Jacob Dlamini Research Articles

Jacob Dlamini and the hidden history tradition of South African historiography

Hidden histories are pervasive globally, particularly since the advent of 'history from below' as social history in the 1960s. Jacob Dlamini's body of work is firmly located within South African historiography's hidden histories tradition and practice. His most recent studies, both published in 2020, Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park and The Terrorist Album: Apartheid's Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police, are a remarkable contribution to this practice, indicating the purchase it has in developing and improving South African historiography. This article seeks, first, to demonstrate how Dlamini's Safari Nation deepens and enriches environmental and nature conservation historiography by incorporating the traditionally marginalised experiences of black South Africans in the making of the Kruger National Park and the development of nature conservation and leisure in South Africa. Secondly, it demonstrates how The Terrorist Album contributes to and improves South African struggle history through the telling of an often neglected or overlooked interface between surveillance technology and subterfuge in the liberation struggle. Keywords: Hidden history; struggle history; environmental history; conservation history; social history; South African historiography.

The Terrorist Album: apartheid's insurgents, collaborators, and the security police by Jacob Dlamini

The Terrorist Album: apartheid's insurgents, collaborators, and the security police by Jacob Dlamini

Contradictory excessiveness: abandoned trolleys in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT This essay explores the significance of abandoned trolleys in South Africa. As an international student who later settled in South Africa, I did not initially notice abandoned trolleys. However, as I became more familiar with the senses of South African society, I began to spot trolleys abandoned in seemingly random locations throughout the country. Using Jacob Dlamini’s charge that studies of South African urban history should foreground the senses, I take up the sight of abandoned trolleys as symbols of the contradictory excessiveness of post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing from my own experiences and photos, and the work of Ivan Vladislavić’s emphasis on “tomasons,” I illustrate their centrality within South Africa, albeit from the margins of society. By zeroing in on an object that tends to be overlooked, the polarizing contradictions that exist between people can be distilled from the abstract into the human.

A conversation with Jacob Dlamini

A conversation with Jacob Dlamini

Jacob Dlamini

Book Review| May 01 2021 Jacob Dlamini: The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police Tamar Garb Tamar Garb Tamar Garb is the Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art, University College London, and a scholar of the art/visual histories of South Africa. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nka (2021) 2021 (48): 178–180. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8971609 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Tamar Garb; Jacob Dlamini: The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police. Nka 1 May 2021; 2021 (48): 178–180. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8971609 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsNka Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2021 by Nka Publications2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

“Playing With Apartheid”: Irish and South African Rugby, 1964–19891

The struggle against apartheid was fought on many fronts. Internationally, the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) across a number of countries engaged in a range of activities that highlighted the atrocities of the Pretoria regime and the plight of the majority in South Africa. An important site of struggle against apartheid was in the sports sphere. Ireland and the Irish AAM played a significant role in this regard. The AAMs in Australia, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States, among others, recorded victories against apartheid through demonstrations, boycotts, and the ban on participation of South African teams in international tours, tournaments, and events. A number of scholars have highlighted the role of the international AAM and its campaigns against apartheid sport. To date, historical studies of the anti-apartheid struggle and South African sport have primarily focused on Britain and New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, the United States. Irish sporting contacts with South Africa extend back over a century. Thus, focusing on the case study of Irish AAM activism against segregated sport further adds to the literature on the sports boycott and the struggle against apartheid. This article draws on Jacob Dlamini’s notion of “moral agents” in understanding players’, teams’, and sports associations’ decisions to continue to play with apartheid, despite international opposition. Drawing from archives in Ireland and South Africa, this article adds new details to the struggle against apartheid rugby in South African sport between 1964 and 1989.

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

A Negotiated Authority: Webs of Facticity in Jacob Dlamini's <em>Askari</em>

A Negotiated Authority: Webs of Facticity in Jacob Dlamini's <em>Askari</em>

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

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.

Re-Writing the Nation: Literary Rehistoricisation and Counter-Hegemonic Discourse in Ken Wiwa's In the Shadow of a Saint and Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia

ABSTRACTIn this article, I analyse two recent African autobiographical works for the ways in which they provide counter-hegemonic national discourses in regard to Nigeria and South Africa. The texts are In the Shadow of a Saint (2001), Ken Wiwa's memoir and biographical homage to his father, the martyred Nigerian writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Native Nostalgia (2009) by the South African historian, Jacob Dlamini. The article highlights the different ways in which each author challenges official discourses of post-conflict national reconciliation through the re-imagining of national histories, the narrative reconstruction of social/cultural identity and the depiction of space. Furthermore, it highlights how the subgenre of postcolonial life-writing is deployed for purposes of literary (re)historicisation and socio-political critique while drawing attention to important divergences, convergences and connections between post-2000 writing from two of Africa's eminent literary sites—Nigeria and South Africa.

Post-TRC anxieties in Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia

In this article, I explore the representation of South Africa’s transition after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia, a provocative account of the author’s childhood in a Johannesburg township during apartheid. I argue that Dlamini’s engagement with recent South African history and his (re)construction of black identity can be understood in counter-discursive ways as having the potential to subvert some of the official historical narratives that underpin the dominant political structures. Furthermore, I foreground how Dlamini uses his peculiar historiographical method to articulate strong scepticism towards, and anxieties about, the post-TRC socio-political order in which nostalgia for the past, disenchantment with the present and trepidation for the future all co-exist simultaneously in a state of nervous tension.

