What is Slavery to Me?

by Pumla Dineo Gqola

Much has been made about South Africa’s transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. “Memory” features prominently in the country’s reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What is slavery to me? links with that research in its concern with South Africa’s past and the meaning-making processes attendant to it, but reads specifically memory activity which pertains to colonial slavery as practiced predominantly in the Western Cape for three centuries by the British and Dutch.

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.