The perversity of debt

A traumatic experience is at the core of The Perversity of Gratitude: the apartheid education administrated by the Colored Affairs Department (CAD) in South Africa. The objective political truths against which the narration of this experience has chosen to do battle are the oppression and the structural educational inequality, located within the turbulent history of disenfranchized resistance to apartheid state, spanning roughly two decades, from 1972 to 1989. But what is really at stake in this narration is the fact that these objective truths can emerge as such only through a subjective process of veridiction: the way in which the subjective assumption of truth became the possibility of thinking and changing material conditions. Then, the unique possible truth is dialectical and paradoxical. Grant Farred is very clear: “Apartheid made me think. And for that I am grateful. That is the perverse truth of my disenfranchised apartheid education.”1 This is his framework from the begin- ning and throughout the book.