Book Review: Native Nostalgia by Jacob Dlamini



Dlamini's book is not just an ode to his mother - it's also a welcome celebration of the lives of ordinary people, writes Jonny Steinberg





At the beginning of his new book, Native Nostalgia, Jacob Dlamini tells us that he is going to do something audacious, perhaps even dangerous: he is going to get nostalgic about his childhood. Why is that audacious, you may ask. Well, because Dlamini grew up in Katlehong, an apartheid township, and those who wax nostalgic about such places risk being condemned as "reactionaries or even apologists for apartheid".


Native Nostalgia proceeds nonetheless, and the world it brings forth is delightful. Dlamini is a humdinger of a talent. He takes from his childhood a great jumble of objects - the radio that sits in his mother's kitchen, the rats that infest the streets, the indigenous first names of the fancy, middle-class kids - and, almost at will, it seems, he makes them play. Into his life his mother's radio brings a bloated ensemble of sounds, stories and ideas - the death of Marvin Gaye, the stubborn persistence of Gerrie Coetzee, the white, Afrikaans-speaking heavy weight world champion supported to the hilt by blacks. It is from Radio Zulu that the seeds of Dlamini's political awaking come; there is an announcer who prefaces each piece of news with the words Bathi ngithi - "They say I must say this".

In Native Nostalgia, the cockroaches in Polokwane on the eve of the ANC's famous conference invoke the rats of Dlamini's childhood; they, in turn, conjure the gold miners who emerged from underground to look for work as they were retrenched in the wake of their industry's decline. This is insouciant, pleasurable writing.  It is clear that Dlamini is delighting not just in his childhood but in his powers to describe it. As he celebrates Katlehong he simultaneously celebrates the writers whose books taught him his craft: Walter Benjamin, Orhan Pamuk and their own reminiscences of childhood.

The point Dlamini makes is that both his township childhood and his capacity to bring it alive on the page are nourished by a noisy and never-finished cacophony of cultural influences. That he is Zulu, Dlamini tells us, perhaps with a little bravado, means as much to him as that he is right-handed. He is reaching for a spirit of anti-nativism, and he does so with lightness, which is something to delight in, given how heavily many of us have begun to wear our respective ethnic garbs.

But Dlamini is in fact not at all like his declared influences. The nostalgia Pamuk invokes about Istanbul is a difficult business; the writer is at once both inside his nostalgia and subjecting it to sharp scrutiny; he is describing, after all, a city deeply uncomfortable in its own skin. Dlamini's nostalgia, in contrast, is earnest and bushy-tailed; his is an unalloyed celebration of the homely values imparted to him by his beloved mother, Evelinah Papayi, her very name steeped in proletarian wholesomeness, and to whom Native Nostalgia is dedicated.

Why, one may (and at least one reviewer of Native Nostalgia did) ask, conduct a whole orchestra of philosophers and novelists to sing a simple paean to one's mother's values? This misses the point, I think. The meaning of any book is made by what is, and is not, being said around it. In these uncomfortable times, ordinary South Africans are written about primarily as problems. Far too many are unemployed. Too many are miserable, and are making others miserable. Too many are violent. The Mbeki presidency was largely taken up with the question of why so many South Africans were sick. This was not meant to be. Freedom was not meant to be accompanied by increasing quotients of pain. About ordinary South Africans there is much disenchantment.

At first blush, Dlamini's book appears to tug against this tide. If Native Nostalgia has a motto, it is that people ought not to be confused with their problems. From the matchbox houses apartheid slapped down at the edges of its cities came people with spirit, with values, with substance. Dlamini spars with those who would rob township people of all that. The ANC's "anti-politics machine in which black people ... feature as nothing more than objects of state policies". Or, even worse, those racial nativists who "[play] the race card like professional poker", claiming "with impunity that if all blacks suffered the same way, then any black person can stand in for all blacks". These are Native Nostalgia's opponents; they would rob Dlamini of his nostalgia and ordinary people of their world-making humanity.

Yet there is something in Native Nostalgia that works against this defence of the ordinary. The rich beings Dlamini conjures inhabit the past, and one is not always sure what he thinks of people now. The streets of his childhood, he writes, "are a lost world ... in which dead bodies were treated with more respect than seems to be the case at present". Elsewhere he laments that his neighbourhood was once quieter than it is now, for back then "it seemed every adult had a job and every kid was at school".

One is not sure whether Dlamini is standing for ordinary people here and now or lamenting their decline. I'm not sure that Dlamini knows either. It is a fecund ambiguity; it is, indeed, one of South Africa's great and tormenting confusions.

One looks forward to more books from this deeply original talent. Even at its weakest, Native Nostalgia sews the seeds of great strengths. Dlamini tells us that Katlehong residents started killing the owls the municipality introduced to cull the township's dreaded rats; owls, associated as they are with witchcraft, were considered far more dangerous than rodents. When he comments nonchalantly that these views are "quaint", "nonsensical" and "downright silly" one gasps at the easy incomprehension of this otherwise curious man.

Several billion people on six continents wrestle daily with the occult. Are they all quaint, nonsensical folk? Dlamini, I suspect, has his own demons: his celebration of the ordinary has sharp limits. Were he to write a book exploring those limits, I would queue to read it.

This Review was written by Jonny Steinberg and was published on the Times Live website on the 7th of February 2010.