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.
