In 2009, historian Jacob Dlamini published the quickly popular Native Nostalgia, a memoir centered on his apartheid-era childhood in South Africa. Dlamini fondly remembers radio programs, school, speaking in Afrikaans (“the language of the oppressor”), and especially tight familial and community bonds. The book was controversial. Some condemned it, while others defended it on ethical grounds. Dlamini does not celebrate state-sanctioned racial domination, and he acknowledges its brutality. But he does seem, as Eric Worby and Shireen Ally put it, to pose the “politically incorrect question: could it be that life for blacks under apartheid … was not quite as bad as critical histories tell us they were.”
We must not stretch the point too far. Black apartheid nostalgia is hardly widespread. According to the Afrobarometer survey, in 2008, nearly one-quarter (24%) of Black African residents in South Africa agreed that life was currently worse than it was under apartheid. In the 2015 survey, 14% of Black African residents rated the apartheid government higher than the post-apartheid government, and 10% of Black African residents approved of a return to apartheid.
These are fairly small, albeit non-trivial, proportions. Rather than dismiss the phenomena, however, I suggest that it provides a useful glimpse into the frustrations of the present. The numerically insignificant pattern of Black apartheid nostalgia emerges within the soil of a much wider pattern of critique and protest—one that takes square aim at the post-apartheid state.
