Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City 3031424336, 9783031424335

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CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY

Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City Yousuf Al-Bulushi

Contemporary African Political Economy

Series Editor Eunice N. Sahle, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Series Editor Eunice N. Sahle is Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies and the Curriculum in Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Advisory Board: Bertha O. Koda, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Brij Maharaj, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Cassandra Veney, United States International University-Africa, Kenya, Fidelis Edge Kanyongolo, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, Law School, Malawi, John Pickles, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, Rita Kiki Edozie, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA, Willy Mutunga, Office of Former Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court, Nairobi, Kenya, and Wisdom J. Tettey, University of Toronto, Canada. Contemporary African Political Economy (CAPE) publishes social science research that examines the intersection of political, social, and economic processes in contemporary Africa. The series is distinguished especially by its focus on the spatial, gendered, and cultural dimensions of these processes, as well as its emphasis on promoting empirically situated research. As consultancy-driven work has emerged in the last two decades as the dominant model of knowledge production about African politics and economy, CAPE offers an alternate intellectual space for scholarship that challenges theoretical and empirical orthodoxies and locates political and economic processes within their structural, historical, global, and local contexts. As an interdisciplinary series, CAPE broadens the field of traditional political economy by welcoming contributions from the fields of Anthropology, Development Studies, Geography, Health, Law, Political Science, Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies. The Series Editor and Advisory Board particularly invite submissions focusing on the following thematic areas: urban processes; democracy and citizenship; agrarian structures, food security, and global commodity chains; health, education, and development; environment and climate change; social movements; immigration and African diaspora formations; natural resources, extractive industries, and global economy; media and socio-political processes; development and globalization; and conflict, displacement, and refugees.

Yousuf Al-Bulushi

Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City

Yousuf Al-Bulushi Department of Global and International Studies University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA, USA

ISSN 2945-7351 ISSN 2945-736X (electronic) Contemporary African Political Economy ISBN 978-3-031-42432-8 ISBN 978-3-031-42433-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42433-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1 What should one do when the place of discursive opposition has been barred to some people? What should those who live in the city but are structurally outside of it do if they do not accept their place of being insiders who have been pushed outside? Lewis Gordon 2 There are many who increasingly believe that, through self-organization and small ruptures, we can actually create myriad ‘tipping points’ that may lead to deep alterations in the direction that both the continent and the planet take. Achille Mbembe 3 The fact that rupture takes place has concrete ontological implications. Being cannot be one or a whole in which all beings remain in their place. Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan 4

Notes 1. 2001 The Philosophy of History, 449. 2. 2008 “Biko’s Black Consciousness,” in Biko Lives!, 87. 3. 2021 Out of the Dark Night, 10. Mbembe’s rumination on Africa’s place in the world, and the production of planetary—rather than provincial— knowledge from Africa, has been especially useful in the overall effort to think the world from Durban in this book. 4. 2012 Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political, 4.

To Halima and Donald, for their humor, unassuming wisdom, and ethical commitment to others.

Acknowledgments

Growing up in a transnational household in the 1990s, family conversations at the dinner table often revolved around the politics of Africa and the Middle East. I remember watching news coverage of South Africa’s “transition to democracy” and absorbing the tremendous hope that the ANC seemed to represent at that time. For instilling an anti-imperialist ethos in my sister and me, and for generating a deep passion for all things related to global politics, I am especially grateful to my parents, Mussa and Kathy. For finding ways to put those commitments into both intellectual and political practice once she went off to college, and for always serving as a role model for me, I thank my sister, Samar. I have followed in your footsteps for about three decades now, and this has always served me particularly well. Mayssoun Sukarieh’s friendship, mentorship, and militancy over the years has been indispensable. Karin Shapiro first exposed me to the academic world of South African history, and she brought debates about the Xhosa Cattle Killings in the nineteenth century to life for us in the classroom. She also was the first to teach me about the writings of Steve Biko and enthusiastically supported my initially ambivalent desire to enter academia without hesitation. Kenneth Surin showed me that there didn’t have to be a divide between brilliant abstract philosophical reflection and concrete activist interventions. Michael Hardt gently cultivated my Marxism and connected me to both Vasant Kaiwar and Fred Jameson. Charles Payne, Jocelyn Olcott, Walter Mignolo, and Orin

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Starn all showed me that there were important resonances between my own political, theoretical, and historical interests and radical politics across the Americas. miriam cooke, Rebecca Stein, and Stephen Sheehi actively nurtured my interest in Middle East politics and helped complexify my at times overly rhetorical thinking. Lee Baker expertly steered me toward the mentorship of Grant Farred, and for that I will forever be in his debt. Professor Farred embodied the synthesis between African and Middle Eastern politics I had been searching for. He understood that his intellectual commitment to his own former mentor, Edward Said, and his own political experience growing up under South African apartheid, necessitated fighting against ongoing Israeli apartheid in Palestine. Thank you for simultaneously challenging my dogmatisms while also pushing me to bring my politics into the classroom rather than confining it to protests on the campus quad. Thank you for constantly reminding me that “there is no thinking but in the writing,” and for insisting that I take conservative thinkers like Borges and Schmitt seriously. And thank you for being so generous in connecting me to your friends and family across South Africa. Such massive debts cannot really be repaid. They can only be paid forward. When it first began as a dissertation idea, John Pickles expertly steered this project through from start to finish. In the classroom and in long office hours visits I benefitted tremendously from his deep knowledge of critical geography, political economy, and social theory. He knew exactly when to give me a long leash to explore ideas that might have seemed tangential, and when to check in by gently reminding me of the more immediate tasks at hand. His contacts across South Africa proved crucial for my work, and none of them hesitated to generously fling open their door and offer support. John also had an uncanny ability to reflect back to me what I was really trying to say, highlighting all that I brought to the table of scholarly conversations, but in much more brilliant and succinct terms than I could ever muster on my own. Such moments were crucial for my self-confidence, and I can honestly say that without this guidance and intellectual refraction, I would not have gotten to where I am today. From our first meeting at Jack Sprat when we discussed C.B. Macpherson, Fatima Meer, Julius Nyerere, and Colin Leys, Eunice Sahle and I could tell we were intellectual and political comrades. As I oscillated between a contemporary South African project and an historical Tanzanian project, she wisely steered me toward South Africa, pointing out that contemporary movements were much more alive in South Africa, and that

