Memory, Ethics and the Re-temporalisation of South African National History in the Works of Jacob Dlamini

Abstract

This paper examines Jacob Dlamini’s two main historical works, Askari (2014) and Native Nostalgia (2009), for the ways in which they critique dominant South African memory practices while offering an alternative, and presumably more ethical, form of memoralisation which can also be read as a modality of temporality in the literary (re)historicisation of South Africa’s national history. In Askari, Dlamini’s recall of collaboration between traitors within the liberation movement and the apartheid security agencies disrupts the received narrative of South Africa’s transition from anti-apartheid struggle to democracy. Similarly, in his earlier book, Native Nostalgia, he provocatively uses nostalgia to challenge the apparent politicisation of official memory projects. Furthermore, both texts adroitly complicate the relationship between the past, present and future in ways that may be read as a re-temporalisation of South African national history by deconstructing notions of a teleological national transition from an apartheid to a post-apartheid dispensation. The paper draws on Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage’s (2013) as well as Homi Bhabha’s (1990) theories on the construction of national histories.

Keywords:

• memory
• ethics
• temporalisation
• national history
• South Africa
• nostalgia

Notes on contributor

Aghogho Akpome lectures in the Department of English, University of Zululand, South Africa. His research interests include literary historicisation as well as narratives and discourses of nation, identity, difference and migration.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I discuss these specific concerns in detail elsewhere (see Akpome 2017).

2. Debates over the value or otherwise of this term has spawned extensive scholarship covering a range of historiographical, epistemological, representational and philosophical issues which are outside the scope of the present study. What is directly relevant to the discussion here are the common reservations that have been expressed concerning the term’s inherent contradictions and weaknesses in regard to the problematic notion of linear time in the analysis of the history of formerly colonised peoples and spaces.

3. Medalie draws on Sean Scanlan’s (2004) exploration of the complexities of nostalgia in this regard.