What does it mean for a black South African to remember life under apartheid with fondness? Get Native Nostalgia by Jacob Dlamini at 21% off for 21 days

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Jacana Media Solidarity Reads Day 2

Native Nostalgia

by Jacob Dlamini

‘The conundrum is this: What does it mean for a black South African to remember life under apartheid with fondness? What does it mean to say that black life under apartheid was not all doom and gloom and that there was a lot of which black South Africans could be, and indeed were, proud? Only lazy thinkers would take these questions to mean support for apartheid. They do not. Apartheid was without virtue.’

Challenging the stereotype that black people who lived under South African apartheid have no happy memories of the past, this examination into nostalgia carves out a path away from the archetypical musings.

Even though apartheid itself had no virtue, award-winning author Jacob Dlamini, who himself spent his childhood under apartheid, insists that black people during this time did not inhabit a vast moral desert.

In this meditation on the experiences of those who lived through apartheid, Native Nostalgia points out that despite the poverty and crime, there was still art, literature, music, beauty and a deep morality that, when combined, determined the shape of black life during that era of repression.

Jacob Dlamini is a South African journalist, historian and award-winning author. He teaches at Princeton University.