South Africa, as many close observers of its inner workings know, is a place of contradiction. It has long been so. Given the country's obvious racial history, the contradiction is at some levels perfectly comprehensible. But it is not without its puzzles. While the chasm between those with privilege and those without it has a racial character, belying this situation and giving it its less than legible obviousness are the continually confounding ways in which a number of factors work prior to, behind, alongside of and after ‘race’. They have the effect of calling us to pause each time we explain what the problem of South Africa is all about. How one makes sense of race is what drives Zimitri Erasmus's Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa. She writes with a searing commitment to being human. It is a text which continues in that distinctive South African tradition of engaged non-racial and anti-racist scholarship. Critical about that tradition is its refusal to take anything for granted – to never, in the first instance, work with social experiences at their surface level, and, in the second, to never apologise for the desire to understand life more deeply. It is about understanding the contradictions which surround race, but also how to live in relation to it. This approach produces, and I shall return to this below, what Erasmus describes as a ‘double politics’, the challenge of how to begin to work with the realness and unrealness of race.

Race Otherwise arrives at a time when we, as South Africans, find ourselves in this global hotspot of contradiction, adrift in all kinds of ways. Characterising this aimlessness, most troublingly, is the onset of a political and moral waywardness in our relationships with one another. These relationships are, paradoxically, the very areas of sociality around which we have begun to project for ourselves, in the community of the world's people, a kind of legitimacy, a right to speak, on issues of social difference and equality. Legitimated by the figures of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, South Africa presents itself to the world as a model of how to deal with the ugly global legacies of racism. Tolerance and dialogue have hallmarked this model.