Jacana

Author of Native Nostalgia, Jacob Dlamini is one who peers through the smoke and mirrors of SA politics, seeking the true nature of the situation. In this article for Business Day he names and shames some of those who boarded the ANC gravy train in Limpopo Province – including, yes, you guessed who:

I MET Sello Rasethaba a couple of years ago at Madiba’s, a South African restaurant in Brooklyn, New York. The restaurant is popular with expatriates and South Africans passing through the Big Apple. Rasethaba was part of a South African government delegation involving politicians, public servants and businesspeople. Their visit took in a number of city stops, including Washington .

Madiba’s is about the only place in the US where you can order pap and boerewors or a plate of bobotie . It is also one of the few places in New York where you can order Castle and Windhoek lagers, one reason South African expatriates and those passing through New York love the place.

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• Native Nostalgia by Jacob Dlamini
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Prepare to be thought-provoked again by Jacob Dlamini, who takes a closer look at polygamy and its practice in Africa – and concludes that it has never been the norm in African culture, but rather an exception to the rule:

IN 2004, Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, historians at the University of the Witwatersrand, wrote an essay titled The Myths of Polygamy: A History of Extramarital and Multipartnership Sex in South Africa . Delius and Glaser used the article, published in the South African Historical Journal, to challenge claims that there was a connection between polygamy and contemporary male promiscuity in SA.

The historians said these claims were favoured by many people, from researchers, social workers to Christian activists.

They said these claims rested on two assumptions. The first was that polygamy created “an expectation of multiple sexual partnerships for men”. Second, there was a tendency to romanticise African tradition by insisting that “in the old days polygamy successfully contained male sexual urges”.

• Read the complete article in Business Day

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Author of Native NostalgiaJacob Dlamini names no names in this article about South Africa’s latest high-profile and controversial appointment to its diplomatic corps (our guess: he’s writing about a certain homophobe due for a sojourn in Uganda), but he does question what exactly the prerequisites are for representing South Africa abroad. Racism and bigotry, he muses, don’t seem to be considered to be reasons for disqualification. But what about insanity?

A COLLEAGUE once showed me a string of text messages he had received from a man who is now being considered for a job as SA’s high commissioner in central Africa somewhere. The texts were manic, crude and downright offensive. They reflected poorly on the writer and suggested a mind that was both troubled and unhinged.

Written in a mixture of English and Sesotho, the texts were nothing but a string of insults. Creative insults too. The author seemed determined to drown his target in a cesspit of vulgarity. Fortunately, the intended victim had a formidable sense of humour and was able to laugh off the insults. In fact, the recipient of the texts felt pity for the sender, who was a good writer and maybe, at one time, a good man.

I do not recall if the intended victim responded to the texts but I do remember that we both concluded that the man who had written and sent the texts was certifiably mad. He had to be. We decided that no self- respecting and sane person would have written and sent out such nasty messages.

• Read the complete article in the Busines Day

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Jacana and Fanele:Necessary are thrilled to bring you the news that Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde’s autobiography has received an honour at the Stonewall Book Awards!

Formerly called the GLBTRT Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award is the oldest book award given for outstanding achievement in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Literature in the United States. It is an official award of the American Library Association and is given each year at the Association’s annual conference.

Each year two awards are given in literature and non-fiction for outstanding works dealing with GLBT issues. Black Bull, Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma is one of four books granted “Honor Status” for the Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award 2010.

Congratulations to Nkabinde!

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• Black Bull, Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma by Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde
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The publication of Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia – which treats, among other things, the unexpected phenomenon of fond reminiscences of apartheid days by blacks – inspired journalist James Clarke to dig up Ben Maclennan’s 1990 book The Lighter Side of Apartheid and do some reminiscing of his own:

Dlamini insists that we should “not dismiss such sentiments simply because they make us uncomfortable”.

There was certainly a bizarrely funny side to apartheid.

Zulu journalist Nat Nakasa said: “I shudder to think what would happen to us if apartheid did not have some comical aspects.”

For much of the apartheid period parliamentary reporter Ben Maclennan, then of the South African Press Association (Sapa), kept cuttings from newspapers and extracts from Hansard that illustrated what Nakasa meant. He published them in a book in 1990 titled The Lighter Side of Apartheid (Chameleon Press).

One of my favourites was headed “Seeking Clarity”. The chairman of the Group Areas Board, Dr van Rensburg, explained the law on race classification thus:

The Group Areas Act defined three races – “White (hitherto known as ‘Europeans’), Native and Coloured”. All those who fell between White and Native were regarded as Coloured. But the act allowed the Coloured group to be subdivided into Indian, Chinese, Malays and those commonly known as Coloured people. The Malays were regarded as Malays only as long as they lived in their own group area of Schotsche Kloof. If they moved into another area, even across the road, those Malays became Coloureds, he explained. (Cape Times, March 2 ,1961).

