Introduction: Reckoning with apartheid the conundrum of working through the past

Abstract

Today in South Africa issues of political economy, including the land question, are necessarily coming face-to-face with a resurgent politics of difference informing long-standing histories of dispossession whose continuities with such politics of difference are frequently denied. Despite the country's “transition” to democracy a genuinely decolonial present has not, as yet, come into being. But from #Rhodes-MustFall to #FeesMustFall to the October 6, 2015, anti–outsourcing campaign there is a growing sense that the incompletion of the transition to democracy is being contested and that the interregnum is drawing to a close as something genuinely new is trying to be born.