Nostalgia after Apartheid

Amber R. Reed

Description

In this engaging book, Amber Reed provides a new perspective on South Africa’s democracy by exploring Black residents’ nostalgia for life during apartheid in the rural Eastern Cape. Reed looks at a surprising phenomenon encountered in the post-apartheid nation: despite the Department of Education mandating curricula meant to teach values of civic responsibility and liberal democracy, those who are actually responsible for teaching this material (and the students taking it) often resist what they see as the imposition of “white” values. These teachers and students do not see South African democracy as a type of freedom, but rather as destructive of their own “African culture”—whereas apartheid, at least ostensibly, allowed for cultural expression in the former rural homelands. In the Eastern Cape, Reed observes, resistance to democracy occurs alongside nostalgia for apartheid among the very citizens who were most disenfranchised by the late racist, authoritarian regime. Examining a rural town in the former Transkei homeland and the urban offices of the Sonke Gender Justice Network in Cape Town, Reed argues that nostalgic memories of a time when African culture was not under attack, combined with the socioeconomic failures of the post-apartheid state, set the stage for the current political ambivalence in South Africa. Beyond simply being a case study, however, Nostalgia after Apartheid shows how, in a global context in which nationalism and authoritarianism continue to rise, the threat posed to democracy in South Africa has far wider implications for thinking about enactments of democracy.

Nostalgia after Apartheid offers a unique approach to understanding how the attempted post-apartheid reforms have failed rural Black South Africans, and how this failure has led to a nostalgia for the very conditions that once oppressed them. It will interest scholars of African studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and education, as well as general readers interested in South African history and politics.

Sujets

• Social Policy
• Public Policy
• Traditions
• Social Science
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Republic of South Africa
• África
• South Africa
• South
• Customs
• Cape Town
• Anthropology
• Africa
• Discrimination
• Le Cap
• Afrique du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268108793
• Langue: English

Extrait

NOSTALGIA AFTER APARTHEID
RECENT TITLES FROM THE HELEN KELLOGG INSTITUTE SERIES ON DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT
Paolo G. Carozza and Aníbal Pérez-Liñan, series editors
The University of Notre Dame Press gratefully thanks the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies for its support in the publication of titles in this series.
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Brian Wampler
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J. Ricardo Tranjan
Participatory Democracy in Brazil: Socioeconomic and Political Origins (2016)
Tracy Beck Fenwick
Avoiding Governors: Federalism, Democracy, and Poverty Alleviation in Brazil and Argentina (2016)
Alexander Wilde
Religious Responses to Violence: Human Rights in Latin America Past and Present (2016)
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The Other Roots: Wandering Origins in Roots of Brazil and the Impasses
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Roxana Barbulescu
Migrant Integration in a Changing Europe: Migrants, European Citizens, and Co-ethnics in Italy and Spain (2019)
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Beyond High Courts: The Justice Complex in Latin America (2019)
Kenneth P. Serbin
From Revolution to Power in Brazil: How Radical Leftists Embraced Capitalism
and Struggled with Leadership (2019)
Manuel Balán and Françoise Montambeault, eds.
Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America: The Promise of Inclusive Citizenship (2020)
Ligia De Jesús Castaldi
Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Legal Impact of the American Convention on Human Rights (2020)
For a complete list of titles from the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, see http://www.undpress.nd.edu .
NOSTALGIA
AFTER
APARTHEID

Disillusionment, Youth, and Democracy in South Africa
AMBER R. REED
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2020 by University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946988
ISBN: 978-0-268-10877-9 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10880-9 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10879-3 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
To Aphiwe
CONTENTS List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Glossary of isiXhosa Words Map of South Africa Introduction ONE Being Xhosa, Being South African TWO The NGO as Moral Compass? THREE “Thinking Outside the Box”: Sonke in Kamva FOUR Life Orientation as Democratic Project FIVE Teaching Nostalgia SIX Freedom from Democracy? Appendix Notes Bibliography Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
I.1 Children in costumes wait for the Heritage Day celebration to start. Photo by author, 2012
1.1 Map of the Eastern Cape Province, with Kamva’s municipality highlighted. Wikimedia Commons, 2016
1.2 Exterior of Cedarwood Primary School. Photo by author, 2012
1.3 Village outside Kamva. Photo by author, 2012
1.4 Kamva, as seen from the National Highway in spring. Photo by author, 2012
1.5 Typical umzi in Kamva. Photo by author, 2012
2.1 Wall art in Sonke’s Cape Town offices. Photo by author, 2012
2.2 Visibility through dress at a Sonke rally in Gugulethu, Cape Town. Photo by author, 2012
2.3 Sonke pamphlet promoting medical circumcision. Photo by author, 2012
3.1 The doctor’s office out of which Wamkelekile operates. Photo by author, 2012
3.2 A rural school where Sonke worked in 2008–11. Photo by author, 2012
4.1 Students line up for morning assembly at a rural Eastern Cape school. Photo by Sarah Caufield, 2012

