If there is one book to read before the elections on 22 April, it should be the study by RW Johnson, South Africa's Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid (Allen Lane/Penguin, published this month).

No other book has been written with such a realistic, researched, informed and deeply thought and felt response to South Africa's current predicament, its past over Johnson's adult lifetime and its possible routes into the future. Its accessible and elegant prose will be a revelation to many readers.

The two literary references in its title - to Aldous Huxley's imaginary vision of a future dystopian society, and to Alan Paton's South African lament of 1948 - are an indication of the cultural matrix that informs this study.

Though few in South Africa would care to acknowledge it, Johnson is probably the country's premier scholar/journalist.

A Rhodes Scholar in the Sixties, Emeritus Fellow and a politics tutor for more than 20 years at Magdalen College, Oxford, and based for the past 15 years in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, Johnson is one of the best informed and most trenchant analysts of South African political life. He returned from Oxford to South Africa in the early 1990s, where he had grown up and been educated as a youth, in order to become director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, founded in honour of the long-standing parliamentary critic of the apartheid government, Helen Suzman, who died at the turn of this year, aged 91.

As a young man, he was active in radical anti-apartheid politics while at the University of Durban in the early 1960s, a consequence of the radicalisation of white students which followed the massacre at Sharpeville. Security police arrived at his parents' house to arrest him during the mass police raids of July 1964, to find that he had left for Oxford on a British passport - he was born in Britain - a few days previously.

As one of the substantial network of South African political emigres in Britain over the next quarter century, he gained a sharp insight into Communist politics during a period lecturing at the Sorbonnne in Paris, while the French Communist Party was still strong - a stay which resulted in his study, The Long March of the French Left (1981). In addition to teaching at Magdalen in Oxford, he has also taught at Stanford University in California.

Like few other major writers on South Africa, he understands the decisive role of the South African Communist Party inside the African National Congress in its decades in exile. This brought Johnson attention abroad, though isolation, hostility and disdain within a politically-correct intellectual and academic milieu on his return to South Africa. Despite his credentials as the author of now seven books on South Africa, he has not once been invited to speak on the campus of any university in South Africa - a fate he has borne with resignation.

Johnson's wife, Professor Irina Filatova, taught African studies at university in Moscow until after the downfall of the Soviet Union and the ending of apartheid, and is co-editor of a two-volume collection of documents on the Communist Party of South Africa drawn from the Comintern archives, as well as a study of Russia-South African relations at the time of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). She is his sternest critic.

Johnson's study, How Long will South Africa Survive?, published in London in 1977, was the first book which took serious cognisance of reports (since verified) of purges and executions in exile within the now ruling party of Namibia, Swapo. A review in the LRB of the late Anthony Sampson's "authorised biography" of Nelson Mandela in August 1999, in which Johnson proposed the heresy that Mandela had indeed for a time been a member of the illegal SACP, was later confirmed by a former Central Committee member, Hilda Bernstein.

With Lawrence Schlemmer, he was co-editor of the study, Launching Democracy in South Africa: The First Open Election (1994), and he was co-editor (with David Welsh) of Ironic Victory: Liberalism in Post-Liberation South Africa, in 1998.

For someone now more read abroad than in South Africa (principally in the London Sunday Times and the London Review of Books), this new book will prove ground-breaking for South African readers, who are more accustomed to references to Johnson as "conservative" or "controversial" (these are among the more kindly epithets) than to his writing itself.

In a long (there are almost 700 pages) and well referenced book, both up-to-date (the preface is dated last November) and full of riches, I will refer only to two principal themes.

The first is Joe Modise, commander of Umkhonto weSizwe in exile and Minister of Defence in South Africa's first democratic government. Chapter 2 of Johnson's book is headed "Godfathers and Assassins", meaning "godfather" as in Corleone. A chilling chapter sub-heading reads: "Joe Modise - Father of the New South Africa".

Johnson follows Modise's career from township crime boss (head of the Spoilers) in Alexandra, east of Johannesburg, in the Fifties, through strongarm protector of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo in ANC politics in Johannesburg in the Fifties, to Umkhonto commander in exile in Zambia in the Sixties...to founder of the ANC's system of prison camps for dissidents and suspected apartheid state agents in a whole string of African states (principally its Gulag, Quatro, in northern Angola) ... to ANC crime boss in exile, supervising the traffic south of drugs and gems, and the traffic north of stolen "German take-aways" (Mercs and BMWs) ... to guerrilla leader who operated "hand in glove with the apartheid security police for years" (p.39) ... to the great spider at the centre of the web of the state arms deal of the 1990s, of which he was a principal beneficiary.

Johnson regards the Mbeki presidency in large part as a function of the Modise power nexus.

His effort to establish a possible link of some kind between Modise's intelligence "Family" and the assassination in 1993 of the former Umkhonto chief of staff, Chris Hani - a rival for Modise's subsequent post as Defence Minister, and of Mbeki to become Mandela's successor as President, a rival whom Modise had tried to have executed in Zambia in 1969 for writing a critical remonstrance stressing his high living and cruelty - does not provide enough evidence to convict, whether in a court of law or (yet) the court of history.

