Anatomy of South Africa by Richard Calland

Politics in South Africa is alive and vibrantly so, although the media often fail to reflect this. This book’s main aim is to bring that political world to life. It presents a vivid, up-to-date picture of how power works in the new South Africa and who really makes the decisions around here. It is people who make politics, and this is a book about personalities as well as the institutions they belong to.

Discussing topics such as the presidency, the cabinet and the directors-general, the opposition parties, the parliamentary committees and the ANC alliance partners, Calland takes the reader along the corridors of power, mixing vivid anecdote with solid research. The result is an accessible yet authoritative account of who runs South Africa, and how, today. The title is borrowed from Anthony Sampson’s seminal work about who ran Britain, Anatomy of Britain, which was first published in the early 1960s.

Like Sampson before him, Richard Calland has a fly-on-the-wall, insider’s approach to the people who control the power that affects us all.