Opinion

Jacob Dlamini vividly remembers Katlehong a la Walter Benjamin

November 22, 2009 Edition 1

Maureen Isaacson

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.

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, and as he treks around Thandu-kukhanya, the township bordering Piet Retief, in August this year, witnessing the aftermath of violent service delivery protests, such anxieties are amplified.

What if the ANC government, in its drive to erase the legacies of apartheid and develop the economy, lumps black people into one big "anti-politics machine", assuming that their experience was identical? History must not be erased as cities change shape and the dreaded rats ascend from the underground to assume what they surely consider their rightful place in the city, or at least in Dlamini's project, so that he can repeat his thesis: that the experience of black South Africans is not the same.

The fact that he is among those who had a happy childhood under apartheid triggers a philosophical argument that recalls Tolstoy.

"Each family was of course, unhappy in its own way."

This erudite book is the fruit of Dlamini's education-deprived mother's belief that "education was liberation". A studious boy, the afternoons in the company of atlas and grammar book, in an inner world beyond the reach of the government's paternalistic arms, have paid off.

The powers-that-were failed in their mission to propagandise and convert him through Radio Zulu, the medium through which Dlamini says he was liberated from his mother's religious conservatism.

His internal life flourished in the government-built house which he reached after walking mean streets, escaping potential molesters. Dlamini is no longer the primary schoolboy nicknamed Kentucky Fried Chicken Wing for the burns sustained in infancy in his mother's bedroom.

He revisits this house with the peach tree that he only later discovered had come fully grown, with the house, a government gesture intended to create that lived-in feeling.

He returns to that childhood armed with his reading. His companion is Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish Marxist philosopher and essayist, whose descriptions in Berlin Childhood Around 1900 inspire Dlamini to tease out the detail of this complex life.

He comes armed with Istanbul, the memoir of Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel literature laureate, , and draws from the fragments of his life in the house built of concrete slabs under an asbestos roof, later discovered to be toxic.

Dlamini, like a gourmet chef, works his way through the peculiarities of Katlehong, slicing through its layers, presenting us with a life lived under the skin, baring a network of nerves, a complex urban structure, complete with rats, screams and smells of teargas, fear, rebellion, foul-mouthed neighbours and the erratic rules of tsotsitaal.

A chapter listing expressions such as "dis kak maar dis alraait" signals a lowering of the mercury. Is Dlamini getting tired?

Also, an over-explication in this book of process - stops short of being laborious at times. But as I am about to call out to the writer to please stop telling me what he is doing, he succeeds in convincing me that he has sustained his story and that he has taken me well within the walls of the "previously disadvantaged areas for previously disadvantaged individuals".

Yes, as a PhD student in history at Yale University, he is taking his own sweet time discovering what reallyhappened in his township childhood.

That he succeeds in bringing us closer to this reality is surely no small thanks to his mother's injunctions. He works against the "nativism" exhibited by an official at the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Council who refers him to the archive of the newly created suburb of Ekurhuleni instead of the Katlehong municipal council because Katlehong no longer exists.

But he will rebuild this township on the shards of his memory, not to be wiped out by politicians.

For, if black people are once again to feature merely as objects of state policies, will it not render this brilliantly rich Katlehong childhood meaningless?