Privileged Minorities: A History of Wealth Concentration in South Africa (Book talk)
Key information
- Date
- Time
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4:00 pm
- Venue
- Webinar
- Room
- Online
About this event
In Privileged Minorities, Mesrob Vartavarian examines a central paradox in South African history: how a nation shaped by anticolonial struggle became fertile ground for wealth concentration and enduring inequality.
While these contradictions are not unique to South Africa, its historical trajectory offers broader insights into persistent disparities across African societies. Vartavarian argues that the rise of privileged minorities—small, exclusive groups that dominate political and economic life—paralleled the development of successful anticolonial movements. These minorities secured exclusive advantages, defined as benefits and protections that enabled material accumulation. Such advantages included land seizures, racialized labor systems, access to coercive institutions, favorable regulatory environments, and targeted state expenditures. Though these mechanisms could foster overall economic growth, they disproportionately benefited select oligarchies and middle classes. The book traces how distinct sociocultural groups in South Africa navigated and negotiated these advantages from the Dutch colonial era through the rise and decline of African National Congress rule. Rather than dismantling minority privilege, challenges from marginalized groups often served to reshape entrenched advantages by incorporating new actors into existing structures. These dynamics produced composite systems of accumulation that sustained inequality.
About the Speaker
Mesrob Vartavarian has published extensively on the formation and evolution of power elites in the Global South. He has held research fellowships and teaching positions at Cornell University, Harvard University, and the University of California San Diego. He was also a consultant at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and is currently writing a comparative history of ruling oligarchies in postcolonial Nigeria, Kenya, and Zimbabwe for Verso’s Southern Questions series.
Discussant: Professor Adam Habib is Vice-Chancellor of SOAS University of London, as well as a scholar and public intellectual. He is a former Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, former Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Johannesburg, and former Professor of Development at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He co-founded the African Research Universities Alliance and is a member and fellow of several leading academies.
Image Credit: Tim Johnson via unsplash
Book Cover
