ABSTRACT
One of the oddest moments of my work in South Africa involved a visit by a distinguished American professor. A self-styled Marxist poet, he visited Durban in the early 2000s, graduate students in tow, to check out the struggle. I don’t recall if he had a ponytail, but I imagine he did. A couple of us at the University of KwaZulu-Natal took him to some of the poorest settlements in the city, in which the failures of the African National Congress (ANC), to redistribute wealth and power aft er the end of apartheid had led to misery and, in some cases, rebellion. Aft er hearing from some of the activists on the ground, hearing of the ways in which the ANC had become an impediment to the very goals it once espoused, the disappointed poet shook his head and said,
“Yeah, you know, this is hard. I’m not really sure people in America are ready to hear this.” And, to those of us in the room who discussed it aft erward, what it really seemed he meant was “I’m not ready to hear about this.”
