The Politics of the Ordinary

Richard Poplak has written a fine autobiography of a childhood during apartheid. More precisely, Poplak gives us an account of what it was like to grow up white, Jewish and almost totally oblivious of politics in Johannesburg between the year of his birth—1973—and 1990 when his family emigrated to Canada, just months before Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. His book clearly describes a life in what he calls “the miasmic fog that kept the country in darkness during the Apartheid years”: the fog of ideology that made it possible for white South Africans to avoid recognizing their brutal exploitation and oppression of the country’s black population. (The book’s title comes from a colloquialism for “Yes, no, man,” an equivocation in daily use in South Africa that seems to Poplak to epitomize the stance one has to adopt before South Africa’s contradictions.)