• Complete article in The Star

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Columnist and author Jacob Dlamini (Native Nostalgia) is not short of opinions, and his vervy, punchy delivery makes them hard to ignore. Here is piece he wrote for Business Day about the scourge of South Africa – HIV/AIDS – and the man many want to hold responsible, Thabo Mbeki. It would seem that Dlamini is in at least partial agreement with Jonny Steinberg’s assessment that SA’s former president has had to take on more than his fair share of villainisation:

PRINCE opens his song Sign o’ the Times with a line about a skinny man from France who “died of a big disease with a little name/By chance his girlfriend came across a needle/And soon she did the same”. The big disease with a little name is AIDS. It has felled the big and the small, the mighty and the weak, the rich and the poor, men and women, the young and the old. Its effect on SA has been, well, big.

AIDS is also the disease whose history will always be accompanied by a footnote about former president Thabo Mbeki ’s dalliance with denialism.

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Excerpt from the introduction to Jacob Dlamini’s new book:

Reflective nostalgia can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to each other, because affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection.

But if nostalgia is about present anxieties, what are these concerns for me? What is it about the present that makes me cherish shattered fragments of memory?

Native Nostalgia should be considered a modest contribution to continuing attempts to rescue South African history and the telling of it from what Cherryl Walker has correctly identified as the distorting master narrative of black dispossession that dominates the historiography of the struggle.

The master narrative would have us believe that black South Africans, who populate struggle jargon mostly as faceless “masses of our people”, experienced apartheid the same way, suffered the same way and fought the same way against apartheid.

That is untrue.

Black South African life is as shot through with gender, class, ethnic, age and regional differences (to name only the most obvious distinctions) as life anywhere else in the world.

The master narrative blinds us to richness, a complexity of life among black South Africans that not even colonialism and apartheid at their worst could destroy.

I do not mean that my feelings of nostalgia should be understood the same way as those of the black pensioner trotted out by newspapers at each general election in South Africa who says: “Things were better under apartheid.”

However, as my treatment of Pamase Violet Nkabinde, Vincent Ntswayi and the others, whose lives and attitudes are described in the book, shows, I am not glib about such sentiments.

• Complete excerpt in The Times

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Boekehuis’ last Saturday Voices event of the year is a CELEBRATION! Join us for some bubbly!

Jacob Dlamini, author of the memoir Native Nostalgia and Maggie Davey, publisher, writer and a WISER Fellow at Wits University from 2010, will chat about what it means for black South Africans to remember their lives under apartheid with fondness.

We’ll see you there!

Event Details

• Date: Saturday, 12 December 2009
• Time: 12:00 PM for 12:30 PM
• Venue: Boekehuis, cnr Lothbury & Fawley Sts
  Auckland Park
  Johannesburg | Map
• Guest Speaker: Maggie Davey
• RSVP: boekehuis@boekehuis.co.za, 011 482 3609

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• Native Nostalgia by Jacob Dlamini
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One wonders if Jacob Dlamini realised how contentious his book Native Nostalgia would turn out to be? In it, the author argues that many look back at aspects of the Apartheid era with a kind of longing. Ido Lekota defends this view in the Sowetan and joins Dlamini in a call for people to remember to keep the good:

IN HIS book, Native Nostalgia, Jacob Dlamini tackles the subject of how often we hear of black people seemingly hankering after “the good days of apartheid”.

This normally happens when people complain about how their lives have changed for the worst in
post-apartheid South Africa.

This knee-jerk reaction, as Dlamini correctly points out, is (especially for those in power) to reject these comments as “reactionary”.

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The author of Native Nostalgia looks carefully at a few moments in JM Coetzee’s Boyhood that could point, Dlamini speculates, to the moment when Coetzee discovered the writer within:

THERE is a scene in JM Coetzee’s memoir Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, where the young narrator visits Aunt Annie, his great-aunt and godmother, at the Volkshospitaal in Cape Town.

Aunt Annie, old, wrinkled and ugly, has broken a hip and the narrator, his mother and the narrator’s brother have travelled from Worcester to Cape Town to “make arrangements for” the aunt.

This passage describes the scene : “Because she is his godmother she believes she has a special relationship with him. She does not seem to sense the disgust he feels for her, wrinkled and ugly in the hospital bed, the disgust he feels for this whole ward full of ugly women. He tries to keep his disgust from showing; his heart burns with shame.”

The narrator, his brother and mother leave the hospital to spend the night in Aunt Annie’s flat and “the prospect fills him with doom”. But what is a boy to do except go with his mother? He does not like Aunt Annie’s apartment. It has no fridge and the “toilet bowl is brown with dirt”. “Why have we got to stay here?” he asks. “Because,” says his mother.

• Complete article in the Business Day

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• Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life by JM Coetzee
  EAN: 9780099268277
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