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I could always return to the Tanzanian project at a later point (which I am now doing). Her connections in South Africa and beyond have been crucial for me, and her support for my work has been unwavering. Her African Studies colleagues and comrades on the board of the Contemporary African Political Economy book series all offered brilliant feedback on the manuscript that improved my arguments substantially. Michael Hardt generously agreed to continue working with me in graduate school, and his feedback and support have been foundational to my thinking and development. It is his own carefully crafted method of reading contemporary social movements for the broader theoretical insights they offer that I have attempted to deploy here. It has been a pleasure to learn from him across many different spaces over the years, from classrooms, conferences, and radical bookstores in the United States, to social movement encounters in Porto Alegre and Chiapas. Altha Cravey and Scott Kirsch offered indispensable advice on questions of method and theory, as well as good humor and political companionship. Altha’s emphasis on social reproduction and taking the household seriously as a unit of analysis has stayed with me, as have her unflinching commitments to challenging hierarchy, heteropatriarchy, racism, and inequality within our educational institutions. Scott’s deep knowledge of Lefebvre helped make me feel at a home in radical geography, and his lighthearted approach to teaching reminded me to never take myself or my ideas too seriously. Banu Gökarıksel was instrumental in getting me into the geography program in the first place, along with generous guidance and support from Rebecca Stein. Even though I did not end up working on the Middle East for my dissertation, Banu has remained unbelievably supportive of my work, contributing to my development as both a researcher and teacher over the years. Wendy Wolford, Sara Smith, Elizabeth Havice, Christian Lentz, Nina Martin, Gaby Valdivia, Arturo Escobar, Larry Grossberg, Fred Moten, Joseph Jordan, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, Bereket Selassie, Kia Caldwell, Perry Hall, Ariana Vigil, and Neel Ahuja all deserve special mention for the lessons they imparted to me both in the classroom and outside of it, and for the kindness and generosity they exhibited toward students like me. The shared commitment to love and struggle I found in the graduate student community at Chapel Hill was truly singular. I can honestly say that without the advice—and much needed levity—from these people I would not have survived graduate school: Dennis Arnold, Eloisa Berman, Adam Bledsoe, Agnes Chew, Chris Courtheyn, Craig Dalton,

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Kim Engie, Murat Es, Priscilla Ferreira, Mabel Gergan, Conor Harrison, Liz Hennessy, Atiya Husain, Ali Kadivar, Ahsan Kamal, Marwa Koheji, Jim Kuras, Tu Lan, Stevie Larson, Liz Mason-Deese, Sara Maxwell, Helen Orr, Joseph Palis, Linda Quiquivix, Sertanya Reddy, Ben Rubin, Sara Safransky, Aron Sandell, Darius Scott, Carlos Serrano, Joe Simons, Haruna Suzuki, Nathan Swanson, Autumn Thoyre, Pavithra Vasudevan, Willie Wright, Batool Zaidi, and Shengjun Zhu. A special thanks to Haruna Suzuki and Stephanie Najjar for indispensable research assistance. My thinking owes a particular debt to Priscilla, Conor, Autumn, Pavithra, Chris, and others in the Capital reading group; to Adam, Chris, and Stevie for our Foucault reading group and our geography and race reading group; to Stevie, Tu, and Shengjun for our David Harvey reading group; and to Adam, Priscilla, and Willie for collaborative thinking about black geographies both domestically and internationally. I have Anne-Maria Makhulu to thank for insisting that I apply to attend the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism, an experience that transformed my thinking and one that I still carry with me today. Sincere thanks to the intellectual and organizational initiative of the entire JWTC team: Kelly Gillespie, Julia Hornberger, Achille Mbembe, and Leigh-Ann Naidoo. Andrew Dowe, your beautiful spirit left us much too soon. Patti Anahory and Helena Chávez transformed JWTC into a PanAfrican and Trans-Atlantic network. Zandile Nsibande, Zodwa Nsibande, S’bu Zikode, Yusuf Simelane, Siya James, Mazwi Nzimande, Mnikelo Ndabankulu, Bandile Mdlalose, Cindy Zikode, Nkululeko Gwala, Thuli Ndlovu, Thapelo Mohapi, Ndabo Mzimela, Edgar Ndlovu, Nomkhosi Shozi, Mzwakhe Mdlalose, Lindela Mashumi Figlan, Nkululeko Shozi, and countless other comrades in Abahlali accepted me with open arms and were extremely patient with my endless questioning. Their bravery, comradeship, and commitment to solidarity over the years have taught me lifelong lessons in radical struggle. I hope my offering does some justice to the stakes of what they have dedicated their lives to, often at tremendous cost. Di Scott, Brij Maharaj, Patrick Bond, Anthony Collins, Imraan Buccus, Jackie Shandu, Kerry Chance, Mvuselelo Ngcoya, Jen Norins, Sandile Mbatha, and Juliette Nicholson all welcomed me in Durban, offered institutional support at UKZN, accompanied me at various points in the research process, joined me at pick-up soccer games, or offered their own expert feedback on my most pressing questions. Prishani Naidoo and Ahmed Veriava organized fantastic conversations in

