Towards a more inclusive nostalgia

Ah, nostalgia. Even the thought of it makes me nostalgic!

Because I’m not sure that as an older white person it’s cool to be nostalgic. When I look back on my childhood, I am casting my mind back to a time when I lived a life of ease and idyllic comfort, at the expense of the black people of South Africa.

Call it white guilt if you like, but it’s true.

For every halcyon day of joy and innocence that I spent on Kings Beach in Port Elizabeth, there was a black kid’s day paddling in the muddy vlei behind Vuku Road, KwaZakhele, because he was not allowed onto the beach at all during the eighties.

My schooldays were relatively privileged, blessed with quality curriculums, teachers and facilities. Legendary games for the Grey High 10^th team against Grey Bloem on the lush Rectory field. A 50cc motorbike to get around on. Kine Park movie theatre!

Don’t get me wrong, it was an incredible childhood, and I will be forever grateful for it.

But any nostalgia that I indulge in for that time, must be mitigated with the knowledge that it was a product of the exploitative and racist apartheid regime of the time, of which I was a direct beneficiary.

I know it’s an angsty, self-pitying thing to say, but I battle with nostalgia. Not that I stop reminiscing, mind you. Like my wanking career during my days of teenage Catholicism, I feel super-guilty, but I still do it all the time!

It’s hardly an impossible cross to bear, this conflicted sense of nostalgia, but it’s a thing. I’m especially bothered when I contemplate the numerous nostalgia sites on Facebook, sharing photos of South African towns and cities during the sixties, seventies and eighties.

Members will reminisce sentimentally about the old movie theatres, the beaches, the restaurants they used to frequent in those long-ago days of renown. Which is fair enough – we all were once younger, and what have we earned in old age if not the right to look back?

But as sure as night follows day, sooner or later some denizen of the interweb will opine that yes, that tea room was amazing, but it has all since collapsed. Decay has set in. The place has Gone To The Dogs.

All of this may be true, of the establishment in question. But there is sometimes a dog whistle subtext, an unspoken addendum “ …and so has the whole bloody country”. This is when nostalgia joins the Oblivious Racism WhatsApp group.

Indeed, much of our country is a burning chip shop of incompetence and corruption. This must be addressed. Thieves must be jailed, institutions resurrected and loot returned. But the fall of colonial gentility is not a symptom of those governmental failures.

Those tea rooms needed to close. It is right that black people by the thousand now bathe in their underwear on New Year’s day where permed white ladies once nibbled scones and cream. That people spitbraai entire cows on the site of the former model-train society. Or choef hubblies groove where rave DJs used to play.

Those are the foundations of a nostalgia yet to come.

So while each of us only has one life to get nostalgic about, the challenge for some us is to fondly remember the glory days when we were kings and queens, and to do it without bitterness. To savour those days, because of the change. To celebrate that evolution.

Things have changed. And they will change again and again.

In every dispensation, there will be beneficiaries. Their identities will shift over time, and if we play it right, perhaps there will be ever more beneficiaries as time goes by.

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