Verdict: carrot with a few quibbles
Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia seeks to challenge “the grand master narrative of black dispossession” that he says dominates the historiography of the struggle.
Not every old woman who bore the yoke of apartheid is going to say that life was, in fact, better under apartheid - although some will. Not all blacks suffered and fought apartheid in the same way - life was complex.
So says Dlamini and by providing a deeply complex, layered, richly textured memoir and cultural biography, he revisits the past, allows it to breathe again, in all its diversity, in Katlehong. This was the “scientific township” built on a farm in Natalspruit in 1949 by “the parent city” of Germiston.
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November 23rd, 2009 @23:03 #
'[Dlamini] redefines nostalgia as "a sentiment of loss and displacement" ... an incurable condition of modernity.' Nice.