Apartheid's Endless Itineraries

For many decades now South Africa has worn the mantle of global exemplarity. During the 1980s, South Africa was, in Derrida’s phrase, “racism’s last word” (le dernier mot du racisme), a place where European racial thinking had reached its apogee (and, one hoped, its culminating endpoint). Following the collapse of the apartheid regime and the democratic elections of 1994, it became, under the sign of Nelson Mandela, the “rainbow nation”: a concrete illustration of the quasimiraculous overcoming of racial oppression through empathy and forgiveness and a beacon for other nations struggling with violent histories. In recent years, however, even as the burnished image of Mandela has been iconized around the world, South Africans themselves have come to suspect, with some discomfort, that their country means something else: a disappointment by or betrayal of political ideals. Promises made— regarding jobs, land, housing— have not been kept; an endemic corruption has set in to consolidate an elite political class; coarse and explicit varieties of racism, after strategically keeping their heads down, have resurfaced; and the country has found itself in the thrall of economic and social disparities often greater than those of the apartheid era. In this new configuration, as Andrew van der Vlies has put it, it is not so much that South Africa is becoming more like the rest of the world, but rather that the world is increasingly becoming more like South Africa, “more unequal, but also concerned