Finding the Future in the Past: Nostalgia and Community-Building in Mhlophe's Have You Seen Zandile?

Abstract

Gcina Mhlophe's 1986 play Have You Seen Zandile? is the story of a young South African girl kidnapped by her estranged mother and separated from her loving grandmother, and is based on the playwright's own childhood experiences. Widely criticised in apartheid South Africa for being apolitical, the play continues to be denounced as light and sentimental. These criticisms are largely a response to the play's nostalgia, the longing for the stories and games of childhood felt by both the main character and the author. But amidst the trauma and violence of apartheid South Africa, how is nostalgia possible? In this article I argue that nostalgia is not only possible, it is vital to Mhlophe's subtle and community-based anti-apartheid politics. I argue that nostalgia represents a feature of the ‘ordinary’ that Njabulo Ndebele claimed needed to be ‘rediscovered’ in South African literature. As a universal human emotion, nostalgia defies the spectacular rhetoric of victimhood that threatens to define the black South African, and reveals instead the everyday complexity of all South Africans. I analyse the function of nostalgic moments within the play to reveal the usefulness of nostalgia in the broader South African context. I show that in apartheid South Africa, nostalgia was fundamental to the survival of trauma, by maintaining the psychological connection between the past and the present. As the play continues to be studied in post-apartheid South Africa, it can be reread as part of the ‘community-building’ process, an endeavour that emphasises the individual lives and experiences of its members, rather than the homogenised narrative of traumatic memory associated with the new nation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This article sheds light on the under-theorised phenomenon of nostalgia and why it remains such a pervasive human emotion in traumatic times.