Fantasies about the unsettled past at the Apartheid Archives Conference

It turns out that nostalgia is a heck of messy thing. I guess memory itself is always less than entirely reliable, indeed wily. That much was clear at the 3^rd Apartheid Archives Conference that happened this past week, 25 to 29 July 2011, at Wits University, under the theme ‘narratives, nostalgia and nationhoods’. I know that I am part of the Apartheid Archives Project (AAP) network, but this baby was a mind-blowing event.

Nostalgia, since it reflects and restores, certainly isn’t simple sentimental reminiscence. In fact, being often a treacherous fantasy, it can betray memory, fictionalise reality. A painful yearning for home that is no longer there, it is also not just bittersweet memory for the past, pining for lost time. Instead nostalgia, a symbolic return, often coloured by trauma, stages an encounter between history and memory while trying to act as guide for the future that often is coloured by unspoken shame and guilt in the present. To reflect on nostalgia is to encounter the good old bad days, what Professor Leswin Laubscher, member of AAP, referred to as ‘ache for an absent other, or an irretrievable self’.



Leswin Laubscher at 3AAC. The poet and scholar Gabeba Baderoon
is in the background (photo: Ratele).

But you probably knew that from Jacob Dlamini’s book. Or maybe not. Or like Eric Miyeni and others dislike the book. Dlamini, a homeboy of mine whom I met for the first time at 3AAC, where he was one of 8 keynote speakers, has been getting a lot of grief from Miyeni, Andile Mngxitama, and others for his book Native Nostalgia for remembering black life in apartheid-era Katlehong the way he does. Mngxitama says it reproduces a white perspective; refers to the book as giving an Oprahesque view of township existence. In Miyeni’s words, Dlamini’s book’s premise is “so sickening I decided never to read it”. How does that work: getting sick from imagining what a book contains? Come on Mr Miyeni, you do your name an injustice. The chutzpah of writing in a column about a book you have not read is admirable; but I think it gives a crutch to the pervasive anti-book reading culture that I want to think a book-writing man like you in a more calmer moment would not support. Read the book, only then you can trash it. Actually, in my reading of Native Nostalgia, which featured so much at the 3AAC, it does not say “we had fun under apartheid”. It illustrates that black people actually had a life even then, despite the inhumanity of the regime. In my book, the book is an uncomfortably fine read (except for the earlier parts when it keeps on promising what it will do later), at once touching and maddening and provocative. I recommend it, precisely because of how he interprets subjects who would say “Things were better under apartheid”. Gutsy, smart writing.  

Jacob Dlamini at 3AAC (photo: Ratele)



Although all this black-on-black skirmish is about what the apartheid past looked like, did to us, what we did and were back then, and how to think about the unsetlled past, I am getting a bit sidetracked aren't I. Back to the AAC. Things were never what they seemed under apartheid, needless to say. In trying to engineer a future white utopia, apartheid turned out to be a pornographic fantasy gone awry, and not just for many ordinary black people. But it didn’t just end there. The regime did not only soil the future for black people (and white people), it would make the past a shameful place for any ethical white person. Anyhow, that’s what I got at 3AAC.



You might not be familiar with the AAP, so here is what it is all about. A loose formation of international group of actors from different fields of enquiry and practice, it’s led by Professors Norman Duncan (in picture below) and Garth Stevens. The main goal is to make sense of South Africans’ stories (but not only South African stories) of racism under the old regime. It is interested in the persisting consequences of the past racist order on personal and collective functioning in today’s society. Yes, indeed, the past is dead, long live the past! The Project “is fundamentally premised on the understanding that traumatic experiences from the past will constantly attempt to re-inscribe themselves (often in masked form) in the present, if they are not acknowledged, interrogated and addressed.” It argues that “it is important for South African society [and doubtless any society which has pasts characterised by racist division, legislated or otherwise] to review, so as to acknowledge and deal with its past, in order to better manage its present and future.”



Norman Duncan, leader of the AAP (photo: Ratele)

Zimitri Erasmus and Garth Stevens, co-leader of the AAP (photo: Ratele)



With nostalgia and nationhoods added to the foundational theme of narrative then, 3AAC was set to offer a stage “to explore various deployments of nostalgia in personal narratives of the past, emphasising its critical and creative possibilities.” And what possibilities! As a few people said, at the end you were not sure what nostalgia is and what the past wasn’t. Along the way, we lost nationhoods, but that is ok; we had our hands and ears full of memories of the unsettled pasts, nevermind the future. As the organisers had promised, the conference brought “into conversation a diversity of scholars critically engaged with nostalgia as a means to expand social memory, reclaim and reconfigure subjugated knowledge(s) and experience(s), to produce new knowledge(s) and new subjectivities; surface ways in which nostalgia is employed not only as a means of reconstructing historical knowledge and subjectivities but also as ‘a set of resources for the future’”. It did all of that. And how it did it. Then it did some: how did they manage to have Nadine Gordimer, William Kentridge, Chris van Wyk, Hugh Masekela, Zoe Wicomb all there, I ask? Impressive.

I am not sure why I experienced a pleasant feeling seeing the trumpet master Bra Hugh helping the 1991 Literture Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer take off her coat (see a not very clear image below). I enjoyed the work that Kentridge presented. Chris van Wyk talked about township dogs, and he was tears-down-the-cheeks-fall-off-the-chair hilarious. Wicomb, who was generous with her time to the conference, having given one of the keynote addresses and sitting through all of the conference talks, read a new story in progress. She is intriguing, even from her look, Wicomb is. The five artists were brought together for the event moderated by another fine South African, Mark Gevisser, the biographer of Thabo Mbeki. It was unbelievable stuff; perhaps historical. You had to be there to experience it. Make a date to be at the next AAC in 2013 when it is likely to be next staged. 

Hugh Masekela helping Nadine Gordimer take off her coat (photo: Ratele).