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Exploring a variety of sites both contemporary and historical, the volume Ties That Bind presents a kaleidoscopic view into the question of how friendship operates in relation to race in the context of South Africa. The chapters that follow examine this question through the lenses of history, art, work, education, fiction, and poetry, bringing to bear history, personal experiences, political theory, archives, ethnographies, and storytelling. We have included a broad range of scholars from different backgrounds and traditions to tackle the questions posed in this book.

The volume begins with Sisonke Msimang’s powerful documentary theatre piece on friendship and race in post-apartheid South Africa in Chapter Two. Originally created for the Ruth First lecture series at Wits University in Johannesburg and performed with Lebo Mashile, Msimang reignited public debate on the nature of friendship across racial divisions, succinctly revealing the illusions of the rainbow nation and the contradictions of shared affections.

In Chapter Three, Stacy Hardy offers an explosive interpretative interview with poet, playwright, and musician Lesego Rampolokeng, an activist in the BC movement often noted for his spoken word performances and contributions with musicians such as Souleymane Touré, Louis Mhlanga, and the Kalahari Surfers. Hardy keeps up with Rampolokeng as he ruminates on the violence, music, betrayals, and impossibilities of friendship in South Africa both during and after apartheid. Their engagement moves in modes that defy register, from humor to anger, and from obtuse poetics to thoughtful intellectual engagement.

A number of authors in the volume cite the work of Frank Wilderson III, and in Chapter Four we include an interview with Wilderson, outlining his ideas on the theoretical underpinnings of Afro-pessimism, race and friendship, speaking specifically to his experiences in the South African context. Wilderson’s ideas are woven through the volume, and the interview gives some form and context for why they are applicable in South Africa.

In Chapter Five, T. J. Tallie explores how the limits of sociality and friendship across race were central to settler colonial logic in Natal from the 1850s through the 1910s. In his detailed historical account, Tallie looks at ways debates about friendship with Africans played into both the aspirations and limitations of settler colonialism. Thinking through the idea of friendship as a coercive gift, Tallie focuses specifically on elements of subversive sociality, such as alcohol consumption, as a social bond between whites as well as its potential danger for the colonial rule of non-whites. Imagined through the impossible handshake Bishop John Colenso expressly wished he could have offered the African, Tallie offers an insightful reading of how friendship could simultaneously reinforce and unsettle gendered and raced hierarchies.

Franco Barchiesi’s chapter, ‘The Problem with “We”: Affiliation, Political Economy, and the Counterhistory of Nonracialism’ brings together a number of central themes that unite the volume. Barchiesi builds a counterhistory to the origins and preoccupations of nonracialism, rooted in the African response to the liberal friend of the native discourse. In an iconoclastic rereading of the historical literature, Barchiesi argues that the dependency of the concept on the structures of settler colonial rule and racial antagonism has led non-racial nationalism to re-inscribe anti-blackness. He focuses specifically on the evolution of African nationalism and its critique of paternalist white friendship, arguing that the complicity between non-racialism and anti-blackness has been part of the celebration of political economy, work, and a generic, impossible idea of a nationalist ‘We’.

Following Barchiesi’s discussion of the political economy of friendship, Bridget Kenny expands the focus to examine the affective encounters between citizens and the South African state in Chapter Seven. Kenny brings ethnographic richness to think about contemporary ways that relationships of care and recognition exist between black workers and the state, and how such social relations enable precarious work. Grounded in detailed interviews conducted at the Casual Worker Advice Office in Germiston in 2012, Kenny unravels how friendship and affective relationships between precarious workers and the State reproduce vulnerability, while at the same time creating a space of political contestation that creates important types of solidarities and resistance. Kenny investigates how workers imagine and desire becoming an active public, invoking both the promise of possible futures, recognition, and the reality of exhaustion. Building on the work of Lauren Berlant, Kenny focuses on the ‘cruel optimism’ that workers have towards the promise of full-time employment and social assistance, even if that promise can never be fully realized.

From the realm of political economy and the state, we turn to art spaces and artistic practices that represent, enable, and contest ideas around race and friendship. In Chapter Eight, Daniel Magaziner investigates the friendships that were forged at the Ndaleni Art School in Natal between 1952 and 1981. Founded by the South African government to train students to teach arts and crafts in the Bantu education system, the school transformed into a space of expression, friendship, and limited freedoms partially removed from the rigid structures of apartheid. Here intimacies and friendships blossomed in unique ways. Rather than celebrating such a space as representing a lost history of multiracialism, Magaziner uses Ndaleni to place the politics of friendship at the center of an apartheid institution. Provocatively, Magaziner argues that art students embraced the strictures of the school in order to achieve community through a form of subjugation and dependence that was an alternative to the form that white supremacy took outside its walls.

In Chapter Nine, M. Neelika Jayawardane brings us into new territory, with readings of the artistic and literary representations of the relationships between maids and madams, which peer into affective spaces of domestic life. Through reading photographs of madams and their maids, Jayawardane exposes how the trope ‘friend of the family’ conceals multiple forms of power at play. She explores the complex ways in which the body of the maid serves as a counterpoint for the desires and self-perception of the white madam. Jayawardane interrogates the contradictions inherent in how this familiar relationship poses as friendship in the intimate spaces of South African households through readings of various photographic works.

Continuing on the theme of artistic representations, the artists’ collective MADEYOULOOK confronts in Chapter Ten the absence of a language to speak about black love. In ‘Corner Loving: Ways of Speaking about Love’, the artists attempt to invent such a language by probing contemporary art, writing, and poetry that deals with modes of intimacy, ranging from the illicit street corner encounter to the complex interplay of music, language, and local idioms to concoct new ways of imagining and representing black love. They suggest that the representation of black love necessitates a new visual and critical tonality that reflects the feel and nature of black love itself.

In Chapter Eleven, ‘Kutamba Naye: In Search of Anti-Racist and Queer Solidarities’, Tsitsi Jaji combines personal narrative and academic inquiry to navigate her discomfort and distress in attempting to forge alliances with a white Zimbabwean artist and former school friend, fusing critical race theory with the daily affective dissonance of personal encounters. In interrogating the transition of friendship from girlhood to womanhood through the lens of race, Jaji uncovers some of her own hidden secrets and unexamined truths. Bringing together personal writing, e-mail exchanges, and critical reflections, Jaji parses out of the difficulties of reimagining friendship as another kind of solidarity.

Finally, Mosa Phadi and Nomancotsho Pakade explore the complex experience of studying as black graduate students in a higher education context in South Africa, where the expectation is to preform blackness both as subject and object in the role they powerfully describe as the native informant. They argue that the olive branch of friendship offered to black students through white mentorship often hides levels of exploitation and objectification, which can ultimately smother the ability for black students to survive and thrive, both academically and economically. The authors find themselves in a precarious position of racialised knowledge production, simultaneously used as part of the transformation agenda of government and unable to fully exist as subjects without preforming as native informants. This positioning is all the more pertinent given the eruption of student movements that interrogate the raced spaces of contemporary university campuses and the decolonization of education in South Africa.