Collaborators and the riven truth behind Zuma’s Nkandla

Jacob Dlamini, Business Day

IN 1879, the British destroyed the Zulu kingdom, putting paid to one of the last major precolonial polities in southern Africa. To hear white supremacists and apologists for the British Empire tell it, the defeat of King Cetshwayo’s army marked the triumph of European enlightenment over African barbarism; to hear Zulu and African nationalists tell it, the destruction of the Zulu kingdom signalled not the end of Zulu political sovereignty but the beginning of a pan-African struggle against white rule.

The smoke that calls: Insurgent citizenship and the struggle for a place in the new South Africa

von Holdt, Karl., Langa, Malose., Malopo, Sepetla., Mogapi, Nomfundo., Ngubeni, Kindiza., Dlamini, Jacob., and Kirsten, Adèle.  2011. The smoke that calls: Insurgent citizenship and the struggle for a place in the new South Africa.  Centre for the Study of Violence and Society, Work and Development Institute

The overall comparative analysis, as well as the insights of the more detailed site case studies, is explored in the body of this report. Here, we would like to draw attention only to four key observations that strike us when we consider the report as a whole.

Layering Racial Oppression in South Africa

Africa Past and Present, Episode 59

Jacob Dlamini, South African author, journalist, and historian, on his best-selling book Native Nostalgia, a memoir that challenges conventional struggle narratives.  He also discusses the social and political history of Kruger National Park and a new research project on collaborators of the apartheid security forces.

Wrong to confidently claim ownership of English

by Jacob Dlamini, Business Day

A FRIEND recently sent me the following fragment from the 1983 annual report of the English Academy of Southern Africa: "To complete the picture as far as our specifically language-related activities are concerned: we (the English Academy of SA) were represented at a ‘Military Language Congress’ organised by the SA Defence Force (SADF) at Voortrekkerhoogte, in May this year; we have finally won our battle to have the ‘equals’ sign banished when a word is broken at the end of a line — the hyphen is back, in both English and Afrikaans."

Jacob Dlamini: Native Nostalgia

Native Nostalgia

In this, his first book, Jacob Dlamini writes about growing up in Katlehong in Gauteng, in the tradition of Orhan Pamuk’s and Walter Benjamin’s accounts of their childhoods in Istanbul and Berlin respectively. Using fragments from his own childhood, he examines the nostalgia that many black people feel for the past – their lives under apartheid. In arguing that people do not stop being moral agents just because they are politically oppressed or discriminated against, the author seeks to recover the moral content of black life under apartheid. 

 

This book is about nostalgia, an affliction of the heart that began life as a passing ailment but became an incurable modern condition. The book uses the life of a young black South African who spent his childhood under apartheid to ask the following question: What does it mean to remember a (black) life lived under apartheid with fondness and longing? The nostalgia examined here should not be understood the same way that the archetypal black pensioner trotted out by newspapers at each general election in South Africa says: ‘Things were better under apartheid.’ No, apartheid had no virtue.