That essentially formed the question behind a student's query in class. Discussing Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth," and the gulf between the colonizer and the colonized, the obvious parallels to contemporary Kazakhstan needed little linking up for my students. The Manichean world, the divide in the urban landscape between the haves and the have-nots, the neocolonial present (the current regime) stemming from the colonial (Soviet) past, just a continuation. The surprise came when the student asked, referring to the Algerian Revolution "do you think that could happen here"? And there wasn't a shred of fear, as I had just described the years of bloodshed and reprisals, but instead hope - hope that finally a change would come, and that the years of Soviet-style everything might finally cease. And all of the students seemed, silently, to share her ... hope.
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