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Older Age in David Medalie's The Mistress's Dog
Abstract
The elderly are commonly perceived as one of the frailest and most vulnerable groups in society.This view could be attributed to a decline in their physical and mental strength, as well as the disengagement from society and the diminishing sense of futurity associated with older age. While the first democratic South African elections in 1994 heralded what many perceived as a period of cultural and political rebirth and renewal, this event for some also led to a profound re-evaluation of previously stable ideologies. Given the fact that identity in older age is in part reliant on the creation of a coherent and meaningful life-story that revolves around an engagement with the past, this radical reconsideration of the past implies that the democratization of South Africa may reconfigure the life-story an ageing individual can claim as his or her own; this places a unique pressure on the configuration of identity in these older people. This article investigates the ways in which the advent of democracy in South Africa influenced the literary representation of older age, and examines this idea in relation to ‘Recognition’ and ‘Tussenfontein’, two short stories from David Medalie's collection, The Mistress's Dog (2010. Johannesburg: Picador Africa).
The proportion of persons 60 and older in South Africa is projected to almost double over the 30 year period between 2000–2030, from 7% to 12%, because of a marked decline in fertility in the last few decades. For Africans in particular, population ageing has meant that a larger proportion of females are reaching old age than their male counterparts (Makiwane, Schneider and Gopane, 2004), leading to a higher proportion of elderly households being headed by women. Through a secondary analysis of the General Household Survey data (2010) this paper explores the intersection between gender, race and ageing in South Africa. The findings from the analysis suggest that more than six out of ten older persons in South Africa are females who generally live longer than males. African females are the least educated and White males are the majority among the elderly with a matric and post-matric qualification. White women are the majority amongst women with secondary school and post-matric qualification and African women are least represented amongst elderly women in employment with the percentage of White women being much lower than that of elderly White men in employment. In feminist politics and theory the imbrication of gender, race and class in explicating women's experiences and development outcomes has been conceptualised in the notion of ‘intersectionality’, a term that denotes the ways in which race, gender and class interact to shape women's, and particularly, Black women's experiences in society. In South Africa, race, gender and class intersect in complex ways to shape elderly people's experiences and development outcomes. This Article argues that state intervention is required to ensure that the most vulnerable group among the elderly population is ensured for a decent standard of living in their old age.
Drawing on interviews with ex‐residents of Tyneside (United Kingdom), this paper builds on recent reappraisals of nostalgia as a ‘productive’ and ‘living’ disposition, to show how fond memories and a sense of loss shape and sustain engagement with the city. In contrast to recent attempts to identify active nostalgia only with its ‘reflective’ forms, or to separate out ‘official’ and ‘non‐official’ nostalgia, the paper demonstrates that nostalgias are mobile and interwoven. It is shown that ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ forms can co‐exist and state‐led practices of conservation be maintained in a complex and mutually sustaining relationship with more personal, less official, visions of the value of the past. Thus it is argued that urban nostalgia for the city needs to be acknowledged as a potentially critical intervention that draws together different modes of attachment and yearning.
Departing from a consideration of Jacob Dlamini's book, Native Nostalgia, this essay critically reviews the conceptual terrain implied by nostalgia, re-situating it in relation to memory, especially where it intersects with debates over the status of truth in relation to history. We explore nostalgia through three dualities that underpin a burgeoning literature: remembering and forgetting, witnessing and testimony, and mourning and melancholia. Against conceptual oppositions that pit remembering against forgetting, or alternatively, that seek to remedy the fallibility of memory by seeking access to the truth of history, we suggest that nostalgia is probably more usefully understood as a practice of coincident temporalities. Nostalgia, in this sense, denotes a specific way of enfolding the past into the present, and indeed the future. We discuss two projects of post-apartheid testimony that work from, and on, the presumed antagonism that nostalgia sets up between truth and its possible distortions in memory: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996-1998, and the Apartheid Archive Project initiated in 2009. We conclude by suggesting that South Africans may need to pursue what Ackbar Abbas has called an affective politics of disappointment if the past is to be brought more creatively to bear on South Africa's future.
