Giving Voice to the Past: Nostalgia as an Anti-Postapartheid Syndrome in South Africa

Abstract

The act of transforming not only transforms the one who acts but also the one who decides to be the change he or she wants to see in the world. The prominent Brazilian theatre director and practitioner Augusto Boal (1979) reinforces this popular axiom when he argued that if the “oppressed” can perform an action, rather than the artist in their place, the performance of that action in theatrical fiction will enable them to activate themselves to perform similar actions in real life. This article focuses on nostalgia as an anti-postapartheid sentiment that appears to be hindering tertiary students from moving toward a truly nonracial and nonxenophobic South Africa. The article draws on illustrations from student narratives emerging from interactive drama and conflict management workshops that were carried out at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. As Jonathan Jansen (2009b) has pointed out, students’ narratives carry received knowledge of past oppressions that trigger what he describes as “the clash of martyrological memories.”