Published in 1998, Portraits of Power captures the moment Portraits of Power captures the moment of South Africa’s transition to majority rule in forty elegant, sharp and intimate profiles of people with power.
Premiers, ministers, showmen, conmen, mothers, generals and chiefs: Gevisser’s celebrated and controversial weekly Mail & Guardian columns get behind the public personae of South Africa’s leaders. Portraits of Power provides a profound insight, psychological and political, into the nature of power – and the volatility of its transfer – in in the years immediately after the 1994 elections that brought Nelson Mandela to power.
“Gevisser… marshals his words like the delicate and precise tools of a plastic surgeon to peel away the masks of people usually presented as the mere sources of statements, comments, or actions… He gives us a nuanced, subjective and emphatic insight into the authentic people behind the news and what drives them, in a subtle and creative way that rises above journalese into compelling and delightful reading….. One of the most incisive and compelling writers in South Africa today.” - Kader Asmal, in his Foreword.
Reviews.
“Vaulting language, political confidence, and a convincing ability to employ both huge and tiny pen strokes… I can barely imagine political journalism in this country without his trenchant voice.”
- Mark Behr, author of The Smell of Apples
“Gevisser… captures the rickety heartland of the new nation; the instability itself, which he teases out, is what generates interest, the poignancy and vitality of the peoples’ lives he describes… He has a real talent for reaching into the moral dilemmas which confront and preoccupy his subjects.”
- Sarah Nuttall, South African Review of Books
“Gevisser played a large… ethical role in the post apartheid public sphere, one in which he provided credible interlocutors for white South Africans to move out of the echo chamber of their own beliefs and assumptions about black-run governments and institutions…. This was both a political and ethical act and a very interesting contribution to make in terms of using literary-inflected journalism in the work of reconciliation on South Africa.”