NOSTALGIA AFTER APARTHEID, disillusionment, youth and democracy in South Africa

 226pp., illus., maps, paperback, First SA Edition, UJ press, Johannesburg, 2025

ISBN: 9780906785355

First published in the USA in 2020.

Amber Reed on Black teachers' and students' resistance to curricula teaching values of civic responsibility and liberal democracy, which they feel impose “white” values destructive of their own “African culture", while apartheid at lest allowed for cultural expression in the former homelands. Reed's study was conducted in a small rural town in the former Transkei homeland in the Eastern Cape and in the offices of the Sonke Gender Justice Network in Cape Town.

"In this fascinating and beautifully written ethnography on rural life in post-apartheid South Africa, Amber Reed compellingly reveals how the transition from apartheid to liberal democracy has failed the rural youth who now regard the Mandela miracle of 1994 as a betrayal and have developed a bizarre sense of nostalgia for life under apartheid. Nostalgia after Apartheid delivers a significant contribution to the anthropology of southern Africa and to the understanding of the social, cultural, and political meanings of the post-apartheid transition in South Africa." Leslie J. Bank, co-editor of Migrant Labour After Apartheid

“Amber Reed’s Nostalgia after Apartheid contributes to important deliberations about a longing for a past that was without doubt oppressive and discriminatory. Yet there is something about ‘order’ and ‘tradition’ that generates nostalgia, and Reed is able to convey this well through her ethnographic work.” Monique Marks, author of Transforming the Robocops

Amber Reed is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Superman College, USA.