Editor’s Note from Paul Bové _ Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Tony Bogues, a member of the boundary 2 Collective, was in South Africa, watching the endless coverage of the news and of Mandela’s life. Bogues had met… Read More ›
Nelson Mandela
Mandela’s Reflections
At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the… Read More ›
Mandela’s Reflections: Mandela’s Gift
In every era, there are several men and women born who make the unthinkable thinkable, but rare and far in between are those who make the once thinkable utterly unthinkable. Nelson Mandela was one of these extraordinary people, a man… Read More ›
Mandela’s Reflections: [untitled]
The bitter lesson that we have learned since the middle of the twentieth century is that national liberation is not a revolution. The world is full of postcolonial civil strife or class/gender apartheid. The era of national liberation movements has… Read More ›
Mandela’s Reflections: Mandela’s Wholeness, Perhaps Infinite
I recall almost nothing between the years of 1986 and 1990. Or, I recall only a few things that I recall very well. My first car was a white Datsun B-210 with an END APARTHEID sticker placed carefully on the… Read More ›
Mandela’s Reflections: Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force
Nelson Mandela was one of the world’s most important twentieth-century political prisoners. At a moment when world politics was in the throes of the “Cold War,” Mandela’s imprisonment focused much of the world’s attention on the authoritarian racial system in… Read More ›
Mandela’s Reflections: Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus
I first met Mandela in 1991 in Johannesburg, at the offices of the ANC during my visit to South Africa, while a guest of the Congress of South African writers, who had invited me to talk at various community centers… Read More ›
Mandela’s Reflections: Nelson Mandela
F. W. de Klerk is the first president of South Africa whom I knew from TV and remembered. As it turns out, he became the last in the long list of white presidents of South Africa. It was late 1989;… Read More ›
Mandela’s Reflections: Mandela, Tunisia, and I
I have experienced Mandela as a presence, an absence, and a label. During the historic first free elections in Tunisia, held on October 23, 2011, I voted early, then set off to tour the polling stations in my hometown of… Read More ›
Mandela’s Reflections: Malaysian Mandela
At secondary school in Singapore in the mid-1980s, we read Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. One word I will always associate with that novel is shantytown. The teacher told the class that shantytowns “were sort of like our kampongs.”… Read More ›
boundary 2 