This article explores the ways in which narratives of the past may provide resources for articulating future possibilities. In societies with a history of sociopolitical conflict, such as South Africa, the past is typically construed as territory to be left behind, negated, and dissolved in the solutions of hard-won democratic discourses, which galvanize us to construct social and personal futures that bear no resemblance to this past. Narratives of the past serve as morality tales of warning or celebratory accounts of overcoming, and nostalgic recollection is by definition rendered regressive, implying a rejection of the current political landscape by those who have experienced a loss of illegitimate power. However, this article argues that this conceptualization of nostalgia as inevitably reactionary may blind us to possibilities for employing the resources of the past in a different way. Perhaps nostalgia is not so much a longing for the way things were, as a longing for futures that never came or horizons of possibilities that have been foreclosed by the unfolding of events. Perhaps nostalgia is the desire not to be who we once were, but to be, once again, our potential future selves. The article asks whether nostalgic narratives of the past may provide resources for the present and the construction of a society characterized by peace and social justice, for our imaginative reach toward new possible horizons and hopeful futures.
Traditionally, nostalgia has been conceptualized as a medical disease and a psychiatric disorder. Instead, we argue that nostalgia is a predominantly positive, self-relevant, and social emotion serving key psychological functions. Nostalgic narratives reflect more positive than negative affect, feature the self as the protagonist, and are embedded in a social context. Nostalgia is triggered by dysphoric states such as negative mood and loneliness. Finally, nostalgia generates positive affect, increases self-esteem, fosters social connectedness, and alleviates existential threat.
This article analyses old-age security policy in South Africa within the wider context of social policy in twentieth-century South Africa. It focuses on old-age pensions as the major part of welfare provision for the elderly. Two main questions are addressed (1) Why did South Africa introduce old-age pensions for aged white elderly in 1928 and why did it broaden the system to include Africans in 1944? (2) What were the main economic and social consequences of this law, especially for Africans in rural communities, with particular reference to the mid-century Eastern Cape? It is argued that South African old-age pension policy was, inter alia , shaped by three factors: (1) capitalist industrialisation mediated by the character of existing public social provision and with regard to Africans segregationist policies; (2) cultural and ideological shifts; (3) class politics. As a consequence of state initiative, from an early stage, pension money became decisive for the economic survival of many African rural households and contributed indirectly to the increased self-respect and social status of African old-age pensioners. The linking of old-age pensions to chronological age did not lead to the emergence of old age as a chronologically-defined stage of life because pre industrial life-course models organised around the notion of 'building the umzi (homestead)' were still very much alive. Finally, it is argued that from its inception, the South African state welfare policy had some ageist aspects to it. The article concludes that the political economy approach to ageing cannot fully account for the complexities of the ageing experience in South Africa.
When contemporary Africans express nostalgia for the colonial past, how are we to make sense of such sentiments? Anthropologists have tended to ignore colonial nostalgia, reacting with dismissal or distaste. This article seeks to account for this avoidance, exploring nostalgia as a crucial source for anthropology and a constitutive feature of Western modernity. Nostalgic sentiments of loss and longing are shaped by specific cultural concerns and struggles; like other forms of memory practice, these desires must be engaged with in ethnographic terms and located within the changing contours of a contested social landscape. In urban Zanzibar, I argue that colonial nostalgia has emerged in a postrevolutionary context and is best understood as a diverse set of responses to neoliberal policies of urban restructuring.
The extended family used to be relied upon to provide subsistence and care for older people in sub-Saharan Africa. However, recently South Africa has seen a reversal of roles, where older people now provide subsistence and care to younger generations; this role reversal is being accelerated by HIV/AIDS deaths among young adults. In most rural households, the non-contributory old age pension (OAP) that is means-tested is an important factor in making older people breadwinners. Using data from the 2004 Mpumalanga Older People's Survey, we examined the changing role of older people, which has been influenced mainly by changes in household structure and old age pension. Findings show that in 63% of matrifocal, multigenerational households, 76% of older people are the sole providers of household necessities, caring for the sick and grandchildren in increasingly skip-generation households.