Saturday, May 16, 2026 4:30 PM

Location:
A Cappella Books
208 Haralson Avenue, NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30307

"This riveting book moves beyond a predominantly state-centric understanding of Western support for apartheid to reveal how everyday actors in the United States and South Africa organized in defense of apartheid. While these campaigns eventually failed, they prefigured present-day transnational far-right networking. A crucial book for analyzing twenty-first-century global white supremacism.” —Christi van der Westhuizen, author of “White Power and the Rise and Fall of the National Party”


A Cappella Books welcomes Atlanta author Augusta Dell’Omo for an in-store talk and signing in honor of her new book, “Saving Apartheid: White Internationalism at the End of the Cold War.”

This event is free and open to the public; copies of the book will be available for purchase.

About the Book

During the 1980s, as global antiapartheid sentiment grew, an international coalition of far-right activists arose to preserve racial hierarchy in South Africa and beyond. This groundbreaking book tells the story of how a transatlantic pro-apartheid movement attempted to defend white rule in South Africa—and forged enduring links between global conservatism and white power.

By mapping an international network of white supremacist organizations, Augusta Dell’Omo reveals a fundamental shift in far-right organizing in response to changing geopolitical realities. The pro-apartheid movement brought together a range of figures who sought to influence the conservative Western governments they saw as allies. As antiapartheid activism grew, the South African regime crumbled, and the post–Cold War order took shape, apartheid’s defenders adapted their ideology for a colorblind, human rights–centric, and neoliberal world. Their successes and failures shaped the antistatist trajectory of white supremacist organizing in the 1990s and beyond, planting the seeds for a global resurgence of the far right.

“Saving Apartheid” ranges from Reagan’s Oval Office to South Africa’s bantustans and from white women’s grassroots organizing to evangelical broadcasting, illuminating how an unlikely coalition reimagined white supremacy. Uncovering the surprising influence of apartheid’s defenders, this book offers a prehistory of the present.


About the Author

Augusta Dell’Omo is a historian of global conservatism and the far right. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.