This study, however, aspires to transcend what is ordinarily perceptible in the collection
to point at the sensitivity of the collection to the more compelling articulation of the poet,
arguing in the end that it will be an over-kill of criticism to state, like Gilfillan, that the
“new Serote [is] muted”(1). Again, the understanding of the privileging of “ancestral
guidance” goes beyond mere expression of centuries-long relationship with the dead, but
more substantially, must be read as providing veritable vistas into the understanding of
how the abstractions of time and place can be utilized as resources for the apprehension
of the present. I return to the explanation of this later in the chapter. With respect to the
condition of the postcolonial state, the assertion that “the impact of current global
conditions... have forced the coincidence of liberation and liberalization” (Jean Comaroff
128), is particularly and intimately true of South Africa. To take one illustration on how
the global impacts on the local, or how “liberation and liberalization” have coincided,
Kelwyn Sole’s account of a particular epoch in South African post-liberation history will
be helpful:
By the mid-1990s, it had become clear that the government was deviating from its previous
position of “national democracy plus economic egalitarianism” in order to create a local
climate that might gain access to and compete on world markets. The ANC’s Reconstruction
and Development Programme (RDP), formulated before the first election as the hub of its
equity and development strategy, was replaced with the 1996 Growth, Employment, and
Redistribution Policy (GEAR), which formulated national economic policy in terms of
neoliberal principles compliant to the dictates of the global market. The GEAR policy
emphasized growth of exports and foreign investment as the principal machinery for
stimulating economic growth. Development goals, and the eradication of the country’s huge
apartheid-given legacy of social inequalities, were seen as realizable through a so-called
trickle-down effect that would result from macroeconomic gains. Both the IMF and the World
Bank became significant players in steering the country in this direction through advice and
expertise, with policies encouraging privatization, tight fiscal discipline, downsizing, and
retrenchments. Such structural adjustment policies limited autonomous policy choice on a
national level. (189-90)^78In view of the foregoing, the overwhelming purchase of globalization, evident among
other things in the compression of time and space, illustrates how the distance of Western
78
The enduring impact of the shift from the execution of the ANC-authored RDP blueprint to the patronage
of GEAR is evident today in the controversy that surrounds how this patronage came to be and how IMF
and the World Bank have been key players in the derailment process. Nevertheless, it is also important to
remark that the shift in government economic policy was not an absolute imposition of the world financial
firms: the shift in paradigm occurred because key figures in the ANC-led government gave their consent
and subsequently provided the groundwork for the execution of this policy which is continually perceived
to stand between the actualization of the initially envisaged agenda of development and welfare and the
masses. See Mail and Guardian February 22-28, 2008, p.23.