The authors assembled here all symbolise the ways in which intellectuals and activists have become spokespersons for a popular radical reevaluation of postcolonial politics: a profound transformation not only of the state and society, but also of the tools of analysis. This radical turn involves consensus regarding an equality amongst different peoples and cultures, rather than the racial, ethnic, class and gender identities which were institutionalised as a fundamental feature of the apartheid order. Postcolonial critique has been so successful that, 26 years later, the concepts and values of inclusive, deliberative democracy have been established as distinctive ways in which citizens see and represent themselves.

Although the basis for such an argument is generally the apartheid colonial experience, arguably, such postcolonial critiques are also paving the way for a South African society that is being produced by the challenges of neoliberalism and globalisation. The assertion of agency has become the activity of intellectuals, activists and people's networks. In this sense, the essays form part of the genealogy of postcolonial discourse in terms of their relations to earlier intellectual, social and political movements aimed at resisting the cognitive and cultural domination of the West, and which trace their origins to past struggles against imperialism.

Poststructuralist theory, which informs the essays, is grounded in the work of earlier intellectuals and activists such as Pixley Ka Seme, Anton Lembede, Sol Plaatje, Lilian Ngoyi, W. E. B du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Ngũgῖ wa Thiong’o, Steve Biko, Robert Sobukwe and others—a dimension that opens up the vastness of the tasks ahead. For how can we analyse the context of social memory, “the pastness of the past and of its presence”, to use T. S. Eliot's (2014) felicitous formulation, as a force for self-understanding and fundamental change, without also considering the history of its formations, and the development of resistance and revolution in earlier periods? Although there are many studies on postcolonialism in South Africa, and even more studies on specific aspects such as race and class, #RhodesMustFall and #NotInMyName, very few look at postcolonialism in South Africa from the perspective of social memory.