JACOB Dlamini's Native Nostalgia, published in October 2009, is a text in search of lost archives, and deeply interested in how we can read and interpret the discourses of the dispossessed. Dlamini, a South African historian living and working mostly in the USA and Catalonia, uses words that seem to have been borrowed from Njabulo Ndebele's significant works, like ‘ordinariness’, but his arguments borrow simultaneously from another tradition: that of the writers of northern hemispheric nostalgia and the practice of everyday life. This double lineage, as I shall show, does not contradict my initial search for a South African accent rooted in southern African ideas and debates. What Dlamini is showing in his surprising book is that a ‘native’ tradition (a term he uses ironically) is one that can speak in any language it chooses, and can determine the language for this discourse.

Dlamini looks for a signification system that will enable him to interpret statements and emotions that at first seem inexplicable, the most obvious being how it is possible that black South Africans can remember the apartheid days nostalgically. In his final chapter, ‘The language of nostalgia’, he raises questions about hidden transcripts and resistant uses of language, and I argue that these are instances of the accented thinking my book theorises. As I show, however, Dlamini's argument comes to include the one language I thought would certainly not be in this book. In the final sections of my argument, I scrutinise the asymmetrical relationship Dlamini and I have to this language, Afrikaans. Developing this insight, I consider the implications of this lack of symmetry for the ways in which knowledge is produced and reproduced and end the chapter with some remarks on the languages of our scholarship, and the implications of language autobiography for the kinds of archives and histories we need for the future.

The life of ordinary things that Dlamini's book is centered on (and especially the remembrance of ordinary things – objects and practices) is part of his project of recovering black history in South Africa. He is a historian in a tradition that documents the subjectivities of black lives, the sensibilities of everyday existence.