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Johannesburg grounded in both concrete struggles and radical theory as part of the Tribe of Moles gatherings. Richard Ballard was an amazing informal host in Durban. In Richard I was delighted to find a fellow geographer and a generous and most hospitable friend. He approached the same issues I was interested in— the political struggles of the urban poor—with a much more rigorous and sophisticated social scientific lens. This meant his keen eye on the precise dynamics driving uneven urbanization and the relationship between everyday people and their local governments was often more nuanced than my own. He never hesitated to connect me with other local researchers doing work in this vein, and ever so gently nudged me in new directions whenever my strong political commitments threatened to overcome the demands of careful research. Even after he moved to Johannesburg he didn’t hesitate to invite me to think through my research with colleagues at the Gauteng City Research Observatory and the Wits School of Architecture and Planning. Although he had long since left Durban by the time I arrived, Richard Pithouse kindly invited me to share some of my early findings at the UHURU Research Center at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. There I benefitted from the brilliant feedback of UHURU colleagues and students, whose thinking was also shaped by their own direct engagement with the Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall movement. Richard and I hit it off immediately, and I knew I had found a fellow comrade. He was always careful never to impose his own thinking on mine, but when asked for feedback, he immediately gave it with incredible generosity and care. His thinking has shaped me profoundly, and for all that he has offered radical thought and praxis I am most grateful. He has paid a high price for his intellectual and political commitments over the years, and I admire his unwavering principles and his steadfast commitment to do not what is simply popular or safe but what is right. Peace Studies and the Center for Geographies of Justice at Goucher College was a wonderful place to begin my career. Seble Dawit and Ailish Hopper formed a dream team of colleagues and mentors who nurtured my slow development as a thinker and teacher, while also offering the unbelievable requirement that I be somehow concretely engaged in Baltimore politics as a part of my tenure requirements. Angelo Robinson was a fantastic senior faculty mentor and wisely encouraged me to take it slow and steady with the manuscript. In Baltimore city, I had the opportunity to connect, think, and build with Niki Fabricant, Lester Spence, Eddie

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Conway, and John Duda, unbelievable thinkers and activists without whom the city would be much worse off. In the classroom, I benefited from the brilliant insights of Rick Pringle, Jen Bess, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Mel Lewis. A special thanks to Steve DeCaroli, who allowed me to sitin on his brilliant lectures and didn’t hesitate to join me in embarking on crazy pursuits like co-teaching a seminar at the intersection of philosophy and black studies or co-facilitating a campus-wide forum on race. At UC Irvine, I have been very fortunate to work with a wonderful group of colleagues in the department of global and international studies, and under the guidance of Eve Darian-Smith, who generously read the entire draft of my manuscript, offering detailed feedback, endless encouragement, and patient support. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard kindly agreed to serve as my senior faculty mentor. As she seems to do with everything she embarks upon, she has gone above and beyond in this role—reading drafts of book proposals and articles while offering indispensable feedback, connecting me to the one and only Elizabeth Robinson, and generously inviting me to participate in working groups, conferences, and journal special issues. Long Bui blazed a path that I will never be able to keep up with, but I am thankful to just be in your proximity and to benefit from your mentorship and friendship. Chris Courtheyn, Stevie Larson, Kris Peterson, Samar Al-Bulushi, Richard Pithouse, and Zach Mondesire all also read the entire manuscript and offered me feedback that significantly improved the final version and clarified my own thinking. In the final stages of writing, thinking closely with Damien Sojoyner, Marilyn Grell-Brisk, Mariel Rowland, and Temitope Famodu about the global resonances of Black Reconstruction was a real delight. Finally, I am especially grateful to Chelsea Schields, for offering me a model of exactly how to do this work, for her own generous and brilliant feedback, for putting up with my grumpy working disposition, and for accepting my many hours of prolonged isolation while this project came to fruition.

A Note on Racial Terminology

According to most estimates, South Africa’s 60 million people are divided “ethno-racially” into the following four groups: 81% “black African”; 9% “colored”; 8% “white”; and 2.5% “Asian/Indian.”1 Using terminology for the biologically disproven notion of race that nonetheless has real-world material effects on people’s lives is always a tricky terrain to navigate. South Africa is no exception. No matter what words you use, you will be committing factual or political errors. For example, to refer to South Africans of South Asian descent as “Indian” ignores the fact that some of them hail not from the country now known as India but from other countries, such as what is now Bangladesh. In addition, the term “Indian”—a nationality—implies the overlap between racial and national/ethnic categories, meaning that the referent for race constantly exceeds its supposed definitional borders. To use the term “African” racially to connote blackness risks excluding those who might not be counted as black, such as people from the Maghreb. It also neglects the political, material, and national reality that anyone residing in postcolonial Africa for an extended period should be able to count as African, just as anyone residing in the United States for an extended time should be able to identify as American. What is more, what is referred to as “the national question”2 in South Africa—rife with political import in the traditions of radical politics going back at least to Lenin—arguably often operated historically as somewhat of a euphemism for race. And yet, to simply avoid the contradictory challenge of naming race because of its xv

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necessarily treacherous grounds makes one complicit with color-blindness, something scholars have long pointed out.3 The simultaneous link and disjuncture between an affirmative political deployment of racial categories and state-sanctioned racist deployments of such categories present more conceptual challenges. For example, the Black Consciousness Movement attempted to unite all people not categorized as white under the affirmative political banner of “blackness.” This meant that people who the state referred to by deploying distinct categories of black/African/Native, colored, and Indian/Chinese/Asian would instead be united under the common term “black” in an affirmative political project that decoupled racial categories from any adherence to biological essence while transcending the state-imposed divisions between different peoples of color. Complicating matters even further, Biko sometimes argued that not all people of color could automatically claim blackness. Only those actively mobilizing against apartheid could, the rest he derisively termed “non-whites.” This represents an insistence on blackness as a political project of becoming, rather than something that you are. But this begs the question of why white people, too, could not become black. While many might rightly balk at such a suggestion, some contemporary theorists of blackness, such as Fred Moten, appear to embrace this possibility. This form of political rather than biological or cultural blackness is experiencing somewhat of a resurgence today in different parts of the world.4 And yet, the crucial political project of naming and claiming “racial” identity can potentially clash with the analytical project of grasping realworld instances of racism, definitionally captured by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies.”5 It is with this second analytical project in mind that I have chosen to disaggregate the powerful aggregation of political blackness into the apartheid state’s categories of “black,” “Indian,” “colored,” and “white” in this book. They continue to map onto forms of “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” in important ways that draw our attention to the afterlife of apartheid categorizations. In addition, while the peak of antiapartheid struggle successfully united many people of color against the racist state, the post-apartheid moment has more often witnessed the