4.2 Students are expected to keep the school clean, both during and outside class hours. Photo by Sarah Caufield, 2012
4.3 In Arts and Culture and Life Orientation classes, lessons are often intended to preserve Xhosa cultural heritage. Photo by author, 2012
5.1 In an after-school program, a child conveys her daily fear of crime in a drawing. Photo by author, 2012
PREFACE
For a month or so in 2012, it seemed everyone in the rural Eastern Cape where I was conducting ethnographic research was talking about Jacob Zuma’s genitals. In May, two men had sneaked into a Johannesburg art gallery and used a red cross and black paint to deface Brett Murray’s provocative painting of President Zuma, The Spear . The large canvas depicted the president in a style reminiscent of Lenin-era Soviet propaganda, only with his genitals fully exposed. Nationwide calls for the painting’s removal (including from Zuma himself) and the subsequent act of vandalism were premised on the notion that this painting went too far, that it was an abuse of the constitutional right to artistic expression and free speech in its overt sexuality and visible disparaging of the nation’s president. Protests erupted throughout the country on both sides of the issue. A complicated series of court cases and appeals followed in the subsequent months, ultimately upholding the gallery’s right to continue to display the painting (Laing 2012). During the time of this controversy, I was living with a Xhosa family in a small hilltop village just outside of the rural Eastern Cape town of Kamva. 1 People in the area were almost unanimous in their anger over the painting’s creation and display. They kept repeating the same sentiment to me: Human rights are important, but they must not be abused to the point of insulting someone’s dignity. In other words, they felt that there is a limit to individual rights and that their fellow citizens had crossed the line by supporting the painting.
This incident, and the reactions of Kamva residents to it, encapsulated much of the broader issues I was investigating in rural South Africa. On the one hand, the country’s recent overthrow of the apartheid state and embrace of liberal human rights saw freedom of expression as central to a healthy democracy. After decades of government censorship along racial lines, the ability to criticize even the highest office was essential. On the other hand, many South Africans found these liberal messages at odds with local value systems. People in Kamva said it was against their culture to so greatly insult a figure of authority like the president. What we see in twenty-first-century South Africa, then, is a country where national values of liberal democracy are often resisted on the grounds of culture in local settings. So, I wondered, what happens when local residents, often deeply invested in these acts of cultural resistance, are the ones tasked with teaching democracy to young people?
I did not set out to write a book about democracy, and I certainly did not expect to be writing about nostalgia for one of history’s most reviled, racist systems of governance expressed by those who arguably suffered most at its hands. When I began ethnographic research in rural South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, I was interested in the ways that young people both were affected by and contributed to the agendas of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), particularly those seeking to promote ideological and cultural change in rural areas far removed from the centers of government (Reed 2011; Reed and Hill 2010). I wanted to understand the role of NGOs in constructing or inhibiting youth agency and activism, but it very quickly became apparent that this focus was far too narrow to capture the lives of young rural South Africans. During the many conversations I had with activists, parents, teachers, and young people in the Eastern Cape, I kept getting steered toward the perceived cultural intrusions of Western-influenced democracy as it played out in local contexts and the resulting nostalgia for apartheid as a time of security, social control, and greater cultural freedom. For my research participants, NGOs seeking to enact ideological change became a conversational entry point into larger expressions of immense frustration with the status quo and anger over the push for an unpalatable version of democracy. “Freedom,” it turned out, did not feel so free; instead, it rested on Western ideas of personhood and subjectivity that felt confining, imposing, and alien. To make matters worse, these political changes were paired with dashed hopes for socialist economic policies and increased wealth inequalities via neoliberal channels of governance. As many anthropologists have done before me, I adjusted my focus to what people wanted me to talk about rather than the other way around. Conversations about the future were sidelined in order to make way for stories about the past.
Since the early 1960s, African states have thrown off the official yoke of colonialism in relatively quick succession, rapidly and drastically changing the political landscape of the continent. Many of these revolutionary movements became pawns in the Cold War scramble for influence on the African continent, and thus governmental aspirations often took on socialist or communist angles. With the fall of the Soviet Union, however, much of Africa was swept up into the dual global trends of liberal representative democracy and neoliberal economics, two sets of ideas that have become naturalized and seemingly inextricable in the view of many people in the twenty-first century. Despite t