Twenty years after the end of apartheid, race still continues to play a role in South African society. Now, however, it is a black majority government that is demanding and maintaining race thinking, in an effort to redress the discrimination of the past.

Both the Employment Equity Act and the Black Economic Empowerment Act, for instance, use the racial categories of apartheid to achieve their ends, but the demand to classify people racially extends beyond business to many other areas of life. Ironically, in a society that is constitutionally committed to non-racialism, race thinking and race classification have been carried forward unthinkingly from our past. Not only does the rationale for such continuation not address the real concerns of our society but the system of classifying carries inevitable seeds of conflict within itself. What is more, the classification of fellow human beings into races remains a crime against humanity, no matter what justification is offered.

In writing this powerfully engaged and argued book, Gerhard Maré takes up the challenge to imagine a world beyond the boundaries created by race, one in which we can live together imaginatively and open to the diversity each of us presents. As he says, it may not be easy to achieve, but confronting race thinking is essential to any project that is serious about changing South African society in fundamental ways.

Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother-daughter relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually, debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease twenty years later. In 1986, Kathleen accepted a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter's most faithful correspondent. The two women exchanged more than two hundred letters that reflected their lively interest in literature, theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity, belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges. Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer's disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image - of simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience - sustained her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive. Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations, journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration; friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural communication, the ethics of international development, and letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving others while they're ours to hold.