Robert J. Balfour is Deputy Vice Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) at North-West University, South Africa. He is a National Research Foundation-rated academic and has published frequently on language learning and literacy, rural education and postcolonial literature.
‘In a dispiriting present, these wide-ranging essays reinvigorate left analysis, with many drawing on the work of the communist intellectual and militant Mzala Nxumalo. This reaching back to engage the present means that this volume is an important contribution to sustaining a national left intellectual tradition, aproject in dialogue with the best ideas from around the world. Mzala, as he was and remains known, was committed to a nonsectarian approach to building a left project and these essays will be useful to people across the South African left, and elsewhere.’ — Scholar, journalist, editor, teacher and activist; author of Writing the Decline: on the Struggle for South Africa’s Democracy (2016) and editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2006), Richard Pithouse