Nyamnjoh's book #RhodesMustFall: nibbling at resilient colonialism in South Africa has at its centre a man and his symbolism: Cecil John Rhodes, his statue that previously stood in the grounds of the University of Cape Town (UCT), and what he most recently came to represent during the nationwide student protests of 2015 and 2016. Even while ‘[a] monument, however imbued with symbolism, cannot capture everything wrong with a country’ (p. 197), using the statue and its subject as a core theme allows Nyamnjoh an historically informed commentary on contemporary South Africa and its (lack of) relationality to the wider African region. One finishes the book with a deep understanding of the discourses that organize daily life and public culture in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa.

One of the most powerful points of this book is its detailed documentation of what it means in practice to emerge from the trauma of apartheid. Nyamnjoh draws on Ben Okri to highlight the urgent temporality that characterizes postcolonial nation building, such that ‘we go from tearing down the unacceptable to building the desirable without a break in the dance’ (Okri quoted on p. 207). The 1994 settlement and the ensuing Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Nyamnjoh reminds us, were not intended as an end point but as a starting point, as enabling the beginning of a tentative new mutuality in the country. The student protests around which this book emerged show us the failures of ensuing processes of restitution.

To read Nyamnjoh's book is to take a break in Okri's postcolonial dance. Nyamnjoh gives us a moment in which to ask hard (sometimes almost unthinkable) questions of contemporary South Africa, questions that are deeply informed by Nyamnjoh's knowledge of wider African struggles for decolonization. Take race – in South Africa, race matters, and it is inextricably enfolded in social class, so that ‘the intersection of class and race in South Africa seldom hides for long. Thought and action are instinctively black and white’ (p. 201). But Nyamnjoh reminds us of other milieus, where we can think about race as one attribute among many; where identity and citizenship are never complete but always becoming, in relation to those around us. To rethink that which we have inherited, he reminds us, takes humility as well as courage and creativity. These are messages that matter within the smaller-scale collegiality of UCT, and out into wider society as a whole.

In earlier work, Nyamnjoh has argued that whiteness in South Africa has tended to be under-researched and under-articulated.Footnote ¹ This book takes on the challenge and opens with a deep dive into whiteness. Nyamnjoh's opening historical chapter is on Rhodes himself, and how the hierarchies of and within whiteness and blackness that we live with in South Africa today emerged at that moment in history. The chapter is a powerful reminder of why we need to dig deep into our histories to change the present. For the last few years, I have been recommending this book to white colleagues and friends, as I think it provides an essential interrogation of whiteness that serves as an entry point into some of the hard conversations that we do not often have. UCT has now taken formal steps towards articulating whiteness, asking through its Transformation Office that white colleagues do the work of decentring whiteness at the institution, rather than leaving it to black colleagues alone.Footnote ² This is a welcome move; nonetheless, there is much work left to do at an institutional and national level if we wish to move towards mutuality rather than difference in South Africa. Nyamnjoh reminds us: ‘It may be up to every South African to be the change to which they aspire. However, that change can only come about if whites and whiteness as epitomes of privilege and supremacy in South Africa move from quibbles and rhetoric to substantive gestures of inclusivity through significant recirculation of wealth’ (p. 207).

Five years on from the publication of this book, in the midst of a global pandemic, I am left wondering if the pandemic has given any impetus to such necessary economic inclusivity, or if it has driven South Africans even more deeply into the ‘ever diminishing circles of inclusion’ (p. 32) that form part of our colonial heritage. It seems clear that the work of decolonizing the country – both in terms of the hierarchies that exist inside our heads and in terms of the concomitant social realities – cannot be done without significant economic redress, such as the introduction of a universal basic income grant that affords a dignified life to all.Footnote ³ Has the urgency created by the pandemic got South Africa any closer towards this goal? And who would be encompassed within its so-called universality: would even a basic income grant be enough, if South Africa maintains its narrow notions of citizenship that Nyamnjoh so eloquently critiques, such that the basic humanity of migrants is not recognized?

Nyamnjoh's book reminds us that the categories we live by and with need not be real, if we have the courage to think and act past them, and that any rhetoric of decolonization needs to widen beyond zero-sum binaries of whiteness versus blackness and citizens versus makwerekwere if it is to succeed.