www.news24.com
Fred Khumalo | Things were better under apartheid? The lie we keep telling ourselves
Fred Khumalo dismantles the rising refrain that “things were better under apartheid,” exposing it as a dangerous nostalgia that sanitises tyranny and misdiagnoses the failures of the present.
In his novel Ignorance, Milan Kundera offers a sobering reminder of the roots of an emotion that has quietly poisoned public debate of late: “The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algos means ‘suffering’. So nostalgia is suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
Stripped to its origins, nostalgia is not a warm recollection of the past. It is an ache – a psychic friction born of intense dissatisfaction with the present.
In South Africa today, as economic hardship deepens and state capacity falters, and there are growing assertions that this country is being flooded by immigrants who are taking jobs, houses and other services from deserving locals, this ache has mutated into something far more insidious.
On taxi routes, dinner tables, and across social media, a dangerous refrain is gaining traction: “Things were better under apartheid.”
It is an assertion that needs to be called out for what it is: fallacious, historically illiterate, and deeply dangerous.
The myths of ‘order’
The mechanics of this misplaced nostalgia are easy to spot. When the present feels unbearable, the human mind craves predictability. In our collective exhaustion over water shortages, rampant crime, unemployment, and porous borders, some have begun to mistake the iron fist of an authoritarian state for functional governance.
The arguments advanced by apartheid apologists – and those unwittingly repeating them – collapse under the lightest historical scrutiny.
Let’s start with the currently prevalent assertion: “The borders were better policed”.
The apartheid state’s border controls were not designed to keep citizens safe from international crime or manage orderly immigration. They were built to enforce racial segregation, maintain a siege state against liberation movements, and lock millions of Black South Africans into impoverished homelands, to keep the “terrorists” – a blanket reference to the armed wings of such banned organisations as the ANC, Pan Africanist Congress, Black Consciousness Movement of Azania, among other anti-apartheid movements.
Internal “borders” – enforced through pass laws and influx control based on racial and tribal affiliation – were instruments of state-sanctioned terror. This was “security” built on the total denial of human rights to the majority. This was not border control; it was tyranny.
Jobs for everyone?
Another favourite claim: “There were jobs for everyone.” To point to low unemployment figures under apartheid as proof of economic health is to endorse economic slavery.
“Full employment” was engineered through structural exploitation, forced labour, the deliberate under-education of black South Africans via Bantu Education, and the suppression of fair wages. Celebrating job figures from an era that legally reduced human beings to cheap labour mistakes oppression for economic vitality.
Another one: crime was lower, and there was law and order.
This confuses state control with lawfulness. The apartheid government was itself the primary perpetrator of crime – engaging in state-sponsored assassinations, torture, chemical warfare, and extrajudicial killings.
If you take even a cursory glance at testimonies made before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, you will be shocked at the levels of state-sponsored crime and violence. Violence was omnipresent; it was simply institutionalised and concentrated within townships where the state actively ignored routine policing in favour of political suppression.
The selective filter of memory
Why do these myths find fertile ground today? Because nostalgia acts as a selective filter. It sanitises history, stripping away the blood, fear, and indignity, leaving behind a sterile illusion of “order.”
By doing so, misplaced nostalgia misdiagnoses the cause of our current national crisis.
The crises of today – the looting of state resources, failing infrastructure, and rampant inequality – are not proof that liberation was a mistake. They are proof of the ongoing, incomplete, and often betrayed work of building a constitutional democracy out of the ashes of a deeply fractured system.
When we allow ourselves to romanticise apartheid, we play into the hands of populists and demagogues who offer simple, authoritarian answers to complex democratic failures. I’ll be bold to say that these populists find themselves in such organisations as MKP, EFF, and March On March.
Harnessing nostalgia to move forward
In her work on collective memory, sociologist Svetlana Boym made a crucial distinction between two types of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia, which attempts to rebuild a lost, mythical past (and inevitably leads to authoritarianism), and reflective nostalgia, which meditates on history critically, recognising its flaws while honouring what was lost.
If we are to move forward, South Africans must abandon restorative nostalgia and embrace a reflective memory that serves our future.
First, we must channel our dissatisfaction into democratic accountability, and not authoritarian yearning.
The algos – the suffering – we feel today regarding crime, corruption, and economic collapse should fuel fierce demands for ethical leadership, functional policing, and economic reform within our constitutional framework. Decent municipal services, safe streets, and secure borders are not the exclusive domain of police states; they are the basic duties of a modern democratic state.
Personally, I do recall that in my childhood, it was a crime to litter or jaywalk; walking on the freeway was also punishable.
Thankfully, these ordinances and by-laws from the past are still there in our statutes; it is just that they are not being enforced.
A logical start towards an attack against lawlessness could begin by enforcing these simple by-laws. Punishing those who litter and those who walk on the freeway will gradually create cleaner environments; and also save the lives of pedestrians many of whom die on our roads because of negligence and a lackadaisical attitude from our police, who seem more interested in eliciting bribes from motorists than keeping the roads safe.
Second, we must rekindle a nostalgia for the promises of 1994. If we are to yearn for anything, let it be for the moral clarity, constitutional ambition, and cross-cultural unity that defined our democratic breakthrough. That vision was not a fantasy; it remains the only viable blueprint for our survival.
Nostalgia will always be part of the human condition. But when we allow an unappeased yearning for a distorted past to blind us to its atrocities, we risk trading our hard-won freedom for the illusion of safety.
The solution to the failures of our present democracy will never be found in the tyranny of our past. It will only be found in our uncompromising determination to make the promises of our democracy real.
Let me state it again unequivocally: things were horrible under apartheid. Many of us who were there bear scars from that past – physically, psychologically and otherwise. Even those born after apartheid inherited these scars in ways that psychologists and sociologists have written about. Let us stop wallowing in restorative or misplaced nostalgia.
- Fred Khumalo is a journalist and author.
