The year that was–10 | 2024 in books: Love, hope and resistance—Part 1
Arvind Narrain presents a list of books read in 2024 so that ‘truth may dazzle gradually’.
Arvind Narrain
Published on: 3 January 2025, 05:07 am

READING books is about enlarging the imagination and opening out possibilities that one may not have considered or about affirming ideas that seem a bit out of place.
Doing a review of books of the year is about cultivating a reflective space from which to think of the tumultuous world we live in from a space which is a bit removed from the din of the contemporary world.
This act of reading or list-making is, however, about the world we live in.
As Emily Dickinson put it:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
…
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
One of the interstices in the Apartheid system for resistance was the space of the law. This was because the Apartheid State had an “obsessive adherence to a legitimising semblance of the legal form”.
Thomas Grant, The Mandela Brief

The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid is an account of the work of Sydney Kentridge, a lawyer who for a large part of his career resisted apartheid using the framework of the law. Apartheid South Africa had created a “vast and comprehensive legislative apparatus for the segregation of the population in every aspect of life according to a theory of race, together with the absolute privileging and supremacy of the minority deemed to belong to one of those supposed races”.
Under such conditions what did the struggle for justice mean?
One of the interstices in the Apartheid system for resistance was the space of the law. This was because the Apartheid State had an “obsessive adherence to a legitimising semblance of the legal form”.
Kentridge made the most effective use of this form of the law in his defence of Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela and many other anti-Apartheid activists who faced the wrath of the Apartheid State.


