In White Boy Running, Christopher Hope explored what it looked like and felt to grow up in a country gripped by an 'absurd, racist insanity'. On a road trip thirty years later, Hope goes in search of today's South Africa; post the evils of apartheid, but also post the dashed hopes and dreams of Mandela. He finds a country still in the grip of a ruling party intent on only caring for itself to the exclusion of all others. Far from being a country where race issues have been eradicated, the racial divides permeate everything, with particular consequences for the once powerful white minority, whose very existence there is now in question. As the old imperial idols of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger are literally pulled from their pedestals in a mass yearning to destroy the past, Hope ponders the question, What next? Framed as a travelogue, this is a powerful and moving portrait of South Africa - and an elegy to a living nation, which is still mad and absurd.