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political disaggregation of people of color into explicit and implicit antiblack coalitions that often unite white, colored, and Indian groups against a black majority. My choice, however, does not come without its own myriad problems, only some of which I’ve detailed in this note. It also risks reifying race, something I used to scoff at as simply the feigned concern of multicultural liberals who were in reality complicit with color-blindness, but which I’ve increasingly come to understand as a real political problem in our current conjuncture. My own politics lie with Biko, Cedric Robinson, and Fred Moten’s expansive notion of political blackness. Abahlali’s politics also resonate with this tradition, but they push it toward a radical claim upon, and drive to redefine, universal humanity. Here they are in good company with Fanon, Cesaire, and the Ghanaian philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu’s notion of “left universalism.”6 But such a politics of political blackness or left universalism must also be held in tension with the analytical project—central in this book—to understand groups according to their own everyday forms of self-definition and according to the material effects of racism as a machine that produces differential relations to life and death. This two-step, between the analytical precision deployed to capture the specificity of the stakes of understanding the “death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies”7 on the one hand, and the political aspirations toward forms of black radicalism, political blackness, and left universalism on the other hand, runs throughout the “racial” terminology and political theory deployed in this study.

Notes 1. COVID-19 and mismanagement created a number of problems for the South African government’s scheduled 2021 census, which is supposed to take place every ten years. 2. Webster and Pampallis, eds. 2017 The Unresolved National Question. 3. See, for example, Grant Farred’s 2006 brilliant and sympathetic discussion of Paul Gilroy’s Against Race, “‘Shooting the White Girl First’: Race in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” 4. See, for example, Paul Gilroy’s “Introduction: Race is the Prism” to Stuart Hall’s Selected Writings on Race and Difference. 5. Gilmore 2002a “Race and Globalization,” 261. 6. Sekyi-Otu 2019 Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays, 8. Interestingly, Sekyi-Otu notes that it was his return from the diaspora to Africa that underscored the importance of striving for “left universalism.” And he

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cites the case of post-apartheid South Africa as partial inspiration for this project: “A pivotal article of ‘Fanon’s warning’ is that unless it is superseded by ‘social and political consciousness,’ one alive to internal inequities and inequities and in pursuit of popular sovereignty and egalitarian justice, such an enterprise is doomed to become a perfect vehicle for the acquisitive ambitions and legitimizing creed of a parasitic and profligate ‘national bourgeoisie’. The ANC’s program of ‘Black Economic Empowerment in South Africa is a paradigm case of this phenomenon, ascendant class interests bearing the unimpeachable credentials of a struggle for racial justice: the call for un juste retour de choses understood as racial ‘substitution,’ the restitution of power into the hands of the putative representative class of the subjugated race, champions of the common good.” In their insistence upon a form of left universalism, Sekyi-Otu and Abahlali are also accompanied by Achille Mbembe, who argues the following in his re-theorization of decolonization 2021 Out of the Dark Night: “In Fanon, the disenclosure of the world presupposes the abolition of race…In Fanon’s eyes, this postulate of a fundamental similarity between men, an original human citizenship, constitutes the key to the project of the disenclosure of the world and human autonomy: decolonization,” 63. 7. Gilmore 2002b “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference,” 16.

A Note on Guide-Quotes & Epigraphs

I never used to pay attention to epigraphs. They always struck me as an unnecessary distraction from the main text—why preface something out of context, if you could just insert it, more coherently, into the actual flow of the essay? Then I read Sylvia Wynter. She takes the art of epigraphs to another level. In fact, she even uses a different term for them: guidequotes. By my count, her most engaged piece of writing, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” deploys no less than nineteen of them. While an epigraph might be used most often to capture, in either succinct or artistic fashion, the central argument of a text—alerting readers in advance to the main theme or claim—the guide-quotes I deploy throughout this book operate more often along the lines of Wynter’s use. Usually, they do refer to arguments I share and deploy. But periodically, they also refer to positions I might disagree with, but that nonetheless usefully point to political and theoretical problems that surfaced during my research. In my use of a variety of guide-quotes preceding each chapter, I attempt to signal to you, the reader, a spectrum of political positions, problems, and claims, that can swirl in the background as you proceed with the argument. If you find them distracting, feel free to skip them. But if you appreciate them, as I now do, take a moment to digest them as signals of the various political positions—sometimes complementary and sometimes contrasting—that were in the back of my head as I wrote each chapter. I do not pretend to have resolved these problems and

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debates, only to have attempted to delineate several of the dilemmas that many movements around the world are grappling with to better understand the challenges we all must face as we make the necessary decisions intended to tackle them.

