A longtime antiapartheid activist, Rassool Snyman, described the trap to me in stark terms. “They never freed us. They only took the chain from around our neck and put it on our ankles.” Yasmin Sooka, a prominent South African human rights activist, told me that the transition “was business saying, ‘We’ll keep everything and you [the ANC] will rule in name … . You can have political power, you can have the façade of governing, but the real governance will take place somewhere else.’”ai13 It was a process of infantilization that is common to so-called transitional countries—new governments are,
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