Two of South Africa’s ‘untellable’ stories

Jacob Dlamini’s Native NostalgiaFerial Haffajee’s What if there were

no whites in South Africa

Anthea Garman, Rhodes Universitya.garman@ru.ac.za

The grand narrative of liberatory success in South Africa has made certain kinds of stories extremely controversial because they do not easily fit a neat black-white, evil-good, past-present dichotomy.

I look at two stories told by two journalists in which they speak of life trajectories which traverse the apartheid-post-apartheid divide.

• Both accounts insist on the value of an individual life and story. • Both take on intellectually legitimate, but also hegemonic, attitudes. • Both add facets and insights to our understanding of lives under transition.• Both accounts ask us to rethink our certainties about black lives in South

Africa.• Both show us just how difficult it is to speak of the South African past.

• Associate professor in history at Princeton University. He has MAs from Sussex and Yale and a PhD from Yale. He was a Ruth First Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, he did a postdoc at the University of Barcelona and was a visiting scholar at Harvard.

• Native Nostalgia won the University of Johannesburg’s Creative Writing Debut Prize.

• His second book, Askari, which won the 2015 Alan Paton Award, is a deeper study of collaboration under apartheid.

• He started his journalism career on the Sunday Times and was political editor for the Business Day and a columnist for BD and The Weekender.

• He was born in 1973 in Katlehong, east of Johannesburg.

• Editor in chief of the Sunday newspaper City Press based in Johannesburg. She is one of very few women editors in South Africa.

• She has been chair of the SA National Editors’ Forum and is a board member for the International Women’s Media Foundation, the World Editors’ Forum, the International Press Institute and the Inter Press Service.

• After doing an undergraduate degree at Wits she worked at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits and then joined the Weekly Mail as a trainee journalist.

• She turned to broadcast journalism at the SABC in 1991. • In 1994, she joined the Financial Mail and was

appointed managing editor in 2002. • In 2003, she was appointed associate editor of the

Mail and Guardian and editor in 2004. • In 2009 she became the editor of City Press.• Haffajee is the co-author of the Little Black Book of

professionals 2001, 2002 and a contributor to the work Redefining Politics: South African women and democracy.

• She was born in 1967 to clothing workers Ahmed and Ayesha Haffajee and grew up in a disadvantaged area in Bosmont, Johannesburg.

Ferial Haffajee – ‘a childof 1994’

Jacob Dlamini – ‘longing for a lost world’

JACOBDLAMINI -- KATLEHONG

“To say Katlehong was in theory a scientific township is to say that there was a wide gap between how government, with its bird’s-eye view of the place, saw it and how those who lived there experienced it. It is, in other words, to speak of the difference between Katlehong as it existed on paper for the state and Katlehong as it looked from the ground, as seen on a human scale. Residents did not so much undermine the grid as neutralise it with practices such as cutting double laps, shortcuts, through neighbours’ properties, and erecting stop-nonsense fences whose efficacy depended not on the fences’ height but their acceptance by neighbours. Here, the ground on which people lived and walked was founded not on official decrees but on relationships between neighbours. This does not mean the place existed outside politics, for, as Robert Hughes says, all cities are shaped by politics.” (NN: 45)

“To think nostalgically about the streets on which I grew up is to think longingly of a lost world, a world in which dead bodies were treated with more respect than seems to be the case at present.” (p55)

“There was nothing mournful about my township childhood, despite standard portrayals of township life that sometimes paint it as miserable.” (p63)

The book’s intention

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... by providing deeply complex, layered, richly textured memoir and cultural biography, he revisits the past, allows it to breathe again, in all its diversity in Katlehong… Dlamini is not here to lament but to remember, and he redefines nostalgia as a ‘sentiment of loss and displacement’ – he describes it as an incurable condition of modernity. For Dlamini, nostalgia allows the past to refract present anxieties…

Maureen Isaacson, Sunday Independent, 22 November 2009: 17.

One strong responseThere is a dangerous increase in books by black authors and so-called intellectuals that portray life under freedom and democracy negatively. One can even judge the content of these by their covers because they have vivid and memorable titles that assault the integrity of the first legitimate and elected black government and its democracy. Xolela Mancu’s To the Brink, Zakes Mda's Black Diamonds, William Gumede and Leslie Dikeni's Poverty of Ideas and Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia, for example, to understand how some black writers rubbish the achievement of freedom and democracy. These books, of course, reveal how the dawn of democracy and freedom under the ANC has opened up opportunities for black writers and intellectuals to articulate themselves. But what sits like a thorn crown among them is not just that they are witty and acerbic but their reactionary quality that negates anything positive.

Sandile Memela, Saturday Star, 28 November 2009: 14

“I don’t know how to describe feeling want and need and deprivation and how to write now, without hurting people I love and of hurting me, of the unprocessed pain of being lumbered with concerns too big for a child. I don’t know how to write about muddled child feelings when you knew you shouldn’t trouble your stressed mother and penniless father, but your shoes now have holes in them and they really can’t make that long, long walk.

“I don’t know how to write, at any length, about the impact of Bantu Education on me -- that I feel shame, still, because I don’t know algebra or geometry; that I don’t know the great philosophers and philosophies as well as I should despite half a lifetime of reading because these concepts are best threaded into developing brains while at school… I was impaled by Bantu Education and then by an insipid experience at Wits, which I abhorred. I only grew into what I could be when I started at the Mail & Guardian, so I find it very difficult to write about what I was” (50).

