Speaker

Jonny Steinberg

Jonny Steinberg

South African writer and scholar of crime, punishment, and power, known for immersive, novelistic non-fiction built on long fieldwork — 350 hours in police vans, years inside a maximum-security prison, a Somali refugee’s journey across East Africa. Born in Johannesburg, he was for nine years Professor of African Studies at Oxford and now teaches at Yale. Three of his books — Midlands, The Number, and Winnie and Nelson — have won South Africa’s premier non-fiction prize.

His best-known work, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (2023), reads a century of South African history through the marriage of Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela; it won the US National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and was shortlisted for the UK’s Wolfson History Prize. Tyler Cowen calls it one of the best books of the past decade and Steinberg one of the most underrated writers in North America. His method is consistent across subjects: read an institution or a person by what they actually do under pressure rather than by their formal role or reputation, and refuse to resolve a complicated figure into hero or villain. He is now writing an intimate biography of Cecil Rhodes.

Core positions

  • Policing happens by consent, or not at all. From fieldwork in South African police vans, he argues that formal authority is inert where the public does not want the police present; effective policing must be wanted or summoned, which is why officers avoid the crimes they exist to fight and cluster where they are called.
  • Institutions are best read from the ground up. Prison gangs governing by a century-old story, a liberation party captured by a frustrated provincial class, a state’s integrity lost the moment police serve a politician — each is understood through what its people do, not its mandate.
  • A biographer must hold contradiction, not resolve it. Beginning from a verdict of ‘bad person’ yields a bad book; Winnie Mandela’s cruelty and her deep capacity for love are, in his reading, one ‘psychic architecture’, and Nelson’s public serenity was a deliberate mask over private grief.
  • South Africa endures rather than collapses or flourishes. A stubborn liberal centre makes a Zimbabwe-style breakdown unlikely, but a broken civil service and an education system that cannot build human capital cap the country’s prospects at modest improvement.

In the wiki