Struggles to give an event or an epoch a name and to assign it a meaning have always been constitutive of key political and social transformations. To name is to shape and reshape an imaginary, to frame what is at stake at a given moment, or to open, reopen or foreclose a set of possibilities. A name can be given to a set of events that have not yet happened. Such a prefigurative name calls into being, conjures up, that which does not yet exist; that which only exists in an incipient state; or that which, it is hoped, is still to come. An earlier name can also be recovered or resurrected, reanimated and given to events in the present whose structures, qualities or causes have no direct relationship with the past. Such a name is usually borrowed from an existing archive where it found its canonical place, and where its meaning is more or less sealed off. Although the historical period to which it refers is considered, at least putatively, closed, the power and energies of such a name are harnessed in the present and drawn upon to meet entirely other goals, with different protagonists, at risk at times of anachronism. Such a name operates both as a memorial and as an index of a future deferred, still to be realised. It calls for a temporal rupture, the recapture and repurposing of past possibilities in the present. We could refer to such a name as analogical.

The question of when an epoch begins and when can it be deemed closed is always open to a multiplicity of responses. So it is with South Africa, and its highly complex concatenation of what is past; when and how to characterise the present, how to read and understand times of crisis, upsurge and turbulence. For a long time during and after ‘the event,’ naming what has happened, its momentousness, might still be an object of contention. If to name is to interpret and therefore to assign a meaning, such a task is by definition unfinished since no account of an event or its meaning can be said to have captured everything.