The Law of the Vultures: A Story for an Altered State?

State?* South Africa stands at a critical moment of her history. Despite the optimisms of recent times, it is not of course a moment that has arisen, as one of our leading sociologists has it, by an 'almost miraculous intervention'1 • Rather, it remains explicable as a point in a long, difficult process of opposition to the structural inequalities of South African society. From any vantage point of that story, we could identify continuities and discontinuities that predate even the institutionalization of apartheid in 1948.