How apartheid nostalgia betrays South Africa's unfinished liberation

IOL News

19-07-2025

To compare the pothole-free roads of white Pretoria in the 1980s to ANC-run municipalities in Limpopo today, without examining these spatial legacies, is disingenuous.
Image: Karen Singh/Screengrab
THE narrative that dominates discussions of South Africa's post-apartheid journey often converges on a single, critical point: the perceived failure of the ANC to deliver on its grand promises.
This critique, amplified by commentators like Prince Mashele, frequently contrasts the present with a romanticised past, suggesting an era of pristine infrastructure and efficient governance under apartheid. But this flawed comparison does more than obscure the truth—it actively distorts it.
In a widely circulated interview on the SMWX podcast, Mashele claimed that under apartheid, 'there were no potholes on tar roads,' and that traffic lights always 'worked.' He continued, asserting that infrastructural decay, non-functional robots and crumbling roads, is uniquely 'an ANC thing.'
This dangerously reductive view demonstrates selective amnesia. It is not merely a critique of governance, but a subtle sanitisation of apartheid's spatial and racial architecture.
Undeniably, Mahmood Mamdani's analysis in Neither Settler nor Native illuminates why apartheid's geography persists under ANC rule. Mashele's statements reflect what Frantz Fanon called the 'Manichaean world' of the colonial order, where two towns existed: one of order and excess, and the other of filth and want.
The black township continued to be 'a place of ill fame, peopled by men of ill repute.' The apartheid state maintained clean roads and working traffic lights in white areas not as a national standard, but as a function of racial privilege and spatial control.
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What Mashele conveniently ignores is that infrastructure under apartheid was race-coded. Paved roads, water services, and electricity were concentrated in white suburbs, while black townships and rural areas were systematically underdeveloped.
In my own experience, growing up and living in places like Ntabamhlophe (western KwaZulu-Natal) or Ngobi (North West), traffic lights were non-existent—and still are, three decades into democratic rule under the ANC. These areas were not marginalised by accident but were designed to be so. Their underdevelopment was deliberate and institutionalised.
To recall apartheid's so-called efficiency without context is to ignore its structural violence. Mashele's nostalgia constructs a binary: ANC equals decay; apartheid equals order. This formulation is historically inaccurate and morally indefensible. It is akin to praising the punctuality of trains under fascist regimes while ignoring the concentration camps they served. As Walter Rodney warned, colonial systems did not merely 'fail' to develop Africa, they underdeveloped it by design. Apartheid was no different.
Mashele's technological nostalgia exemplifies what Jacob Dlamini identifies as 'restorative nostalgia', a desire to recover a mythical past cleansed of its oppressive foundations. This mode of nostalgia sanitises apartheid's brutality by fixating on its superficial order. In contrast, Dlamini's notion of 'reflective nostalgia' offers a more honest reckoning: a mourning of apartheid-era community networks or certainties that were fractured not by freedom itself, but by democracy's failure to fulfil its emancipatory promise.
Therefore, true memory must confront, not conceal, the violence that underwrote apartheid's oppressive order.
Mamdani's concept of 'decentralised despotism' in colonial governance is particularly instructive here. The apartheid state was a textbook case of bifurcated rule, where civil rights and services were afforded to whites.
Meanwhile, black South Africans were governed through tribal authorities and customary law in the Bantustans. Infrastructure was not neutral but was weaponised to entrench spatial exclusion. This remains evident today, where apartheid's geography persists under a different political dispensation.
To compare the pothole-free roads of white Pretoria in the 1980s to ANC-run municipalities in Limpopo today, without examining these spatial legacies, is disingenuous. The real question Mashele should be asking is why the ANC has failed to transform places like Ngobi, not why Sandton looks better maintained. What Mashele should be saying is that the ANC has not changed much in these places, because it inherited and perpetuated apartheid's geography.
Indeed, the ANC has betrayed many of its foundational promises. Its 1994 Ready to Govern manifesto envisioned one million homes, 2.5 million electrified households, and a comprehensive public works programme to redress historical inequality.
Instead, the neoliberal turn, engineered in part with the guidance of apartheid-era finance figures like Derek Keys and 'new' South Africa economic policy czars (Trevor Manuel, Thabo Mbeki, and Tito Mboweni), saw the abandonment of redistributive infrastructure plans in favour of market-led growth. This ideological surrender created the vacuum now filled by elite corruption and administrative collapse.
