South African Defence Force veterans’ modes of remembering and the ethics of post-apartheid nostalgia

Abstract

South African Defence Force veterans frequently evince nostalgia for their service in the apartheid army. This has invited censure as commentators regard it as self-evident that nostalgia for the oppressive apartheid regime is ethically dubious. However, such assumptions fail to employ the resources of moral philosophy to buttress and nuance their pronouncements. In this article, we argue that nostalgia can be understood as a bittersweet longing for irretrievable personal pasts, a yearning for times when South African Defence Force veterans felt a sense of belonging to a brotherhood in arms and to the imaginary white nation. However, this is not necessarily synonymous with a desire to reinstitute apartheid. We then offer a brief survey of significant difficulties posed by three prominent camps within moral philosophy (deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics) for evaluating this post-apartheid nostalgia as a moral or ethical problem. We find that the emphasis on voluntary or deliberate action entrenched in mainstream moral thinking constitute substantial obstacles to arriving at sound judgements regarding the nature of nostalgia. We argue that nostalgia, properly understood, cannot fulfil commonplace theoretical and intuitive requirements for moral relevance. We therefore challenge the notion that definitive ethical judgements can usefully be made about post-apartheid nostalgia.