This essay examines the changing range of descriptors available for black South African experience from the 1960s through to the present and shows the changing implications of "black", "African", "citizen" and "human being", with particular reference to the formative structures of education, and the enabling (or disabling) effects of literary studies in their Eurocentric and Afrocentric forms. In a general continental context in which the post-colony replicates the oppressive structures of the extractive instrumentalization of colonialism, it argues that emphasis is now best placed on ideas of the human being and citizen. [This paper was presented as the Keynote address at the 40th African Literature Association conference at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 10th April 2014.]