CRITERIA: NON-FICTION AWARD The winner should demonstrate the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integ

Thula Simpson’s History of South Africa: From 1902 to the Present (Penguin) has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Awards non-fiction prize, in partnership with Exclusive Books. Simpson anwers some questions about his book.

What new insights did this book reveal?

My first book, Umkhonto We Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle, drew largely on records that only became available post1994. The research made me aware of the untapped information that carries relevance beyond the limits of the ANC’s armed struggle, and can therefore help us to understand the origins of the new SA. My new book explores those new sources in depth, but it also revisits the key events that have informed most general histories of the country. It reinterprets those episodes by drawing on insights that the post-apartheid era has granted us regarding the longerterm significance of said events.

How do you decide what to include and exclude, and how much time do you spend on structuring the book?

There are many aspects of contemporary South African life that would have bewildered previous generations, but the opposite also holds: 20th-century SA was replete with intractable “questions” and insoluble “problems” that have lost their resonance. Such contrasts make the past interesting, but writing in the present shaped my decisions over what material to incorporate.

What were your sources for the research?

The vast range of archival material declassified after apartheid formed one key category. Another were established archives that I sought to interrogate with new questions. A third category is digital records created to organise and generate publicity. Developments such as data hacks, hashtag movements, and citizen journalists have placed primary material into the public domain. Then there is the vast secondary literature produced by those with knowledge of events discussed in the book.

The most difficult part of writing the book?

Undoubtedly, taking events “to the present”. Since I began writing the book in the mid2010s, this involved keeping track with unfolding developments over a number of years, while simultaneously developing the larger synthesis of SA’s longer-term history.

What are the greatest challenges facing SA, and how should they be tackled?

The chapter titled “Rainbow Nation” begins by considering the first 90 days of the postapartheid dispensation. You can see in embryo a number of the challenges that have come to define the new dispensation.

A transformation as dramatic as that which SA experienced in the early ’90s could hardly be expected to leave the domestic political landscape unchanged. A key test facing the country would be of its capacity to adjust to new challenges.

Do politicians pay enough attention to history and should they? “They” or “we”? The question is important to SA’s future. Having ostensibly rejected the alternatives of one-person and minority rule, we invoke them by adopting the most limited, spectatorial conception of popular sovereignty imaginable. In the same way as under an autocratic system you can have a wise monarch or a cruel despot, and under minority rule an enlightened aristocracy or a corrupt oligarchy, there is also good and bad in democracy. The degree of each depends on us as citizens to pay enough attention to history.

In what way do you think the book “illuminates truthfulness”?

Among the factors that motivated my writing of this book was being assigned responsibility for lecturing “The Rise and Fall of Segregation and Apartheid” to university students who have only experienced the post-apartheid years.

The need to revisit the question of the relationship between past and present only became more acute as the country’s slowburning social, political and economic crisis unfolded in the following years.

At its best, the book shows that with the aid of the vast quantity of new sources that have become available to us as a consequence of the great liberalisation of South African life post-1994, we can begin tackling that task.