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Acknowledgements

S everal relatives, including my late mother and father, teachers at several schools and academics at various universities made notable contributions to my well-being, to my academic and professional development, and to my success throughout my working life. Some of them are acknowledged at appropriate points in the text which follows.

My concern here is to acknowledge the support and encouragement of a number of colleagues at my home university and elsewhere. At the University of Pretoria, where I have spent the longest span of my working life – from September 1999 until now – Professor Robin Crewe and other senior colleagues supported my life-writing research programme, coupled, in recent years, with my appointment as a Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.

At Rhodes University Professor Catriona Macleod, without knowing it, set in motion a series of events which led me to think back to the nerve-racking mid-1970s, when I wrote a fictionalised memoir in the US. The public lecture at Rhodes University, which she invited me to present in 2008, inspired me to undertake the arduous task of researching and writing this full-scale intellectual autobiography.

Opportunities for discussions as well as for the writing of sections of this book were made possible by invitations from Professor F Geyer and his colleagues at Stellenbosch University during my numerous working visits as a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), especially in 2012. During the course of my 2012 visit to STIAS, Professor David Attwell, a South African friend and colleague, currently at York University in the UK, and I held numerous discussions on life writing, complemented by a STIAS discussion of the central themes of this book. He is one among a list of colleagues who read through earlier manuscript versions.

Helpful comments and encouragement were graciously offered by professors André du Toit of the University of Cape Town and Grahame Hayes, formerly of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Special attention was paid to the ‘Justice and the Comrades’ chapter by three high court judges – Judge Bernard Ngoepe, Judge Phineas Mojapelo and Judge George Maluleke – and by one of our country’s pre-eminent academic lawyers, Professor Christof Heyns of the University of Pretoria. A version of the appendix was first published in Die Suid Afrikaan, published in December 1987, issue 12, page 31–34.

I dedicate this book to my wife and members of our extended family as well as to my late parents, Hlekani and Dumazi Manganyi.