History in Five: At the beginning of the book, you write about your upbringing in Virginia and your fascination with the Civil War. How did that curiosity inform your decision to write about South Africa and apartheid as an adult?

Eve Fairbanks: I was a child during what I think is a strange and still under-considered decade—the 1990s in America. My high-school friends and I, born in the early ‘80s, had few or no visceral memories of so many kinds of conflicts that we learned in history books had defined America: the Cold War, legalized racial segregation, the ideological battle between communism and capitalism. It was as if a slate had been wiped clean—or it was supposed to have been wiped clean.

My father played a very small role in wiping it clean. He worked for the Ronald Reagan administration to defeat communism. And yet I have such a strong memory of how lost he seemed when I was young. I was told America had won the Cold War, but he acted like someone who had been defeated. It was one of those first experiences of the world that’s paradoxical and makes you think: “There’s something about my society that I don’t understand.” My parents and their friends were also politically conservative, and they dreaded Bill Clinton and spoke as if the America they loved was vanishing.

When I first started reading South African writers in the 2000s, the tone felt similar. Some of the history was so familiar: Jim Crow was the explicit model for South African apartheid. But apartheid got so extreme that South Africans of all political persuasions legitimately feared it couldn’t end without an all-out civil war between Black and white people. In many ways, the peace that came after apartheid’s end, the rapid integration of universities and the civil service, was and is a total miracle. Yet people felt overwhelmed by feelings of disorientation and loss—Black as well as white people.

It’s also a free-speaking society where people say the kinds of things Americans still keep quiet or say via euphemism out loud. Things like how they feel about people of other races, or how disappointed they are in democracy, or how terrified they feel that their once-dominant tribe is becoming less dominant. It was a huge relief to move to South Africa from the U.S. When I did, in 2009, I felt American political discussions were becoming at once more urgent and more veiled—more anchored to abstract and dire predictions about the future than to observations about what was really happening.

Hin5: How did you connect with Dipuo, Malaika, and Christo? What made you decide to make their stories the focus of your book?

EF: I met Christo, a white soldier-turned-lawyer, first. He was involved in the prominent court case that’s in the second half of The Inheritors. In the South African newspapers I read, he was presented as a kind of shadowy figure, like the types of secret back-room powerbrokers or influencers Americans imagine hold immense power behind the scenes—i.e. the anonymous Gab account that’s “driving the narrative” or some often-faceless advisor puppeteering the president. Christo was that type of figure in South Africa, and I wanted to know what it was like to be that person.

He also had a way of putting things that wasn’t sophisticated in a taught fashion but was quite deep. I know somebody’s worth writing about if I find myself relating stories about their life or things they’ve said to me at dinner parties, and other people say, “Wow, that’s exactly how I feel.” No one person can speak for a whole community. And writing about a big problem or a whole country through a handful of individuals can be problematic. But some people just do speak powerfully to communal feelings.

That’s the reason I chose Dipuo and Malaika, too. Malaika I met through her involvement in student protests against racism on elite South African college campuses. When I interviewed her, she told me she hadn’t seen her mother, Dipuo, in a very long time, and so we’d have to do the interview while driving around with Dipuo. I was briefly disappointed—I didn’t know Dipuo. But as soon as I met her, I knew I wanted to write about her at length. What I didn’t do was search for people in specific roles—a certain kind of politician, a certain type of person struggling to get a job, etc. I don’t think searching too directly for a representative character works for a nonfiction book. A figure who can carry a book has to be someone you—the writer—just want to meet again and again and again, and you’re most likely to stumble across someone like that organically.

Hin5: The book asks what really happens after a country resolves to end white supremacy. Did the hopes and fears South Africans had about the end of apartheid come to pass? Why or why not?

EF: I think most South Africans would say that the aftermath of apartheid is absolutely nothing like what they expected. It’s not that people got it wrong so much as that nobody can really imagine how they’ll feel when they get what they want or when they have to face what they feared. That might sound banal, but it’s a powerful lesson I learned. Big change makes people different. So some of the feelings white and Black South Africans had towards each other—the suspicion, the anger, the fear—changed rapidly after apartheid’s end.

But in another way, the fear people had before apartheid ended still deeply informs their feelings now. It turns out that fear, in a strange way, can be something quite precious to people. Because it feels like something they’ve foreseen, something they’ve understood. It’s very hard to give up a fear or to admit it was, in retrospect, baseless, even ignorant. Sometimes I feel South Africans reflexively see the chaos and breakdown they feared could erupt in the mid-‘90s as if it’s still about to come to pass, as if it’s hologrammed over reality.

Hin5: How do you think South Africa will continue to grapple with the legacy of apartheid in the future?

EF: I think there’ll be a fascinating change in a couple of decades, at the point at which most working-age South African adults don’t remember apartheid. That’s not the case now. Even now, some of the issues that defined the country for centuries are starting to become irrelevant: the median white South African household is still much wealthier than the median Black South African one, but this gap is closing. Under apartheid, Black South Africans effectively could not own a business or—with rare exceptions—attend a high-quality university. That’s changing. Malaika was born two years before apartheid’s end, and her friends are somewhat less interested in the country’s racial dynamic than their elders were—which actually leaves some white South Africans sort of bereft, because it’s a loss of attention.

But I also think The Inheritors is incredibly worth a read for anyone who doesn’t believe in the concepts of so-called “systemic” or “structural” racism. It’s much easier to see here the idea that Europeans or their descendants are history’s superior people is knit into the country’s economy, its landscapes, where the highways and electric plants are, even what face people of all races will still instinctively trust when they see it at their front door—even though Black people now run South Africa, politically speaking. And actually, overt racism—derogatory language, outright discrimination—can actually fade quite substantially while forms of living and thinking that it created remain. It’s like a very old house with too-small windows, wrong-sized rooms, tilted floors, no heat vents—you can’t renovate or the whole structure will be compromised, but it’s not at all right for the current inhabitants.

In South Africa, an economy premised on extreme inequality originally came into being to facilitate white people’s superior position. Now, white people are less and less viewed as superior. However, the unequal economy and ideas like that the extremely wealthy deserve their wealth or that those who don’t have money have personally failed are still here. The intellectual and physical structures that racism created can be decoupled from racism and yet still exist as things that trap the country from changing or developing as it should. In South Africa, the question “Why are we living like this?”—why is there still so much poverty? why is there still so much joblessness?—is becoming increasingly hard to answer.

Hin5: What would you like readers to take away from The Inheritors?

EF: I always loved reading studies about twins or siblings reared apart who then meet in mid-life. I’m fascinated by how much of themselves they recognize in each other and how they understand themselves better by meeting each other. South Africa has siblings, so to speak, all over the world—new democracies, societies reared on the premise that “the West is best,” countries living on the presumption that a group in power can never share it lest they be subject to terrible vengeance, places struggling with a demographic shift between people of differing ethnic or religious backgrounds. I’d like readers to think about their own societies.