Native Nostalgia

"This is a new book, published the year before last. Dlamini asks this question: If you are black and you grew up in an apartheid ghetto, what if you still feel nostalgic for your childhood? What does that mean? He recounts his childhood and it’s an enormously nostalgic account. He loved his childhood. What does it mean? I grew up under apartheid but I feel deeply nostalgic about my childhood? It’s an incredibly clever book, very simply written but very clever. One of the things he’s trying to do is to rescue his childhood. The ANC does not like people feeling nostalgic about apartheid because they are delivering the country from evil. So, in a sense he’s reclaiming his individuality and his sense of self from the country’s political turmoil, from South Africa’s ruling party. He’s saying you can’t rob me of my childhood, I did love it, which doesn’t mean I want apartheid back, but in cherishing my childhood I’m trying to free myself from you, from your political project. It’s very interesting and very refreshing. Oh, it wasn’t a wonderful childhood. It was a ghetto childhood, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have things to cherish in it. I think what he’s saying is subtle. I think he’s saying that even in an apartheid childhood, you had a mother who had wisdom, you had music, you had schoolteachers who taught you a great deal. He recovers a great deal of dignity for his mother. It’s a very loving portrait of her and he says the ANC can’t take away the fact that she taught him his morality and not they. They have an interest in saying that nothing good could have happened until they liberated the country, so it’s a commentary on the past in order to make a commentary about the present. A number of things are happening at the same time. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Well, I think that way in which black people in power express fear is similar to the way in which the whites in power expressed fear. It’s a very interesting symmetry. The white people believed they were superior and had science and culture on their side and yet at a deep subterranean level they also knew that things couldn’t last. There is a similar feeling of precariousness in the ANC, which was swept to power as the country’s liberation movement, has governed for the past 17 years, but knows it can’t go on forever. Three years ago there was xenophobic violence in South Africa when about 100,000 foreigners were chased from their homes and I think in a strange and sad way, the poor of South Africa, in a very distant and fragmented sort of way, were echoing what the apartheid authorities were doing in the 1960s. They were sifting through the cities and classifying people by the colour of their skin, dark or light, and this is what the apartheid state did. They decided who could and couldn’t live in the cities according to the minutiae of classification, so there were sad historical echoes."