Privileged Minorities

South Africa's liberation struggle is often told as a story of privilege overturned. Mesrob Vartavarian asks a harder question: why did a country shaped by anticolonial resistance become such fertile ground for concentrated wealth? His answer turns on privileged minorities, small groups that dominate political and economic life by securing what he calls exclusive advantages. These range from land seizures and racialised labour systems to access to coercive institutions, favourable regulation and targeted state spending.

Tracing these arrangements from the Dutch colonial era to the rise and decline of ANC rule, Vartavarian shows how challenges from marginalised groups often reshaped privilege rather than dismantling it, folding new actors into old structures of accumulation. It is a clear and unsettling framework for anyone trying to understand why inequality outlasts liberation, in South Africa and across the continent.