Preface

Summary

I was an undergraduate student of comparative literature in Bayreuth, Germany, when Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 and South Africa's general election in 1994, and when he instituted the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Like millions of other people, I had the feeling that something of far-reaching global political and moral relevance was taking place in South Africa. Much later, as I read Mandela's biography, Long Walk to Freedom, and Desmond Tutu's No Future without Forgiveness, I was drawn to the social and moral reach of the ideas that these leaders projected. They provided alternatives to much of what I had understood about the African political and moral landscape. I knew that they were transforming (South) Africa, but I did not have the language to articulate my thoughts about this transformation. In 2004, when I was part of the UCLA Global Fellowship program as a postdoctoral fellow, I began to think seriously about the theoretical import of these two South African moral leaders and the historical relevance of South Africa's peaceful political transition. This transition and the moral premises of the TRC meant something larger than ordinary historical events.1 They were a metaphor, a tool that can be used to explain the world in ways that could inform relationships between peoples in Africa and all over the world.

I had previously embraced most Western theories of life and society largely as an intellectual exercise. Very few of them could help me interpret my experience as a citizen of a postcolonial African country and of the world. Marxist theory did not help me understand my experience growing up under various military regimes. It never adequately explained any of Africa's structural and foundational problems. Nor were postcolonial theories of much help. However, shaped by these theories, I grew up eager to defend Africa against the West, but I never learned how to be in solidarity with other Africans who are not of my ethnicity. For the most part, solidarity had been understood as being collectively against the imperialists because of our common experience as colonized and black peoples in a world in which whiteness has been cast as the norm and blackness as its opposite.