Shireen Ally

The disappointment of nostalgia: conceptualising cultures of memory in contemporary South Africa

Departing from a consideration of Jacob Dlamini’s book, Native Nostalgia, this essay critically reviews the conceptual terrain implied by “nostalgia,” re-situating it in relation to memory, especially where it intersects with debates over the status of “truth” in relation to “history.” We explore nostalgia through three dualities that underpin a burgeoning literature: remembering and forgetting, witnessing and testimony, and mourning and melancholia. Against conceptual oppositions that pit remembering against forgetting, or alternatively, that seek to remedy the fallibility of memory by seeking access to the “truth” of history, we suggest that nostalgia is probably more usefully understood as a practice of coincident temporalities. Nostalgia, in this sense, denotes a specific way of enfolding the past into the present, and indeed the future. We discuss two projects of post-apartheid testimony that work from, and on, the presumed antagonism that nostalgia sets up between “truth” and its possible distortions in memory: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996–1998, and the Apartheid Archive Project initiated in 2009. We conclude by suggesting that South Africans may need to pursue what Ackbar Abbas has called an “affective politics of disappointment” if the past is to be brought more creatively to bear on South Africa’s future.

The state-sponsored and centralised institutionalisation of an academic discipline: Sociology in South Africa, 1920–1970

Abstract This paper is the first of a two-part article. It is an exploratory attempt to expand our understanding of the organization of sociological knowledge within both the university and extra-university sectors in South Africa and the states key role in that process. It tracks the institutional development of the discipline within the states universities, as well as the centralised bureaucratic mechanisms of state power through which social research was commissioned, funded, practised and monitored. It outlines the three major ethnically and racially separate streams of sociology in the university system and identifies the key academic groupings and individuals involved. Similarly, the establishment and the role of highly centralised, state-sponsored and organized insitutions is traced, thereby showing how state agencies have co-ordinated, shaped and directed the actual content of sociological research.

Introduction: ‘Life after Thirty’ – A Critical Celebration

In 1977, a group of Johannesburg-based academics launched the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) History Workshop (hereafter HW), in a move that would reconfigure the landscape of South African historiography. So, in 2009, on the occasion of thirty-odd years of the HW, it was resolved to host an event that would not only celebrate its longevity, but also reflect critically on its practice. Imagined as an opportune moment reflexively to interrogate the HW’s past, present, and indeed future, a colloquium was convened that involved a weekend’s worth (3 to 5 April) of sustained critical intellectual exchange, debate, and dialogue. Local and international scholars – those intimately involved with the HW, those with only a passing familiarity, and even some of its most outspoken critics – were brought together around several select themes that carefully, and often critically, engaged the HW’s practice across both time and space.

‘Ooh, eh eh … Just One Small Cap is Enough!’ Servants, Detergents, and their Prosthetic Significance

This article explores the potent entanglements of race and servitude in the historical drama of dirt and domesticity. I focus on a recent advert in South Africa for the laundry detergent Omo, in which a black ‘fairy godmother’ maid magically materialises in an on-screen suburban domestic scene, whacking her white madam on the hand, while humorously admonishing her: ‘Ooh eh eh … just one small cap is enough!’ I argue that the iconographic assemblage of maid-madam-dirt-detergent-machine in the Omo advert dramatises the labouring hands of black servants that have historically kept their colonial masters (literally and figuratively) white. Tracing the histories of servants and detergents, laundry and labour, and tool and toil, I argue that the Omo ad resolved – through inversion, parody and humour – the colonial paradox of the dependency of white cleanliness on ‘unclean’ black labour, by figuring the servant as a prosthesis, and as a joke. The servant, however, is uncanny, the joke is unfunny, and the laughter attending the ad is nervous.

'The people shall speak'?: The ward system and constrained participatory democracy: a case study of Chochocho, Mpumalanga

Ward councillors and committees are the fulcrum on which a democratic commitment to participatory local government, and its attendant developmental aims, pivot. Yet, ward councillors are often the targets of localised protests that are now endemic as a critique of the pace and accomplishments of democratic developmentalism. If participatory structures issuing from the slogan ‘the people shall govern’ were intended to allow people to voice their grievances and realise their aspirations, why do so many local communities turn to protest instead? This article investigates the workings of the ward system through an intensive case study of one ward in Chochocho, Manzini (a rural trust area in Mpumalanga province), where qualitative in-depth interviews as well as observation revealed that while the communication function attendant to democratic governance has been decentralised, this has not been accompanied by a similar decentralisation of the capacity of the community to control more directly access to, and decisions over, resource and development priorities. As the councillor has little influence over decision-making regarding the allocation of developmental resources, the result is not only ineffective service delivery in the community, and a growing equivalence between ward structures and that of the local ANC branch, but as a result, a deep sense of frustration that feeds scepticism about participation amongst community members. It is this diminution of participation from the rhetoric of ‘people shall govern’ to the reality of ‘the people shall speak’ that animates the contestations over the ward system as an effective space of participation for local communities.

