Eusebius McKaiser, acerbic South African political analyst, dies at age 44

Eusebius McKaiser, a South African writer and broadcaster who took a sharp and often disturbing look at his country’s struggles with apartheid’s legacy of race, politics, sexual violence and identity, died in Johannesburg on Tuesday. He was 44.

According to his manager, Jackie Strydom, the cause was thought to be an epileptic seizure. His co-workers said that shortly before his death he had shown no symptoms of illness and had been working normally.

This week, Mr. McKaiser released a podcast in which he denounced President Cyril Ramaphosa’s dominant African National Congress and lamented the opposition’s inability to provide South Africans with a viable electoral alternative.

He urged his audience to blame the ANC for the country’s crumbling national power grid, which has operated for years with hours of blackouts across the country.

“The effects of blackouts are not random, natural occurrences,” he said. “They are the foreseeable consequences of corruption, state occupation, technocratic ineptitude and unethical and ineffective leadership by the government misled by the ANC.”

In a continent where more and more governments are embracing homophobic policies and practices, Mr. McKaiser, who was openly gay, a fierce defender of same-sex rights enshrined in South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution. In a 2012 article in Britain’s The Guardian, he wrote that “it is homophobia, rather than homosexuality, that ultimately embarrasses Africa.”

A leading public intellectual, he traced many of South Africa’s seemingly intractable social problems to the apartheid era, which formally came to an end with the election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first black president in 1994. He shared those views with a wider Western audiences, including in opinion articles in The New York Times.

Writing in 2012 about the rape of a 17-year-old woman by seven men, a crime captured on mobile phone video that outraged the nation, he said: “The incident provoked outrage because rape, and more generally sexual violence against women and children, is all too familiar to South Africans. It is a living scar of apartheid.”

Mr McKaiser addressed other social issues, most notably the persistence of racist attitudes, which he attributed to the violence of the apartheid era, when racial differences were enshrined in a white-drafted law that drew clean lines in society from cradle to grave . from residences to places of worship and burial.

His views were often divisive, especially in a country where radio talk shows provide a large portion of political discourse.

“I can’t think of any other broadcaster that has had such an impact, that has been able to arouse such intense emotions,” says Stephen Grootes, a fellow broadcaster and journalist. “So many people hated him. So many people loved him.”

Moshoeshoe Monare, the news manager of South African public broadcaster SABC, told Daily Maverickan online news broadcast that Mr. McKaiser had contributed to SABC’s “mission to reflect the diversity of opinions and our culture of openly debating our differences.”

“We will remember his courage to express unpopular views,” he added.

In “Run, Racist, Run: Journeys into the Heart of Racism,” a book published in 2015, more than two decades into the post-apartheid era, Mr. McKaiser that, as in the era of enforced segregation, both black and white people still tended to live segregated lives.

“Apartheid geography is as real as it’s ever been,” he said. And views on race also remained far apart, he said, engaging in an increasingly complex debate that raised issues of enduring privilege, rights and resentment.

While “not all whites were or are perpetrators of anti-black racism,” he said, “all whites have benefited and continue to benefit from the history of anti-black oppression.”

“Many white people are blind to the continued presence of racism,” he added, “and related to this blindness, many white people rationalize their ignorance into thinking that black people are obsessed with race.”

He did not exclude South Africa’s legendary literary landscape from criticism. “Go stalk the black minority writers at most local festivals and you will see a microcosm of apartheid geography,” he wrote.

Eusebius McKaiser was born on March 28, 1979 in what was then called Grahamstown, South Africa. Due to the colonial origins of the name – the town’s founder, Lieutenant Colonel John Graham, was a 19th-century British officer – it was renamed Makhanda in 2018.

His father, Donald McKaiser, was a longtime member of the South African Army and ran a small construction company after he retired from the army. His mother, Magdalena (Stevens) McKaiser, died in 2006.

Mr. McKaiser is survived by his father; his partner, Nduduzo Nyanda; his sisters, Geniva and Marilyn McKaiser; and his stepmother, Valencia McKaiser. Her sons, Mr. McKaiser’s half-brothers, died young: Timothy in early childhood and Owen in 2017 at age 21.

Under apartheid law, the family was classified as coloured, meaning mixed race, a category that suffered systematic discrimination but enjoyed more rights than black South Africans.

Mr. McKaiser attended Rhodes University in Grahamstown from 1997, earning a bachelor’s degree in law and philosophy, then a master’s degree in philosophy, before winning a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford in 2003. colonialist Cecil John Rhodes at his death in 1902.

Mr. McKaiser later supported the campaign to remove statues of Rhodes from the universities of Cape Town and Oxford, calling for a wider effort to change the institutional mindset of such places of learning to remove any vestiges of colonialism.

“The point is simple, but challenging: toppling the statues of racists is necessary, but not sufficient, to create an anti-racist society.” he wrote in The Guardian in 2020.

Mr. McKaiser was also known as a contest debater.

He started his career as a radio announcer with a late night talk show on Radio 702, a commercial station in Johannesburg, and worked for other stations including SABC3, a public television channel, and PowerFM, a talk radio station. In 2021, he launched a podcast called ‘In the Ring’.

He has published several books on politics and race, including “A Bantu in My Bathroom,” “Could I vote DA: A Voter’s Dilemma” (DA refers to the opposition’s Democratic Alliance), and “Run, Racist Run.”

Reflecting his reputation as a mentor to young South Africans, several accounts of his life highlighted one of his latest social media posts, which was inspired by Musa Motha, a 27-year-old South African amputee who had just reached the final of a UK talent show reaches. .

‘Stop what you’re doing. Right now,’ Mr. McKaiser wrote on Twitter shortly before his death. “You have to pay attention to this. Wow. I am speechless and had no more tears.”

“This,” he added, “is the inspiration you needed for this week.”