What does it mean for black South Africans to remember life under apartheid with fondness? This is the question Jacob Dlamini explores in his debut book aptly entitled Native Nostalgia (see here). Dlamini is the most lyrical South African writer since Johnny Steinberg drifted off to New York. Like Steinberg, he delivers reflective insights with rhythmic beauty. It is worth reflecting on his main claim - which will surely stimulate debate in the months ahead - that many black South Africans harbour nostalgic memories of life under Verwoerd's government.
His key premise is that life within South African townships during apartheid was rich and complex, contrary to widespread descriptions of them as mere sites of socioeconomic depravity. Life happened in the township both despite apartheid and in complex relation to apartheid. Fond recollections by blacks are not an inadvertent legitimation of an immoral political system. Of course, fear of being seen to retrospectively endorse apartheid explains why a book like Dlamini's might not have been written before - it invites a lazy accusation that the writer wishes apartheid had never ended.
By arguing that not all aspects of life in townships were hell, Native Nostalgia humanises township residents. It recognises that township residents have always exhibited complex agencies with which they built and negotiated daily life during apartheid. These lived realities - lying at the heart of nostalgic recollections by blacks - include music, art, games, partying and other markers of normalcy that showcase the human spirit's defiance of the psychological insult that was apartheid. Dlamini adds to this rich characterisation with a number of thought provoking related claims.
He claims that Afrikaans is the language of nostalgia for many black South Africans. Phrases such as a ‘Waar was jy?' - which also became the title of a hit song for the outfit Skeem - and ‘Toeka!' and many others instantly evoke a litany of fond memories. A jazz track may invite a lover or friend, for example, to implore another to ‘Hoor net daar!' The appearance of Afrikaans across the cultural landscape of township life means that there is an Afrikaans cultural grammar that white Afrikaans speakers might never recognise. This is not to deny the fact that Afrikaans still has an oppressive resonance for many black South Africans. The salient point is that the relationship between black South Africans and the ‘oppressors' language' is more ambiguous than simplistic accounts of that relationship that start and stop with the 1976 Soweto uprisings.
There are interesting academic insights too that flow from this analysis. There is often a temptation in the social sciences to trot out an overarching narrative that can explain human behaviour particularly at a group level. This is why many liberal researchers mistakenly think they are doing township inhabitants a favour by viewing the township as an object of pity. It is, as Dlamini points out, telling that townships are often referred to as ‘sites' to be examined rather than as ‘places' to be experienced. Sites can be placed under an outsider's microscope for a couple of weeks and then written about as a social science thesis project.
Places, on the other hand, are a challenge to be avoided. They imply the existence of irreducible complexities in the details of a community's life and the lives of its individual members. Few theses and books engage South African townships as places of ordinariness. Even contemporary black writers like Eric Miyeni unreflectively assume that the ultimate marker of upward mobility is whether one can run from a Johannesburg township to Melville or Sandton more quickly than one's township friends can kill one of those township rats that look like a cat.