Azania should be thought again and against the grain of enclosure and its attendant sterility, so that there is liberation. Even at this moment that is coined as the aftermath of apartheid, which is to say, the post-1994 South Africa, the name of the country is one of the scandalous issues that still persists. Not that this is a boiling contention, but it is a fundamental issue that refuses any form of forgetting. Since this aftermath is that of forgetting, the work of remembering is done by those who not only still yearn for the renaming of South Africa, but insist on exposing its racist machinations, and do not believe in the myth that it is a non-racial polity which has surpassed settler-colonialism. This work of remembering is a continuous task that is carried out by those who not only refute the idea of South Africa as a non-racial polity, but are still calling for South Africa as a non-racial polity to come to an end so as to give birth to Azania. This is the country's rightful name, chosen by those who were conquered and who, by structure and design, were racialized as not forming part of the polity. It is key, therefore, to note that this is a problematic of those who have been structurally unaddressed. In the present South Africa, there is no ethical duty to deal with the memory of the long arc of black dispossession, and to confront the re-engineering of racism in its perverse and dissimulated forms.

Given the preoccupation with ‘apartheid’, there is a systematic form of dissimulation and also that induced forgetting that there were regimes that preceded it, and that, by its nature, apartheid served as the heightened perfection of these antecedent regimes. What came to be the territory called South Africa is a country whose name has been legally designed through conquest. This, then, should be understood as the structured logic that has meant black dispossession. Is apartheid not preceded by settler-colonialism, slavery and segregation? Why is there no insistence on making this common sense, just like the evocation of apartheid? Is South Africa the name of the polity that has defined itself by means of the denial of the black?