Do South Africans Exist?. Ivor Chipkin

       Acknowledgements

      This book began its life as a PhD thesis at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Phillipe Gervais-Lambony made my French adventure possible and I want to thank him for his faith and friendship during this time and since then. My gratitude also goes out to Marie-Anne and Isis. I think too of Afifah Barkallah and Justus Njagu.

      The text has also benefited from discussions with Debbie Posel and Achille Mbembe and other former colleagues at the Wits Institute for Social Economic Research. Vyjayanthi Rao has been an inspired friend in Johannesburg, Mumbai, New Haven and cyberspace. I am especially grateful to William Beinart and also to St-Antony’s college for the chance to spend some time at Oxford, where several chapters of this book were written. Peter Hudson has always been a generous reader of my work and given me invaluable support and assistance.

      I was able to complete this manuscript while working for the Human Sciences Research Council. I am grateful to Adam Habib and my other colleagues in the Democracy and Governance Programme for their collegiality and friendship.

      In preparing this book for publication, I was fortunate to have the excellent services of Hilary Wilson as proofreader, Margie Ramsay as indexer and Karen Lilje as book and cover designer. If this book is a little easier to read it is because of the editing and the advice of Alex Potter. Estelle Jobson managed to bring this whole project together. I am very grateful to her.

      The publishers and I wish to thank Jeannine Howse of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and Byron Kozakiewiez of Beith Digital for assistance with locating and scanning the cover artwork. We gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by William Kentridge to reproduce his art on the cover of this book. We wish too to acknowledge the following institutions, from whom extracts in their archives or publications have been reproduced and credited accordingly: Grove/Atlantic, New York; Image, Doubleday, Random House, New York; The South African Labour Bulletin, Johannesburg; and Verso, London.