There are books that radically alter the view of a political conflict, with regard to both its roots and its contemporary manifestations. One such a book was Elsa Joubert's magnificent Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena (Tafelberg 1978; trans. The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena Hodder & Stoughton 1980). It tells the true story of a black woman's struggle against the pass laws and other forms of subjection. It radically disrupted her family and brought her children into conflict, not only against apartheid but also against parents who, in their eyes, lacked the courage to challenge the establishment.
After Poppie it was impossible for supporters of apartheid to deny that the system of apartheid lay at the crux of the violence. Johan Degenaar, a Stellenbosch philosopher, wrote that Poppie suffered under the structural violence of the system. One or two professors tried to counter with the argument that she was simply an exception and that one shouldn't generalise. It was, however, a lost case: every adult black person was literally and figuratively lost without his or her pass.
Twenty two years later comes Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia (Jacana Media) with a perspective radically different to that of Poppie Nongena. The book is a nostalgic view of life in the black township of Kathlehong on the East Rand during Dlamini's youth in the 1980s. The sense of community of that era is contrasted with the present-day feeling of disruption and alienation. It is, in fact, a formidable challenge to the view of the ANC-in-exile that it inspired the uprising and that it alone had the capacity to solve the problems of black people with the correct policies and effective management.
Dlamini, previously political editor of Business Day, begins Native Nostalgia with a visit to Thandukukhanya, a township near Piet Retief. His purpose was to investigate the violent protests there against weak service delivery. His interactions with elderly residents reveal how alienated they feel. The new councillors and officials talk to them as if they were children, and are interested in nothing but lining their own pockets.
The people's biggest complaint is that order has broken down. There are too many interlopers appearing - who then erect shacks and disrupt the peace. If they think back thirty or forty years, they see the pass laws as keys to the stability that prevailed. Dlamini emphasises that this is not an off-beat opinion. "There are certainly millions of people out there who share the sentiments expressed by Mrs. Nkabinde, Mrs. Ngcobo and Mr. Ntswayi ... If the pass laws were such a hated symbol of apartheid, as many of us think they were, why would Mrs Nkabinde remember them so fondly?" There are others in this writer's circle who share these views.
Dlamini feels nostalgia for his childhood years of the 1980s. By nostalgia he means a yearning for something that has been lost, or has been replaced. But to avoid any misunderstanding he is quick to stress the irony underlying nostalgia: for all its fixation with the past, it is essentially about the present. "It is about present anxieties refracted through the prism of the past ... It is when people feel themselves adrift that they come down with nostalgia."
His homesickness is not for apartheid -he had no doubt that the struggle against apartheid was just-- but to an era where there was respect for parental and other forms of authority, and a recognition of the values of education, discipline and communal responsibility. It was, in fact, for the very reason that there was a sense of solidarity among the black residents of the townships that apartheid could be overthrown.
Native Nostalgia rejects the image of the townships as ghettos where an exploited working class languished, trapped and without hope. Dlamini describes the townships as vital, complex, places. People sometimes colluded with the government and sometimes rose against it, but much more than today they knew the difference between right and wrong.
The difference between white and black was not as stark as is claimed today. The world was, rather, grey and for that reason Dlamini had no qualms in supporting Gerrie Coetzee, a white boxer from the East Rand, when he listened to the broadcast of Coetzee defending his world title against a black American.
Dlamini does not see Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor, but the medium par excellence of black nostalgia. It was the language that his mother and brothers and sisters spoke without reserve. The common tongue of the townships today is still impregnated with words and phrases like ag, tog and hoor net daar. The kwaito group Skeem sings a song called "Waar was jy?"
Dlamini's memoir rejects the view of the current rulers that before 1994 black people could do no other than wait abjectly for the ANC to deliver their liberation. The writer presents township blacks as agents capable of giving meaning to their own lives. There was no victim-complex here.
The book is a wonderful, inspiring story because it makes heroes of people who rose above difficult circumstances and created their own history. Native Nostaligia demands that the people of the townships be granted their own place in political history, rather than being seen merely as the storm troops of the ANC. It is a book that asks for a radical review of the urban history of South Africa.
*Hermann Giliomee is a historian and writer. An updated edition of his The Afrikaners: Biography of a People has recently appeared and can be ordered from Kalahari.com (see here). This review first appeared in Die Burger. The translation into English was by Lester Venter.
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