Contents

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Introduction: Thinking the World from Durban 1.1 Abahlali baseMjondolo: Residents of the Shacks 1.2 Africa in the World 1.3 Cape Town–Durban–Johannesburg: The Founding of Urban Racial Regimes 1.4 Apartheid Space and its Afterlife: From Township to Shack 1.5 The Zone of (Non)Being 1.6 Place-Based Shack Struggles in Global Context 1.7 Summary of Chapter Contents Transition: Fissures in the Time and Space of Democracy 2.1 Understanding the Limits of the First Transition 2.2 New Subjects Emerge 2.3 Civil Society, the State, and Emancipatory Politics 2.4 Human Rights and the First Transition 2.5 Democracy from Below 2.6 Autogestion and the Withering Away of the State: The Transition Reconceived 2.7 Transitions, Rebellions, Democracies

1 5 7 10 15 17 19 22 39 44 48 52 54 59 64 69

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CONTENTS

Ruptures: From Post-politics to the Urban Political 3.1 From Post-political Consensus to the Urban Political 3.2 New Spaces of the Political 3.3 Abahlali baseMjondolo: Organizational Structure, Repertoire, Social Composition, and Primary Antagonists 3.4 Abahlalism as Rupture 3.5 Forcing the Government’s Hand

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87 94 96

Development: A Promised Land Called Cornubia 4.1 Abahlali and the Birth of Cornubia 4.2 Development(s) 4.3 Planning Durban 4.4 BRICS, State Capitalism and a Changing World-System 4.5 Urban Informal Settlements: The Growth of Shack Communities 4.6 Spatial Justice, the Rural–Urban Divide, and Post-Apartheid Housing Policy 4.7 The Evolution of Post-Apartheid Housing: The “Promised Land” of Cornubia 4.8 Social Movements and the Developmental State 4.9 Which Developmental State?

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Precarity and Autonomy: Life and Death in the Shacks 5.1 A Tale of Two Deaths 5.2 A Precarious Liberation 5.3 State and Movement Powers 5.4 Wynter’s Global Geography of Jobless Archipelagoes

153 156 163 168 177

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Conclusion: Dignity as Rupture and the “Becoming Black of the World”

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118 121 126 136 138

Bibliography

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Durban Beachfront (Photo by author) Delegates arriving at Abahlali’s Unfreedom Day at Kennedy Road (Photo by author) Cato Crest shack community. Shacks are often constructed from a variety of surplus material (Photo by author) Abahlali land occupation. T-shirt reads “Land, Housing & Dignity” (Photo by author) BRICS from below convergence of protestors & social movements (Photo by author) Map of apartheid’s geography of homelands (Source © MATRIX Michigan State University) Cato Crest shack dwellers meet Abahlali to discuss joining the movement (Photo by author) Nkululeko Gwala addresses Cato Crest shack dwellers (Photo by author)

3 64 88 90 115 119 159 161

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Thinking the World from Durban

Apartheid, the political logic of late capitalism, arranges our future through control of our space. Ruth Wilson Gilmore1 Revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement; collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge. Robin Kelley2 The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa—giving the world a more human face. Steve Biko3

Some say the Durban beachfront represents the most desegregated space in the “post-apartheid” city today. Take a moment to transport yourself back to 2013, the year in which I spent the longest stretch in the city,4 and join me on the following journey: Start at the northern tip of the three-mile-long stretch of sand that graces the city’s Indian Ocean shores, where the Suncoast casino sits, and walk south between the waves and the concrete. Observing your immediate surroundings, you might be inclined to agree that the formal segregation which defined the apartheid era has now been transcended, or at least suspended. A real mélange of city-life meets at these shores, where white and black surfers, Indian © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City, Contemporary African Political Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42433-5_1

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bunny chow sellers, and fully covered Muslims seek out the early morning sunrise views or a late-night bite to eat on the waterfront. In what was once an archetype of the apartheid doctrine of “separate development,” where prime recreational areas such as these were strictly segregated, now children of all races can be seen splashing in the water together, digging in the sand, and mingling in the many play pools that stretch along the waterfront. If you are lucky enough to visit during the Durban International Film Festival, one of the best of such gatherings on the African continent, you might catch a documentary at the Blue Waters Hotel—just south of the Suncoast casino—about comparative histories of apartheid in South Africa and Israel/Palestine. This experience would encourage you to believe in the contemporary analytical salience of apartheid, but only insofar as it marks a now-transcended historical reference point for South Africa, and an oddly apt description of contemporary Israel’s colonization of Palestine, albeit one seemingly “out of joint” with our globally interconnected and integrated times.5 Advancing south along the white sands that meet the rough waves, however, seeds of doubt might begin creeping into your mind. Why are most of the “car guards”—people who offer to keep your vehicle safe in exchange for a few coins while you dine nearby—people of color? Why are the low-wage service workers almost entirely black and Indian? Like me, you might have your dreamy rainbow nation moment along the beachfront ultimately fractured by witnessing an incident of petty-theft, one of thousands to occur that day across the country. A short, shoeless black boy is chased down by a burly white man who could easily be a rugby player. The white man claims the boy stole his backpack while he was enjoying himself in the waves. Black police standby and watch quietly— only hesitatingly intervening—clearly weary of interrupting the white man’s seeming “right” to extract extra-judicial and violent revenge on the poor boy, and in so doing, re-enact the very white-on-black violence that founded modern South Africa, and the racial capitalist world order it came to symbolize.6 Trying to forget this momentary violent interruption of your beachfront tour, you proceed along the shore until you reach the southernmost tip of the beachfront, just past the Ushaka Marine World theme park that was built in 2004 to recognize a decade of post-apartheid “freedom.” There, you will turn right, rounding the point and entering the Durban Bay, where you will likely find yourself face-to-face with a

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Fig. 1.1 Durban Beachfront (Photo by author)

massive container ship coming to port. Durban is known today as perhaps the busiest port on the entire African continent—alongside Port Said, Egypt—with roughly 60% of South Africa’s exports and imports passing through its terminals.7 Durban grew during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, serving as a logistical export hub for the minerals extracted from the area around Johannesburg, including gold, diamonds, coal, platinum, uranium, and chromium. More locally, it was sugar cane that drove the provincial economy of Natal during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which also passed through the Durban port for export to the rest of the world. Tongaat Hullet, one of the largest sugar companies on the continent, is still the largest landowner in the city today, although their infamously long history of exploitation and dispossession may have finally caught up with them as the organization faces extreme financial difficulty and potential bankruptcy (Fig. 1.1). Heading slightly inland, northwest from the port itself, you will find yourself in downtown Durban. Once a thriving central business district

