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Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa

In the mid-1990s, during South Africa’s transition to democracy, Mark became celebrated as a journalist for his weekly “Mark Gevisser Profiles” in the Mail & Guardian, which are collected here in a 1998 anthology.  Portraits of Power captures the transition 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 the years immediately after the 1994 elections that brought Nelson Mandela to power.

Reviews.

  • Mark Behr, author of The Smell of Apples

    “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.”

  • -  Sarah Nuttall, South African Review of Books

    “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.”

  • - Anthea Garman, Rhodes University

    “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.”