“In probing this troubled and quiet past, van Vuuren productively ruptures a comfortable separation between the apartheid era and contemporary South Africa. ‘The current struggle against corruption in South Africa,” he concludes, “is undermined by a basic lack of appreciation of the nature of that corruption and the criminal networks that facilitate it—namely, that they are continuities of a profoundly corrupt system that predates the first democratic election.'”

~Andrew Offenberger, Assistant Professor of History at Miami University