In The Politics of Evil, Clifton Crais provides a unique interpretation of South African history and a fresh approach to the study of power, culture and resistance in the modern world. Encompassing all of South Africa's history in his analysis, Crais examines the formation of an authoritarian political order and the complex ways people understood and resisted the colonial state. He explores state formation as a cultural and political process as well as a moral problem and he looks at indigenous concepts of power, authority and evil, analysing how they shaped cross-cultural encounters and the making of a colonial order. Apartheid represented one of the great evils of the twentieth century. This book reveals how the victims of apartheid understood the triumph of this evil in their lives as they elaborated rich and at times violent visions of a just world. Professor Crais concludes by looking at political transition, the challenges to creating a durable democracy and the persistence of evil in South Africa.

Prizes

Winner of Ohio Academy of History Book Prize 2004

"The Politics of Evil is a pathbreaking book, sure to generate discussion among historians of South Africa." History: Reviews of New Books
"This innovative new book broadens South African political history in vital ways by allowing historical African ideas and practices to help determine what constitutes politics. The result is a vivid exploration of the cross-cultural production of an authoritarian colonial order. The value of The Politics of Evil lies in the [Clifton Crais's] determination to ground this rich political imagination in the dynamism of material life. Meticulously researched, convincingly argued, and engagingly written, The Politics of Evil will, no doubt, stand as a landmark study in South African history and the history of colonial politics more broadly." Julie Livingston, Rutgers University
"[T]his is a compelling meditation on several of the key forces that shaped the history of South Africa's Eastern Cape--the Ciskei and the Transkei.... Highly recommended." Choice

Clifton Crais is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Emory University. He is author of over one hundred works, including Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa(Cambridge, 2011); Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (2008) - on the woman more famously known as the 'Hottentot Venus' and the subject of a feature film, 'Venus Noire' - and White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865 (Cambridge, 1992). He is also editor of The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (2003), co-editor of Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (1995) and Area Editor of the Encyclopedia of World History (8 volumes, 2008). Crais is also the author of History Lessons (2014), a work that combines memoir, historiography and the neuroscience of memory, and a documentary history of South Africa. Long-range works include a history of violence and explorations of fiction and creative non-fiction concerning memory and narrative.