In his introduction to Barack Obama's 2018 Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg, the South African writer Njabulo Ndebele commented on the dire political situation on both sides of the Atlantic: "What we came to see in South Africa as state capture," he declared, "seem[s] mirrored in the United States and other parts of the world by what we could call more accurately a 'capture of democracy.'" 1 Ordinary South Africans, too, saw parallels: quite a few wryly remarked to me that the 2016 election brought Americans the joys of a white Zuma. The laughable aspects of this comparison had in fact already been noted during Trump's campaign by the (South African-born, US-based) comedian Trevor Noah, who joked that the vulgar mogul was obviously presidential-but presidential for Africa, where he would be a fine companion to posturing strongmen like Muammar Gaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, and, yes, Jacob Zuma. Such observations return us, sobered, to the foundational premise for Safundi, namely that South Africa and the US can generate comparative insights, even though the mirrorthe familiar image that Ndebele redeploys-is often a distorted one. Comparative projects always negotiate tensions between sameness and difference, generalities and particularities; they proceed despite fundamental incommensurabilities and "develop within histories of hierarchical relation"-as contributors to this collection do not fail to point out. 2 Still, the scholarly project of thinking about the US and South Africa together, initiated by George M. Fredrickson's White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (1981), continues to generate compelling work. 3 Recent contributions include monographs (like Erica Still's