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under colonial and apartheid rule, today it is less glorious, having been abandoned by the white elite once the formal integration of the city occurred in 1994. Many of these white elites fled to the outskirts of the city to former sugar plantation land, transforming them into new suburbs like Umhlanga Ridge, with exclusive gated communities mirroring those that first emerged in Southern California.8 Despite this white flight, downtown Durban remains a bustling city center, albeit one without much of the glitz and glam of financial power that one finds in other metropolitan centers. Here you will pass through thriving informal markets and Chinese shopping malls, and over roads that have been renamed in honor of veterans of the struggle against colonialism and apartheid.9 The two most prominent among them include Pixley Ka Seme St and Anton Lembede St., founders of the African National Congress (ANC) and the ANC Youth League, respectively. Somewhere nestled between these two streets—more commonly (and maybe appropriately) still referred to by their colonial-era names—you will find the office of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a shack dweller organization perhaps ironically headquartered in a once-glamorous but now much diminished thirteenfloor building in downtown Durban. Abahlali’s office is meager, to say the least, constituting three small rooms where meetings can sometimes pack dozens of attendees into incredibly cramped quarters. The organization was forced to shift their headquarters here soon after the leadership was displaced from the Kennedy Road shack settlement following a brutal attack by an ANC-led and police-backed mob in 2009 that combined formal and informal modes of repression. In order to get to the shack communities where Abahlali members actually reside, you will have to take Pixley Ka Seme St going against traffic, up to where it eventually dovetails with the N3 highway heading northwest through the city’s most immediate white-majority suburbs where many tourists and the city’s professional class reside. If you stay on the N3, you will eventually arrive at Johannesburg, but your journey today is much shorter. Exiting the N3 to the south just past the affluent suburbs deposits you at the Cato Crest shack settlement a mere three miles from city center. Or you can take the N3 a bit further and exit to the north, where you will find the Kennedy Road shack settlement, just six miles from Abahlali’s downtown office. Abahlali members in Durban reside in roughly forty such communities scattered throughout the city, but these two have been especially prominent in the movement’s history. As the crow flies, the distance to these shack settlements is relatively short,

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but as Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey remind us, space is not only absolute but also relative and relational,10 and you will feel as though you have time traveled. The enduring structural logic of sociospatial apartheid, fleeting but nonetheless present along the Durban beachfront, now smacks you upside the head, leaving you feeling dizzy. Communities like Kennedy Road and Cato Crest mimic the historic “black spots” that the apartheid government sought to eradicate when unruly blacks boldly penetrated the boundaries of white urban space. Suddenly, you are among an entirely black population, but only in an immediate sense. Just beyond the borders of the shack communities are formally planned, working, and middle-class neighborhoods where Indian and white families dominate in number. But for now, you are in the middle of a shack settlement, and here it does indeed feel like a different world. The global HIV/AIDS epicenter that is Durban and the broader KwaZulu-Natal Province— where infection rates for adults aged 15–49 hover around 27%—is likely double that, if not more, in shack communities. Clean water, sanitation, and electricity are all hard to come by, and can often only be accessed by illegally tapping into nearby sources in more affluent neighborhoods. But if these communities represent continuities with an apartheid logic predicated on premature death for black people, they also represent ruptures with that logic.11 This is because such spaces, precarious though they may be in the extreme, are also fought over and won by their residents. It is true that shacks can also be found in rural settings as well as in the backyards of formal homes located in historic townships established under apartheid. But many of the urban shack communities where Abahlali members reside, like Cato Crest, were only established following intense struggles by their occupants to find a home closer to the city center, given the economic and social opportunities such precise geographies often promise.

1.1 Abahlali baseMjondolo: Residents of the Shacks Having first emerged in 2005, Abahlali is now the longest-running and most prominent social movement in South Africa and one of the most well-known radical organizations across the entire African continent. The organization is a key node in the global struggle for the right to the city, where resistance to gentrification in the global north has coupled with demands for urban land redistribution in the global south. In

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a context of permanent mass unemployment, Abahlali highlights the ongoing centrality of struggles around social reproduction, offering a crucial complement to the important resurgence of workplace movements centered around factories, farms, and mining pits in South Africa.12 The group operates as a network in the sense that ultimate power is granted to local “branches” in specific shack settlements, rather than to the central elected leadership body operating out of its small downtown office space. As shack communities have blossomed in the post-apartheid era, so too have intense struggles around access to formal housing, electricity, sanitation, childcare, and the basic necessities of everyday life. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of these struggles may have pursued tense but somewhat amicable negotiations with the national and local representatives of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). But over time they have deteriorated into antagonistic stand-offs between everyday people and their supposed “representatives.” As the promised “freedom” of a post-apartheid era slowly turned into a nightmare, many shack dwellers realized that not only might the government fail to meet their basic needs without a persistent agitation in the form of people’s movements from below, but even worse, state officials would begin to portray poor black citizens as an anti-government mob in need of violent repression. In their desperate search for an alternative politics, many poor people have begun abandoning the official political parties—be they the governing ANC or the smaller opposition parties such as the Democratic Alliance, the Economic Freedom Fighters, or the Inkatha Freedom Party. Especially in Durban, but increasingly in other cities too, poor people living in shacks will often turn to Abahlali in such situations when accusations of corruption are leveled at local ward councilors or when the municipal government has dispatched its repressive apparatus against shack dwellers living on occupied land, squatted upon out of necessity in their bid to survive in the city. In addition to operating as a mediator between shack dwellers and the different branches of local, regional, and national government, Abahlali encourages self-organization among its membership in all aspects of their life. Rather than waiting for freedom to be delivered from on high, the group reminds its membership that true liberation lies in their own hands. It supports the establishment of community programs such as childcare, youth halls, and universities of the poor for dialogue and self-education in the shacks. Most important, Abahlali has consistently preached a gospel of dignity whereby it is the minds of the poor that are the simultaneous

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means and ends of struggle, something that existing political institutions simply fail to comprehend.

