Paradise Lost

Gregory Houston, PhD. (1998), University of KwaZulu-Natal, is a chief research specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council. His most recent publication is a co-edited volume, Society, Research and Power: A History of the Human Sciences Research Council from 1929 to 2019 (HSRC Press, 2021).Modimowabarwa Kanyane, D.Admin (2006), University of Pretoria, is an Executive Dean at the University of Venda. His most recent publication is a co-edited volume, Culture and Rural-Urban Revitalization in South Africa: Indigenous Knowledge, Policies and Planning (Routledge: London, 2021). Yul Derek Davids, PhD. (2010), Stellenbosch University, is a Research Director at the Human Sciences Research Council. He has published extensively and co-edited the South African Social Attitudes 2nd Report: Reflections on the Age of Hope Book (HSRC Press, 2010).

[...] Paradise Lost is an essential read for understanding South Africa’s inextricable and heartbreaking entanglement with its deep history of racist colonial and apartheid systems. Throughout each book chapter, each author strives to outline solutions or ways forward within their particular sites of research—from the possibilities and limits of Ubuntu and decoloniality (citing Ndlovy-Gatsheni), to calls for African knowledge production and raciolinguistic decolonial thinking, to the necessity of radical democratic politics. These essays culminate in Modimowarbarwa Kanyane’sthoughtful elaborations of the ways South Africans need to work towards decolonizing both white and black minds to create substantive equality, social justice, and national reconciliation. The strength of this collection, however, is in giving us the realities of both past and present as a platform for reimagining what South Africa could be. Ultimately, the paradox that Paradise Lost reveals is that South Africa must think with race in mind or the country will never move through or beyond racism.Kathryn Mathers, Duke University, in Research Africa Reviews Vol. 7 No. 1, April 2023, pp. 60-63