ABSTRACT
In 2012, a spate of Internet petitions, blogs and websites emerged seeking the support of an international public to stop what they called the genocide of whites in southern Africa. More recently, Steve Hofmeyr, the South African popular Afrikaans musician, made headline news (and mobilized significant public support) with the statement that the white “tribe is dying”, a claim that he made alongside his call to expose “the lie of white on black genocide during apartheid” (Brodie 2013). Paul Gilroy warns us that such “revisionist accounts of imperial and colonial life” (2005, 2) are on the rise. Writing about Britain, Gilroy sees this revisionism as a sign of the condition of postcolonial melancholia, which “promote[s] imperialist nostalgia” and “endorse[s] the novel forms of colonial rule currently being enforced by economic and military means at the disposal of a unipolar global order” (3). Postcolonial melancholia is not only a wish to return, nostalgically, to the time of imperialism and a disavowal of responsibility for the aftermaths of apartheid and colonial history but it also endorses a colonial approach to the present moment.