Ferial Haffajee – Bosmont

“If it had not been for freedom, I would be living a nightmare that I dreamt too often before the glimmer of change appeared on my horizon…

“I would go to work with my dad at a clothing factory in lower Doornfontein. It made panties, really cool tracksuits and onesies, and I would count them and pack them and earn something from his generous Jewish boss…

“It could so easily have been my life if freedom had not arrived. So I thank the leaders, the guerrillas, the activists who gave us freedom, and the ANC, too, for it completely deepened and lengthened my horizons and opened up unimaginable vistas …” (51).

The book’s intention“Whites are a tiny and diminishing minority in South Africa. Yet there appears to be an outsize, counterfactual, American-borrowed obsession with whiteness that distracts blacks from wielding the power we have. This obsession prevents us from apprehending the progress the country has made since 1994, appreciating the non-racial values that brought us here and holding a black majority government accountable for its failures to do more. It also gives demagogues and opportunists a star to hitch their bids for power. Thought experiment. What if there were no whites in South Africa? Do those seemingly obsessed with whiteness think everything would be OK the day after whites disappear?”

The responsesLukhona Mguni, researcher at UKZN: “Haffajee is perplexed by the young black South African discourse on white supremacy, white privilege, and the alleged ubiquity of white culture and its ability to become the norm in a democratic South Africa. This has led her to writing this book – to show the other side… Freedom has worked for Haffajee. She lives under a new establishment (defined by black politicians, businesspeople, entertainers and artists) that is antithetic to the old establishment defined by colonial and apartheid contours of repressive laws.” https://www.newera.com.na/2015/12/18/insult-young-south-africans/

TO Molefe, writer: “There is a lot that struck me as flawed with this premise, however well intentioned.” https://medium.com/@tomolefe/what-if-we-actually-listened-to-each-other-in-south-africa-dee6060e02f7#.6hyfbiamh

Sandra Gordon, Publisher Wag the Dog: “In her inimitable fashion she asks that all South Africans humble themselves, celebrate what has been achieved (significant when you read the stats) and see that our transition is a major work in progress. Still.” http://themediaonline.co.za/2016/01/is-haffajees-book-worth-reading-hell-yes/

Percy Mabandu, author: “Ferial Haffajee's book… pretends to ask a bold question. But by asking a question that can only be answered with conjecture, she misses the opportunity to confront the reality of racial injustice in South Africa. What is the meaning of whiteness in South Africa today?” http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2016/01/05/Novel-Statement-Fifty-shades-of-white

Two ways of dealing with the past

1. Nostalgia a la Boym

• Dlamini uses nostalgia purposely – “Longing and critical thinking are not opposed to each other” (NN 18)• He is intent on rescuing a complexity and agency “not even colonialism and apartheid at their worst could

destroy” (NN 19), “… as if blacks produced no art, literature or music, bore no morally upstanding children, or, at the very least, children who knew the difference between right and wrong … this is not to say there was no poverty, crime or moral degradation. There was. But none of this determined the shape of black life in its totality…”

• “There are also immediate anxieties at the heart of my nostalgia. I am concerned that in its technocratic drive to erase the legacies of apartheid and to bring about economic development, the ANC has created the anti-politics machine in which black people – who allegedly suffered the same way, struggled the same way and lived the same way under apartheid – feature as nothing more than objects of state policies or, worse, passive recipients of state-led service delivery” (NN 20).

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 2001. Nostalgia is:• loss AND displacement• has no cure• a condition of modernity• more about the present than

the past -- “present anxieties [are] refracted through the prism of the past” (NN 16)

2. ‘At war with yesterday’• ‘Our country is stuck between people who want to move on – for whom the past is a

hindrance; and people who feel we can’t move on because the past is still in their present (NW 67).

• ‘In the greater swathe of world history… 50-odd years of formal apartheid is a blip’ (65) and ‘the fiercely-political eighties were very future-directed: this shit had a sell-by date’ (66).

• ’An eighties person like me does not get this. I guess it comes from growing up in a time when you could unionise and when power was something to be engaged… I believe fervently that you shape your own destiny’ (66).

• ‘Young black people want to occupy the centre; to nudge white young people from a centre they still believe does not belong to them’ (82).

• ‘Without affirmative action I would likely be a retrenched clothing factory worker of a low-level banking clerk... My life is defined by and led by black power in all its manifestations and tributaries. From where I sit, blacks are the centre of my gaze in all ways ‘ (73, 87).

• The only nostalgia Haffajee admits to is ‘revolutionary nostalgia’ (65).

This ‘war’ – both of the new generation of black South Africans and Haffajee’s (which may be more of a cold war) – is still about the present condition.

How are these stories ‘untellable’?1. They sit uncomfortably in the present. Dlamini’s story deliberately complicates a

hegemonic history that the ruling ANC with its heroes wants to become the version taught in schools. Dlamini is the son of an ordinary family and he’s determined to write himself and them into history too.

2. Haffajee’s own story of the past is painful and difficult to tell but the transition to democracy offered her extraordinary opportunities which she seized. She cannot believe that the next generation raises the past for further exhumation when her own life has centred her so comfortably in a longed-for present.

3. They tell us just how unsettled the past continues to be in South Africa – recent student demands for ‘decolonisation’ of universities and knowledge.

4. They’re unsatisfying, disgruntling reading experiences which leave us unreconciled with the past, meaning that we have to ‘stay with the trouble’.

5. These stories squeeze themselves into the conversation, demanding the space of telling, believing, be enlarged to admit their accounts and points of view.