No other book yet written, however, brings together so much evidence of the political crime network that South Africa inherited with the return of the exiles. A turf war between competing exile syndicates, each located in different branches of Umkhonto weSizwe, is suggested as one of the underlying themes in the Zuma/Mbeki conflict at the ANC national conference at Polokwane in December 2007, and from both before then and continuing up to now.

The book provides clues as to the historical genesis of a matter as central as the subject of last Sunday's editorial in City Press. This stated: "The security forces seem to be seriously compromised. They seem to be divided between those loyal to Zuma and those against him. There is a need for a clean-up operation that will ensure that these agencies just do their work without meddling in politics." (5 April 2009.) No other book provides such clues about the history and nature of these competing "families" of spooks within the ANC, with "security" the crucial agency which controlled the criminal networks in exile and set the conditions for the arms deal.

In this light, Zuma's accession to Presidency of the state as former head of one of these ongoing secret intelligence networks is no small potatoes.

At a more general level, Johnson provides a concept that ought to become a subject for serious and frank discussion in South Africa, the concept of "failed colonisation".

At variance with the conceptual framework now orthodox in academic, media and political discourse in South Africa - that the period of European colonialism was one of unmitigated disaster - Johnson examines this historical heritage as one providing the possibility of successful advance towards modernity and full participation in the global economy. For this, in his first chapter, he cites Marx's article on "The British Rule in India" from the New York Daily Tribune of 25 June 1853, and argues: "The question is simply whether the innovative, indeed what Marx rightly saw as the revolutionary spirit of colonialism ‘took' or not. Put more crudely, it is simply the difference between going forward and going backwards: the key measures are whether life expectancy and GDP per capita improve, as they did under colonialism and apartheid." (p.11)

He cites India and Malaysia as countries which now "push powerfully ahead", and continues: "no one believes that successful development there has for a long time depended on white planters or administrators. The fact is that colonialism brought order, unity and modernity to these countries and that these gains have been preserved and built on in the era of independence, whereas in countries as different as Somalia and the Congo the order, unity and modernity of colonial times have been lost.

"In today's Zimbabwe, once one of Africa's most developed states with its best-educated populace, the question is often asked, ‘what did we have before candles?'; the answer is, ‘electricity'. In the Congo what were good roads at independence are at best cart-tracks now.

"This is what I mean by failed colonization." (pp.10-11)

This failure of modernity he sees would cause of a mass emigration of blacks, following the flight of whites and Asians, and should this begin to happen in South Africa "then we would indeed face another failed colonization. ...Should South Africa become another example of failed colonization then the implications for the continent for decades, even centuries ahead would be dire. For Asia and Latin America are developing fast. There would be no Third World community: Africa would stand increasingly alone in its poverty, its failure and its psychological defeat.

"Mbeki spoke of the twentieth century being ‘the African century'. This is already untrue: the rapid growth of China, India, Korea and Vietnam more or less guarantee that it will be Asia's century. There is no disgrace for Africa in that. But if South Africa fails, and thus Africa fails, long before the end of this century Africa will face a situation infinitely worse than it does now.

"Such a defeat would doom Africans to an indefinite further period of serving as a source of raw materials - human as well as mineral - for a world leaving it further and further behind, and in which its erstwhile Third World allies would increasingly regard it with scorn or pity. ...So great is the defensiveness aroused by this question that those who raise it are frequently accused of ‘wanting South Africa to fail' but nobody who thinks about it for long can possibly want this to happen." (p.12)

In a country facing a general election in two weeks, in which the whole public sector was now seen as "part of a gigantic spoils system", in which there has been a "huge criminalization of the state", in which the future President appeared from his own words to believe that the ruling party was "above the law, the constitution and mere humanity", and in which the arms deal of the Mbeki era had "poisoned the whole political system" (pp.644-66), these are the brave and honest reflections of a thinker who never toadied to those in power and whose life's energies are summed up in sober words.

As I write this appreciation, Bill Johnson - whom I feel honoured to call a friend - lies in hospital in Durban, having lost a leg to amputation. He only recently recovered consciousness. It is an irony of his life, and of this book, that he was infected by a deadly bacterium, necrotising fasciitis, the result in all likelihood of the failure to provide an adequate sewage disposal system in the neighbourhood of the rivers of Kwa-Zulu Natal.

It is no irony, however, that he provides an explanation even for this. In a chapter with the sub-heading "Developmental failures: Water and the IDT", he chronicles the well- predicted "cynical disaster" brought about the centralising ideology of Professor Kader Asmal at the Ministry of Water Affairs and Forestry. As he writes, "by 2000 there were major outbreaks of cholera, directly traceable to failures in sanitation and water supply. Such outbreaks had never occurred under apartheid." (pp.105-105)

Johnson has become a victim himself, along with hundreds of thousands of others, of the danger of a "failed colonisation" so comprehensively explained in this book.

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