[7] Before becoming a historian, he had been a journalist in South Africa – he was political editor and columnist at the Business Day newspaper, and also wrote for the now defunct The Weekender.

[12] Closely related is his concern with the parts of the individual's private life and psychology that cannot be subjected to the total control of a state, racial system, or ideology.

[12][15] It presents a nostalgic account of his own childhood under Apartheid, challenging the one-dimensional depiction of Apartheid-era townships as devoid of moral, cultural, and aesthetic activity.

Eusebius McKaiser said it "delivers reflective insights with rhythmic beauty,"[17] and Hermann Giliomee lauds it for acknowledging the agency of black people living under Apartheid.

[22]Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (2014) investigates the life of Glory Sedibe, also known as Comrade September, a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and senior Umkhonto we Sizwe operative who in August 1986 was abducted by an Apartheid death squad, led by Eugene de Kock.

Active in the Congress of South African Students – and regarding non-Congress-aligned elements of the anti-Apartheid movement as his primary ideological opponents – he had been unable to imagine what could motivate a defection on Sedibe's scale.

[13][23][24] The Daily Maverick called it "deeply unsettling reading," and complimented it for "subverting the neat binaries of South African history.

"[13] In André du Toit's view, the book is not wholly successful as a biography of Sedibe, but its critical analysis is rigorous and effective.

The Terrorist Album suggests that a bumbling inefficiency and blind "racial panic" underlay the ostensible, and much mythologised, omnipotence and omniscience of the Apartheid state.

"[12] In one review, Alex Lichtenstein was exceedingly positive about Dlamini's oeuvre as a whole, but questioned whether The Terrorist Album "adds much to the portrait of apartheid one finds in Askari, although it does take readers deeper into the twisted minds of the security police.

"[6] It is based on Dlamini's doctoral dissertation,[4] which was titled, "Putting the Kruger National Park in its place: a social history of Africans, mobility and conservation in a modernizing South Africa, 1900–2010.