Apartheid Nostalgia: The Politics of Longing and Frustration in Contemporary South Africa

• In Event: 594 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Narrative and Political Identity

Abstract

Since the late 2000s South Africa has experienced an upsurge of collective mobilization, including community protests around state service delivery and xenophobic attacks against immigrants. Drawing from interviews with 73 community members living in townships in Gauteng province, this paper examines the subjectivity and political orientations beneath these mobilizations. The results underscore a peculiar effect which I refer to as Apartheid nostalgia: a fond remembrance of the Apartheid era, contrasting sharply with a harsh appraisal of the post-Apartheid era. This nostalgia has two primary expressions: a longing for the abundant employment opportunities and community development of the earlier period, and a longing for the Apartheid state's strict regulation of human movement. I argue that this surprisingly favorable view of Apartheid reflects a politics that is rooted in “political society” (Chatterjee 2004), which revolves around the provision of security and welfare rather than equal rights.

Author

• Marcel Paret, University of Johannesburg