1.2

Africa in the World13

This book recounts a story about the struggles for such spaces, with particular attention to how they might offer us a window into broader global debates concerning urban justice, race and class, development, and the strategies of global movements confronting racial capitalism. As such, the book is not exactly a story about a social movement, per se. Readers expecting a traditional ethnographic or primarily empirical study should certainly look elsewhere.14 Instead, a fundamental aim of this study is to approach the movement as a looking glass, one that reflects and refracts back to us important insights regarding our common ways of seeing and understanding the world. I am most concerned with theoretical debates regarding issues of transition, rupture, development, precarity, autonomy, and dignity, and I periodically deploy the experiences of shack dwellers involved with Abahlali to help us grapple with these theoretical challenges. In so doing, this study builds on decolonial and Marxist theorist Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s call to deprovincialize empirical and theoretical studies of Africa in order to place them into conversation with other geographies that nonetheless resonate powerfully with the experiences of shack dwellers in South Africa.15 This demand for deprovincialization by way of thinking the world from Africa is mirrored by Achille Mbembe. In his rumination on the contemporary theoretical legacy of decolonization, Mbembe explains that “to write the world from Africa, or to write Africa into the world or as a fragment thereof, is an exhilarating and, most of the time, perplexing task. As a name and as a sign, Africa has always occupied a paradoxical position in modern formations of knowledge.”16 Africa is most often deployed as a foil for purportedly global theory, as an extreme case or an exception that successfully debunks the rule. While such interventions have offered important correctives to the pretenses of an overly ambitious Euro-American theory of globalization, the actually existing transnational imaginaries and practices of shack dwellers in South Africa struck me as requiring a more expansive theoretical reflection, one that included but also exceeded the prevailing methodological nationalism in what are often presented—implicitly or explicitly—as narrowly South African debates. As Sandro Mezzadra argues, such a project pursues the “resonances of the

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common” across time and place, whereby a renewed practical and theoretical interest in internationalism also takes into account the metaphorical project of “translating” politics between specific contexts while keeping in mind the epistemic borders that continue to shape such initiatives.17 In this regard, the simultaneity of global uprisings in 2011 and 2020 was both striking and emblematic. In the former case, a chance event of selfimmolation in Tunisia became the spark that ignited an “Arab” and then global spring. In the latter case of 2020, the murder of George Floyd kicked off yet another round of the diffusion of the global Movement for Black Lives that stretched from Minneapolis to Holland and Nigeria, offering an example of the profound resonance felt between struggles across what are otherwise heterogeneous contexts. To grasp the continuities and resonances at play in contemporary global movements, I take a cue from Mbembe who argues that “‘desegregating’ and disenclaving theory must become a constitutive part of the new agenda.”18 To desegregate and disenclave theory is a parallel but slightly distinct project from decolonizing theory, at least with regard to how decolonization has most often been linked to processes of reestablishing sovereignty (both territorial and intellectual) through indigenization.19 In this book, theory is desegregated and disenclaved by thinking Africa and the world with and from theories across the global south and global north. In this regard, such a decolonial project somewhat surprisingly insists that Africa need not only be thought with African theories—for that would risk further enclaving it. Any project seeking to identify resonances of the common today must also include Mezzadra’s claim that “the scenario of a capitalist world-system without a ‘Western’ center is a concrete possibility for the twenty-first century.”20 In asking what is left of the theoretical and political project of decolonization in our contemporary globalized world, Mbembe also argues that “Europe is no longer the center of the world. Its sovereignty has become ancillary. The contemporary world is decidedly heterogeneous—that is, constituted by a multiplicity of nodes governed by the double logic of entanglement and disconnection.”21 For evidence of this tendency, we will look to the rise of the BRICS bloc in the first decade of the twenty-first century; but we could just as easily look to the fractured multipolarity signaled by the global divide over whether to condemn Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine; or even to the tremendous confusion surrounding the 2021 American withdrawal from Afghanistan after two decades of a “global war on terror” that failed to even claim

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a victory in the very place the war began.22 Such a relative decline of Western-centered world order “would be quite a rupture with a fivecenturies-long history,” notes Mezzadra, “and there is a need to take stock of its meaning…both in terms of its potentialities and in terms of its risks.”23 Among radical anti-systemic movements, such a shifting global scene has required a renewed openness to learning from—and a commitment to being in constant dialogue with—comrades across the world. This theoretically itinerant manner of reading and situating place-based struggle in Durban, South Africa, draws on what Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o has called a “globalectical imagination”: Globalectics is derived from the shape of the globe. On its surface, there is no one center; any point is equally a center. As for the internal center of the globe, all centers on the surface are equidistant to it—like the spokes of a bicycle where they meet at the hub. Globalectics combines the global and the dialectical to describe a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue, in the phenomena of nature and nurture in a global space that’s rapidly transcending that of the artificially bounded, as nation and region. The global is that which humans in spaceships or on the international space station see: the dialectical is the internal dynamics that they do not see. Globalectics embraces wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion. It is a way of thinking and relating to the world, particularly in the era of globalism and globalization.24

While earlier conceptions of globality tended to emphasize the whole at the expense of the parts, potentially leading to unhelpful generalizations and the flattening out of difference,25 a globalectical imagination turns our attention to the entirety of the local–global continuum. As Eve Darian-Smith and Philip McCarty explain, “In this sense, the local, national, regional, and global are better understood as embedded sets of relations: inseparable and continually creating and re-creating each other.” Such an approach aims “to grasp global-scale issues, to integrate larger global systems analysis into a multilevel analysis of the entire local–global spectrum, and to see the global through the local and vice versa.”26 In line with these approaches, this book advances the argument that place-based shack communities constitute an important site for the examination of both the enduring afterlife of apartheid space and the ruptures within these spaces produced by everyday people seeking out a better life.27 By approaching Durban through a multi-scalar global lens, I aim to

