Roos, Neil. Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society: Social Histories of Accommodation. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781776148905

Abstract

In 2015, I, then a history honours student, attended a department seminar by Professor Neil Roos. With the Fallist movement and calls for decolonisation hitting South African university campuses, his appeal for new avenues of investigation into the everyday life of white South Africans under apartheid struck a chord, not only academically but personally. Growing up as a white South African who was semi-born free in a lower middle-class household, I knew all too well how ordinary whites remember apartheid in a new dispensation. Stability and normalcy are often lauded in white speak of the past. The euphemistic “good old days” of apartheid were fondly remembered as stable and normal. Ordinary.