Eusebius McKaiser, a South African author and broadcaster who centered a pointy and infrequently unsettling gaze on his nation’s struggles with apartheid’s legacy in race, politics, sexual violence and id, died on Tuesday in Johannesburg. He was 44.

The trigger was considered an epileptic seizure, in accordance with his supervisor, Jackie Strydom. His associates stated he had proven no signs of sickness instantly earlier than his loss of life and had been working as traditional.

This week, Mr. McKaiser accomplished a podcast excoriating the dominant African National Congress of President Cyril Ramaphosa and bemoaning the lack of the opposition to supply South Africans a viable electoral different.

He enjoined his listeners responsible the A.N.C. for the nation’s crumbling nationwide electrical energy grid, which for years has operated with hours of rolling blackouts throughout the land.

“The effects of blackouts aren’t random, natural events,” he stated. “They are foreseeable consequences of corruption, state capture, technocratic ineptitude and unethical and ineffectual leadership by the A.N.C.-misled government.”

In a continent the place a rising tally of governments embrace homophobic insurance policies and practices, Mr. McKaiser, who was overtly homosexual, was a fierce defender of the same-sex rights enshrined in South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution. In an article in Britain’s The Guardian in 2012, he wrote that “it is homophobia, rather than homosexuality, that is ultimately an embarrassment for Africa.”

As a number one public mental, he traced lots of South Africa’s seemingly intractable social issues to the apartheid period, which got here to a proper finish with the election of Nelson Mandela because the nation’s first Black president in 1994. He shared these views with a broader Western viewers, together with in opinion articles in The New York Times.

Writing in 2012 about the rape of a 17-year-old woman by seven men, against the law that was captured on cellphone video and outraged the nation, he stated: “The incident elicited an outcry because rape, and more generally sexual violence against women and children, is all too familiar to South Africans. It’s a live scar from apartheid.”

Mr. McKaiser tackled different social points, notably the persistence of racist views, which he ascribed to the violence of the apartheid period, when racial distinctions have been written right into a physique of white-drafted regulation that drew inflexible strains throughout society from cradle to grave, from locations of residence to locations of worship and burial.

His views have been typically divisive, significantly in a rustic the place radio speak exhibits yield a lot of the grist of political discourse.

“I can’t think of another broadcaster who had such an impact, who has been able to generate such intense emotions,” stated Stephen Grootes, a fellow broadcaster and journalist. “So many people hated him. So many people loved him.”

Moshoeshoe Monare, the chief for news at South Africa’s public broadcaster, SABC, told Daily Maverick, a web-based news outlet, that Mr. McKaiser had contributed to SABC’s “mission to reflect the diversity of opinions and our culture of openly debating our differences.”

“We will remember his courage to express unpopular views,” he added.

In “Run, Racist, Run: Journeys into the Heart of Racism,” a guide printed in 2015, greater than 20 years into the post-apartheid period, Mr. McKaiser wrote that, as within the period of enforced racial separation, each Black and white individuals nonetheless tended to dwell segregated lives.

“Apartheid geography is as real as it has ever been,” he stated. And perceptions about race, too, remained far aside, he stated, becoming a member of a debate that grew to become ever extra tangled, bearing on questions of tolerating privilege, entitlement and resentment.

While “not all whites were or are perpetrators of anti-Black racism,” he stated, “all whites benefited and still benefit from the history of anti-Black oppression.”

“Many whites are blind to racism’s continued presence,” he added, “and, related to this blindness, many whites rationalize their ignorance by thinking that Black people are race-obsessed.”

He didn’t exclude South Africa’s fabled literary panorama from criticism. “Go stalk the minority Black writers at most local festivals and you will see a microcosm of apartheid geography,” he wrote.

Eusebius McKaiser was born on March 28, 1979, in what was then known as Grahamstown, South Africa. Because of the identify’s colonial origins — the city’s founder, Lt. Col. John Graham, was a Nineteenth-century British officer — it was renamed Makhanda in 2018.

His father, Donald McKaiser, had been a long-serving member of the South African navy and ran a small building firm after he retired from the military. His mom, Magdalene (Stevens) McKaiser, died in 2006.

Mr. McKaiser is survived by his father; his companion, Nduduzo Nyanda; his sisters, Geniva and Marilyn McKaiser; and his stepmother, Valencia McKaiser. Her sons, Mr. McKaiser’s half brothers, died younger: Timothy in early childhood, and Owen in 2017 at age 21.

Under apartheid regulation, the household was categorized as coloured, which means of blended race, a class that confronted systemic discrimination however which loved extra rights than Black South Africans.

Mr. McKaiser studied at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, beginning in 1997, incomes a bachelor’s diploma in regulation and philosophy, then a grasp’s in philosophy, earlier than profitable a Rhodes scholarship to review at Oxford in 2003. The scholarships have been based by the British arch-colonialist Cecil John Rhodes at his loss of life in 1902.

Mr. McKaiser later backed the marketing campaign to take away statues of Rhodes on the universities of Cape Town and Oxford, and known as for a broader effort to vary the institutional mind-set of such locations of studying to take away all vestiges of colonialism.

“The point is simple, yet challenging: toppling the statues of racists is necessary but not sufficient to achieve an anti-racist society,” he wrote in The Guardian in 2020.

Mr. McKaiser was also called a aggressive debater.

He started his profession as a radio broadcaster with a late-night speak present on Radio 702, a industrial station primarily based in Johannesburg, and labored for different stations, together with SABC3, a public tv channel, and PowerFM, a chat radio station. In 2021, he launched a podcast known as “In the Ring.”

He printed a number of books on politics and race, together with “A Bantu in My Bathroom,” “Could I vote DA: A Voter’s Dilemma” (DA refers back to the opposition Democratic Alliance), and “Run, Racist Run.”

Reflecting his fame as a mentor to younger South Africans, a number of accounts of his life highlighted one in every of his closing social media posts, impressed by Musa Motha, a 27-year-old South African amputee who had simply reached the finals of a British expertise present.

“Stop what you’re doing. Right now,” Mr. McKaiser wrote on Twitter shortly earlier than his loss of life. “You need to watch this. Wow. I am speechless and ran out of tears.”

“This,” he added, “is the inspiration you needed for this week.”