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Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2018

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Summary

Some time ago, a student at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, asked me, in a class on South African writing: ‘So when did apartheid end?’, meaning when were the first democratic elections held. Or, perhaps, when was grand apartheid dismantled and taken off the statute books? Or, subliminally, in response to commemorations of the twentieth anniversary of the day, when did the world see Nelson Mandela walk free? All of these could be provided as answers, but instead I wanted to say: ‘Has it?’ This may seem like a pessimistic response, but I want to frame it differently. Apartheid is ending (even if one may want to insist, as I do, that it has not ended), and there is a crucial place for academic writing and teaching in this process of the long ending and new beginning. In the reluctance to accept an easy ‘post’ position for South Africa (post-apartheid, post-race) my intention is not to diminish what has been achieved already, but instead to contribute to developing ways of thinking forward, and modes of writing, reading and teaching that are actively and positively engaged in the further work of this ending.

My understanding of this enduring ending is not the one to be found in the kind of writing and thinking arguing that South Africa is postapartheid (and therefore history has become irrelevant, the ‘post’ erasing the responsibilities and formations of the past). Nor is it the kind of ending that chooses to be silenced and to perform this silence as proof that a certain kind of voice, a certain kind of opinion, is ‘finished’, the time for it over. There is also another kind of talk about endings with which I do not want to agree, which says that apartheid may have ended but nothing has changed, that the ‘post-ness’ is somehow fake. Perhaps what ties together these senses of the ending is the expectation that the end will be finite, that there will have been a morning when the world woke up to a new day that bore no traces of what had gone before.

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Chapter
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Accented Futures
Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid
, pp. ix - xvi
Publisher: Wits University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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