Justice, silence, complexity: Recent forays into the reconstitution of apartheid experience

ABSTRACTThis review essay situates itself within the broad body of scholarship that has returned to South Africa’s apartheid years in order to critique the assumptions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and raise once more the issue of justice. It surveys three studies from 2014 that examine apartheid-era experiences not dealt with in their full complexity by the TRC. These studies all emerge from different disciplines: Pamela Reynolds’ War in Worcester from anthropology, Jacob Dlamini’s Askari from history, and Carrol Clarkson’s Drawing the Line from literature. In surveying these studies, I set forth an argument that the TRC, in its yoking of justice to a project of nation-building and catharsis, inadvertently engaged in its own forms of silencing in dealing with the past. This occurred partly due to the TRC’s binary framework of victim and perpetrator, which failed to address those who were more than merely victims (as I discuss in Reynolds’ study of youth leaders in the struggle) or those who were both victims and perpetrators (as I discuss in Dlamini’s study of the askari). I move through the texts in a sequence that begins with these two attempts to reconstitute complex forms of black experience elided by the TRC, and concludes with Carrol Clarkson’s Drawing the Line, which I read as a way of thinking about a justice that aims to be open to moral complexity. Throughout, I pursue the question of whether there is a fundamental tension between the demands of justice and those of human complexity.

Remembering life under apartheid with fondness: the memoirs of Jacob Dlamini and Chris van Wyk

A number of works of non-fiction written in the post-apartheid period reflect on childhood and adolescent experiences during the apartheid years. This paper looks at three of them: Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia (2009) and Chris van Wyk's two memoirs, Shirley, Goodness and Mercy (2004) and Eggs to Lay, Chickens to Hatch (2010). Dlamini's memoir describes his childhood in Katlehong, while van Wyk's deal with his early experiences in Riverlea. These memoirs are unusual in that, while they do not hesitate to expose the injustices of apartheid, they nevertheless seek to convey the persistence of normality and the ordinariness of family and community life within the abnormality of apartheid. This paper considers the implications of fondness or nostalgia in all three memoirs, as well the ways in which Dlamini and van Wyk present non-deterministic conceptions of identity and pay tribute to powerful matriarchal figures. The use of humour in Shirley, Goodness and Mercy and Eggs to Lay, Chickens to Hatch is also analysed. Finally, some possible reasons are given as to why van Wyk's memoirs seem to have been spared much of the criticism which has been directed at Dlamini's.

Askari: a story of collaboration and betrayal in the anti-apartheid struggle by Jacob Dlamini

Askari: a story of collaboration and betrayal in the anti-apartheid struggle by Jacob Dlamini

Hauntology, archivy and banditry: an engagement with Derrida and Zapiro

In this article, I explore what I call ‘primary spectral movements’ in archive. My exploration is positioned within a framing provided by Derridean hauntology. I suggest that spectral readings of archive unfold fresh epistemologies and ontologies. Drawing on the work of scholars Jacques Derrida, Esther Peeren and Jacob Dlamini, as well as cartoonist Zapiro, I focalise particular ghosted voices and narratives in 2015 South Africa. This becomes the basis for a call to what I name ‘archive banditry’ – a strategy, if not a praxis, to create space for ghosts in oppressive societal contexts.

Fracture and Selfhood in Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia

The article attempts to interrogate formations of the self in post-apartheid black writing. Drawing on Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia, it traces mutable formations of the black subject across temporalities and spatialities. Following Theodor Adorno's dialectics of non-identity (1972), I argue that emphasis on the historical and locational particularities of township life need not result in homogenising identity politics, and that Native Nostalgia points the way to constellations of the self that are radically open.

The ethics of nostalgia in post-apartheid South Africa

The ethics of memory, for Avishai Margalit and Paul Ricoeur, means, respectively, remembering the past so as to foster more caring relationships and seeking the truth of the past and building a better future. In post-apartheid South Africa, a variety of memory practices bring to public attention reminders of apartheid, a past that must be remembered so that it will strengthen relationships amongst once-divided citizens and so that iniquities will not be repeated. In general, these diverse efforts – official, publicly funded initiatives and individual endeavours to preserve personal memory – seek to shape collective memory in ways that invoke the horrors of the past. Native Nostalgia (2009), by Jacob Dlamini, both conforms to this trend and challenges it. It follows convention by contending that apartheid was without virtue; it defies the norm by insisting that the life that Dlamini lived in Katlehong is worth remembering with nostalgia – reflective nostalgia – because it was an ordered world in which ethically laudable principles governed social interactions, principles and practices, all of which are rare in post-apartheid South Africa.

The disappointment of nostalgia: conceptualising cultures of memory in contemporary South Africa

Departing from a consideration of Jacob Dlamini’s book, Native Nostalgia, this essay critically reviews the conceptual terrain implied by “nostalgia,” re-situating it in relation to memory, especially where it intersects with debates over the status of “truth” in relation to “history.” We explore nostalgia through three dualities that underpin a burgeoning literature: remembering and forgetting, witnessing and testimony, and mourning and melancholia. Against conceptual oppositions that pit remembering against forgetting, or alternatively, that seek to remedy the fallibility of memory by seeking access to the “truth” of history, we suggest that nostalgia is probably more usefully understood as a practice of coincident temporalities. Nostalgia, in this sense, denotes a specific way of enfolding the past into the present, and indeed the future. We discuss two projects of post-apartheid testimony that work from, and on, the presumed antagonism that nostalgia sets up between “truth” and its possible distortions in memory: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996–1998, and the Apartheid Archive Project initiated in 2009. We conclude by suggesting that South Africans may need to pursue what Ackbar Abbas has called an “affective politics of disappointment” if the past is to be brought more creatively to bear on South Africa’s future.