'Let's talk about Bantustans'

‘Politically, the bantustans are the greatest single fraud ever invented by white politicians’, wrote Stephen Bantu Biko in a 1972 essay titled Let’s Talk About Bantustans. In it, Biko advanced a careful analytical and political critique of the bantustans and ended with the revolutionary call: ‘Down with Bantustans!’ Nearly two decades later, Biko’s call had been realised and the era of the bantustans was ostensibly over. Yet, in 2010, the NRF Chair in Local Histories and Present Realities at Wits University was hosting more than a dozen researchers and postgraduate students conducting in-depth historically-informed research in multiple field sites across the northern provinces of the Free State, Mpumalanga, North-West and Limpopo and increasingly, each of us were beginning to confront the unmistakable afterlives of that ‘greatest single fraud’. As we were beginning to find, indelibly inscribed in the social cultural and aesthetic life in the rural hinterlands of the country’s interior were the pervasive and durable legacies of the bantustans. From struggles over land, to contestations of chieftainship, and the transformation of local elites, the histories of the former bantustans proved critical to understanding the contemporary landscape of some of the dry, dusty expanses of the rural north. These experiences, however, did not easily fit the existing historiography of the ‘homelands’. The scholars of the 1970s and 1980s who studied the bantustans did so largely to expose their illegitimacy. Historiographies of the ‘homelands’ produced univalent readings of the political logics of the bantustans as instruments of apartheid repression and control, and they trained most of their analyses on the most developed bantustans of the coastal provinces, especially the Transkei, Ciskei, and KwaZulu. It turned out that we knew relatively little about the large swathes of bantustan territories in the northern interior Lebowa, KwaNdebele, Venda, Gazankulu, KaNgwane, Bophutatswana and QwaQwa. We knew not enough about the variety of ‘homeland’ formations produced by different regional

Material Remains: Artifice versus Artefact(s) in the Archive of Bantustan Rule

If Bantustans were artifices of the apartheid state – ‘puppet’ regimes ruling through the despotism of ‘tradition’, rather than through modern bureaucratic techniques – what are we to make of their archives, the remains of their government? This paper – a chronicle of the reclamation of the KaNgwane archive – considers this question in relation to scholarly critiques of the archive as well as that of the Bantustans. As a pile of rotting, random (almost pulped and recycled) documents, the KaNgwane archive lacks most of the taxonomic classification, ordered selection, and epistemic authority of colonial state archives, against and along which critical scholarship urges us to read them. Yet the remains of what was in fact the KaNgwane archive is richly instructive. First, what remains as (and in) the Bantustans archive suggests not only investments in the conventions of statehood, but the way in which the Bantustan state was materialised through bureaucratic paperwork. Second, the literal recycling of history lays bare the possible meanings of the histories of Bantustan rule to those once subject to its authority, and who now subject its history to theirs.

Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa

By ANNE KELK MAGER. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. 232pp. ISBN: 978-0-253-22180-3.

‘If you are hungry, and a man promises you mealies, will you not follow him?’ South African Swazi Ethnic Nationalism, 1931–1986

Abstract On a cold winters day in June 1986, David Lukhele (a cabinet minister in the former KaNgwane) was gunned down mercilessly in his home by members of Umkhonto we Sizwes elite ‘elimination’ unit. He was assassinated for his fervent defence of the apartheid governments 1982 plan to cede KaNgwane (and Ingwavuma) to Swaziland, and for mobilising – against the ANCs broader African nationalism – an unrepentantly chauvinistic Swazi ethnic nationalism deferential to ‘incorporation’ under King Sobhuza and Swaziland. Yet, the very same David Lukhele had, in 1973, come under government surveillance for mobilising landless chiefs in the Transvaal against a South African Swazi identity subservient to Sobhuza and Swaziland. This dramatic reversal in the politics of David Lukhele indexes the volatility of South African Swazi ethno-politics over the course of the twentieth century. From its beginnings in Sophiatown in 1931 to its deathly denouement in 1986, South African Swazi nationalism cultivated ethnic identification as a particularly fertile conjunctural politics of land, custom, and chiefly authority, instantiated interestingly by the insistent yearning for a Bantustan.