In the so-called Rainbow Trial of 1989, the men and women in the dock gave an exciting glimpse of what the new country could look like. But it was not to be, as the ideals of people’s power and a united, non-sexist, non-racial nation did not fully find a home in the new South Africa. One of t.
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The “public intellectual” has a specific role in society – to publicly raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot be co-opted by governments, someone whose
raison d’être is to represent people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.
This definition of the public intellectual – from Palestinian cultural critic and literary scholar Edward Said – is the foundation of a book we have just completed, titled
The Fabric of Dissent: Public Intellectuals in South Africa, published by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press.
Our editorial team from the University of Pretoria’s faculty of humanities and the HSRC put together 75 portraits of public intellectuals who personify Said’s definition and who have profoundly influenced South African society in the past and present.