Nostalgia After Apartheid: Disillusionment, Youth, and Democracy in South Africa (Kellogg Institute Series on Democracy and Development)

Nostalgia after Apartheid offers a unique approach to understanding how attempted post-apartheid reforms have failed rural Black South Africans, and how this failure has led to a nostalgia for the very conditions that once oppressed them. Nostalgia after Apartheid examines a surprising phenomenon encountered in the post-apartheid nation: despite the Department of Education mandating curricula meant to teach values of civic responsibility and liberal democracy, those who are actually responsible for teaching this material (and the students taking it) often resist what they see as the imposition of "white" values.These teachers and students do not see South African democracy as a type of freedom, but rather as destructive of their own "African culture"-whereas apartheid, at least ostensibly, allowed for cultural expression in the former rural homelands.In the Eastern Cape, Amber R. Reed observes, resistance to democracy occurs alongside nostalgia for apartheid among the very citizens who