I did not struggle to be poor.
—Smuts Ngonyama, spokesman, African National Congress

The “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
—Walter Benjamin

Dear Madiba,

This is the year of your ninetieth birthday; the whole earth is celebrating — to excess, I am tempted to say. Why? Because we cling to you, Nelson Mandela, as a living icon, as a liberation hero who did not renege on his commitments to freedom from oppression and justice for all, as the father of the rainbow nation, as a man of nearly incomprehensible moral resilience…