Eusebius McKaiser, South African political analyst

Eusebius McKaiser, a South African writer and broadcaster who focused a sharp and often unsettling gaze on his nation’s struggles with apartheid’s legacy in race, politics, sexual violence, and identity, died Tuesday in Johannesburg. He was 44.

The cause was thought to be an epileptic seizure, according to his manager, Jackie Strydom.

This week, Mr. McKaiser completed a podcast excoriating the dominant African National Congress of President Cyril Ramaphosa and bemoaning the inability of the opposition to offer South Africans a viable electoral alternative.

In a continent where a growing tally of governments embrace homophobic policies and practices, Mr. McKaiser, who was openly gay, was a fierce defender of the same-sex rights enshrined in South Africa’s postapartheid constitution. In an article in Britain’s The Guardian in 2012, he wrote that “it is homophobia, rather than homosexuality, that is ultimately an embarrassment for Africa.”

As a leading public intellectual, he traced many of South Africa’s seemingly intractable social problems to the apartheid era, which came to a formal end with the election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first Black president in 1994. He shared those views with a broader Western audience, including in opinion articles in The New York Times.

Eusebius McKaiser was born March 28, 1979, in what was then called Grahamstown, South Africa. His father, Donald McKaiser, had been a long-serving member of the South African military and ran a small construction company after he retired from the army. His mother, Magdalene (Stevens) McKaiser, died in 2006.

Mr. McKaiser leaves his father; his partner, Nduduzo Nyanda; his sisters, Geniva and Marilyn McKaiser; and his stepmother, Valencia McKaiser.