Auditor-General reports confirm the rot: only three of 35 national departments received clean audits in recent years. Provinces like Limpopo have required constitutional interventions due to a total failure in service delivery. In this context, Mashele's outrage is justified. But to project this dysfunction onto a narrative that vindicates apartheid's design is intellectually dishonest.
Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, explains this internalisation of colonial values as part of a broader inferiority complex. The formerly oppressed, he warns, may begin to admire the coloniser's systems, not because they were just, but because they were stable. Mashele's obsession with working traffic lights is a symptom of this pathology, a longing for colonial order dressed as political critique. This is not speaking truth to power, but speaking comfort to whiteness.
The rise of self-proclaimed political analysts who gain traction through unchecked criticism of the ANC is not unexpected. It is part of South Africa's vibrant democratic culture. Such voices are indispensable. But they must be rooted in historical truth. As Edward Said argued in Representations of the Intellectual, the true public intellectual must interrogate power without becoming its tool. In contrast, Mashele's commentary risks becoming a performance of analysis, divorced from the very people it purports to represent.
The danger lies not in criticism of the ANC, that is both necessary and overdue, but in what is lost when such critique adopts the language and assumptions of apartheid's defenders. Mashele's claim that the ANC 'broke the robots' implies that apartheid had a universal standard of governance. It did not. It had a racially exclusive logic. If the robots worked in town, it is because they were not meant to work in Seshego or Ntabankulu.
Who, then, does Mashele speak for? Not the residents of Ntabamhlophe or Mogwase, who still wait for paved roads and functioning clinics. Not the youth of Nkowankowa, who must walk kilometres for access to water or schooling. He speaks not from the margins, but from a middle-class, or 'Grand Estate', vantage point that measures progress in suburban conveniences, rather than in structural transformation.
Mashele's comments also obscure the ANC's complicity in failing to reverse apartheid's spatial logic. Post-1994 housing developments were often built on peripheral land, perpetuating apartheid's spatial exclusions. As urban scholar Neil Klug notes, these areas were poorly serviced and isolated, replicating the 40-40-40 rule: 40 km from the city, 40-square-metre homes, requiring 40% of income for commuting. This is not liberation but stagnation under new management.
Patrick Bond's analyses of post-apartheid neoliberalism highlight how state-led, investor-friendly policies replaced development. The result: infrastructure for the elite, neglect for the majority. While 4.7 million 'housing opportunities' were created, 2.4 million families remain without homes. The state has effectively become a site of accumulation for a political class, rather than a vehicle for redistribution.
Fanon warned that a national bourgeoisie that mimics colonial forms without dismantling them will eventually become 'the transmission belt between the nation and international capital.' This prophecy now defines the ANC's trajectory. However, even as we confront this reality, we must not let nostalgia obscure the past. 'There were no potholes' is not an argument but a mirage. Infrastructure that excludes cannot be glorified simply because it functioned for some.
South Africa's future demands a radical reorientation. Mamdani speaks of the need to 'unmake permanent minorities' — to reverse spatial, economic, and legal segregation through systemic reform. That means reparative urban planning, land reform, and dignified service delivery — not superficial comparisons between the towns that excluded us and the municipalities that now ignore us. It means remembering that functioning infrastructure for the few is not a standard, but a sign of inequality.
Again, the freedom the black majority wants is not material excess or socioeconomic rights alone, but more. Liberation is not measured by traffic lights alone, but by dignity, equity, and memory. The robots in white suburbs worked because the state ensured they would, at the expense of the black majority's humanity. To forget that is to betray those still waiting for the freedom promised at dusty crossroads where robots never gleamed.
Potholes are real, but so is the history that built them—and the future we owe to those still left behind.
Siyayibanga le economy!
* Siyabonga Hadebe is an independent commentator based in Geneva on socio-economic, political and global matters.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL. Get the real story on the go: Follow the Sunday Independent on WhatsApp.