Melancholia of Freedom: Humour and Nostalgia among Indians in South Africa

Freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom.

Jean Paul Richter

As I began fieldwork in Chatsworth, a large, formerly Indian township outside of Durban in South Africa in 1998, I was immediately struck by two features of everyday life there. The first was a pervasive sense of loss and displacement in the face of the new freedoms afforded by the country's tense but gentle transition to democracy in 1994. While the new era and its new possibilities were celebrated by some, including many well-educated people of Indian origin, the predominant feelings among the ordinary working class Indians in the township, colloquially known as charous [literally "burnt man" in Afrikaans] were those of loss and bewilderment. The oft-repeated saying – "[B]efore we were not white enough, now we are not black enough" – summed up this sentiment.

The sense of loss had a very real material basis in recent economic and spatial transformations. The new African National Congress (ANC) government embarked on a programme of economic liberalization that aimed at inviting global capital into the country and simultaneously closing or privatizing the many public and semi-public enterprises that had been part of the apartheid regime's attempts to create a "protected" economy that would secure the prosperity of whites. Accompanying this came a restructuring of the labour and employment laws in order to strengthen and empower the African majority. These measures resulted in massive job losses and the economic marginalization of the Indian community that for years had inhabited a relatively cushioned position in South Africa's economy (Freund 77–93). The efforts at simultaneously providing cheap housing and free schooling to everybody in the country resulted in a conspicuous redistribution of resources. Thousands of Africans live today in informal shacks or in newly built "government houses" in Chatsworth; Africans are highly visible on streets and in shopping centres as well as in the public schools in the township, where Zulu-speaking children now constitute above 50 per cent of the students.

The effect of these changes was a multi-layered sense of loss: loss of economic security, loss of the township as "our place"; loss of perceived existential and physical safety; loss of a sense of "community unity" which was the product of the apartheid regime's racialized deployment of political repression; and finally, a more imperceptible version of what Hegel famously called the "loss of the loss," that is, the disappearance of the blockage – unfreedom and apartheid – that prevented true self-realization and thus could explain a range of problems and shortcomings in everyday life. With a new freedom, which is also a moment of uncertainty, compounded by changing relations among local, regional, and global forces, everybody in the country was left to rethink themselves beyond that overpowering shadow and structuring power that apartheid had imposed on them for decades.

The second remarkable feature of life in Chatsworth was the ubiquity of self-deprecating humour. Jokes, puns, and everyday mockery of the charou way of life constituted an important medium for reflection on the past, the bewildering present, and a very uncertain future. Initially, I saw this as evasiveness, as a reluctance to include me in the often painful questions about the place of the 1.3 million Indians in South Africa – predominantly, descendants of indentured labourers who arrived between 1860 and 1890. Soon, as I began exploring community theatre and other performative practices among Indians in Durban, I realized that self-deprecating humour and satire had a long history there. Satire had been central to political critiques of apartheid, as well as a powerful medium of celebration and reflection on the inner life of what apartheid compressed and institutionalized into a single "Indian community" in South Africa (Hansen, "Plays").

In this article, I will try to combine brief explorations of theatre performances and radio shows with ethnographic material from the township I have worked in over the past five years. I wish to explore how the pervasive postapartheid melancholia among ordinary South African Indians is expressed in a range of performances on stage and on radio...