Granta essays from the time of the fall of the wall and apartheid hail political leaders who aspire to 'not victory, conquest or triumph, but renunciation, reduction and dismantling'.
In November 1989, South Africa was only a few months away from Nelson Mandela walking free from prison. The many walls of the apartheid state - border fences, bureaucratic barriers, discriminatory laws - were eroding and would, within half a decade, all come tumbling down. For Mandela, they already had through literature - he remarked of the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe: "The writer in whose company the prison walls fell down."
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