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deprovincialize the South African experience of social movements, while contributing to the destabilizing of both methodological nationalism and area studies prisms in favor of the more scrambled geographies of an ever-mutating process of globalization that I argue more accurately illuminates and situates shack dweller struggles.28 While I pay close attention to national and continental conversations and debates, I also place Durban into dialogue with Latin American social movements, black diasporic theory, and theories of liberation emanating from Euro-America.29

1.3 Cape Town–Durban–Johannesburg: The Founding of Urban Racial Regimes South Africa offers a useful vantage point from which to assess cyclical patterns in the historical rise and fall of hegemons in the modern worldsystem. The prerequisites for a single integrated world economy began to develop slowly in the second half of the fifteenth century, between the 1452 and 1493 papal bulls.30 These public decrees issued by the head of the Catholic Church encouraged the subjugation of Muslims and “pagans” along the African coast, Portuguese expansion and trading rights, and an Iberian division of the world’s territory into Spanish and Portuguese domains.31 At the same time that Columbus achieved Spain’s westward expansion by sea in 1492 with his arrival on the Caribbean island of Hayti, the Portuguese opened an eastern route for European expansion by successfully rounding Africa’s southernmost point at the Cape of Good Hope in 1497. The local resistance that the Portuguese encountered at Table Bay—where the iconic city of Cape Town sits today—encouraged them to continue their journey along the African coast. They moved northeast along the African coast and eventually found East Africa to be a more suitable region for establishing a permanent presence on the continent.32 Along this journey to East Africa and Asia, the Portuguese “explorer” Vasco da Gama is credited with “discovering” the Durban port in 1497 when he sailed by on Christmas Day, naming the land he sighted “Natal” in honor of Jesus’s birthday.33 While the province was therefore known as Natal under apartheid, the post-apartheid regime, in its pursuit of hybridity and rainbow nation mythology, has chosen to blend the Portuguese explorer’s “Natal” with the locally-dominant Zulu community of the Zulus in renaming the province KwaZuluNatal. Just prior to his voyage past the coastal homelands of the Zulu

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people, da Gama’s completed his “rounding of the Cape.” This feat— successfully achieving a southern sea-route from Europe to the Indian Ocean and Asia—ensured his name would forever be remembered in the hagiographic chronicles of European geographical expansion.34 It was not until the Dutch assumed their own position as global hegemon in the mid-seventeenth century that the more dire consequences of Vasco da Gama’s earlier journey would be felt by the indigenous inhabitants of Southern Africa. Formal European settlement in Cape Town began in 165235 with the arrival of the Dutch colonizer, Jan van Riebeeck, whose statue in the Cape Town central business district remained standing as of 2022.36 While the settlement at Cape Town was initially intended to serve as a mere refueling point along the route to the more important “East Indies,” many of the early Dutch who settled there soon had a more permanent presence in mind. Early settlers would intermittently conquer, and intermarry with, local indigenous populations—the Khoikhoi and San peoples—as they stretched out over the inland frontier from Table Bay over what would become the Cape Colony.37 The mixing between settler and native, along with the importing of enslaved laborers from West Africa, East Africa, and Asia— first from Dahomey and Angola, and then increasingly from the East African coast, Madagascar, the Indian subcontinent, and Indonesia— would combine to create the “Cape Malay” and later, more expansively, the “Cape Coloured” community in South Africa.38 As Pumla Dineo Gqola explains in her study of the memory of slavery in South Africa, today there is “an absence of folk memory of South African slavery even in the Western Cape, where the bulk of the slave population lived between 1658 and 1838, and where the majority of their descendants continue to live.”39 While the racial designation “colored” would later be applied to most “mixed” people throughout the country, Cape Town and the Western Cape Province remain the epicenter of the majority of the mixed people who are still referred to as colored in South Africa today. As the tentacles of global capitalism continued to spread, the cyclical rise and fall of world powers left parallel imprints upon landscapes such as South Africa’s.40 The Dutch descendants who called the Cape Colony their home were eventually forced further inland by the encroachment of yet another rising world hegemon in the early 1800s—the British. As they sought to strengthen their own foothold on the African continent, the British met stiff resistance from the now “indigenous” white

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Dutch-descendant inhabitants who identified as “Afrikaners,” a Dutchderived term for “the Africans.” And while this particular group of “Africans” would go on to become the most notoriously anti-African “Africans” on the continent,41 it was apparently their destiny to set out on a “Great Trek” across the entirety of what would become modern South Africa, as a means of escaping English rule by becoming farmers, or “Boers,” further inland.42 Thus was born South Africa’s own foundational myth of settler colonialism in the “Boer trekkers,” who are celebrated by their contemporary descendants for having set out across the frontier to successfully conquer a harsh landscape through bloodshed and sheer determination.43 Such narratives mirror those of homesteaders conquering the Oregon Trail in the United States and the Kibbutzim “making the desert bloom” in Israel-Palestine.44 As Patrick Wolfe reminds us, “territoriality, the fusion of people and land, is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”45 Many of these settler Afrikaners journeyed to Natal, and this set off decades of fighting with the Zulu people, as well as with the British, who were keen to expand inland from the port of Durban which they had established in 1824.46 Thus, if Cape Town has Portuguese/Dutch colonial origins in the world-system, Durban is more firmly rooted in the British rule that would define the nineteenth century, and much of our Anglo-centric world since.47 Just as the Dutch had imported slave labor to the Cape Colony from overseas, so too would the British look abroad for a supplementary labor force. For in their never-ending clash with the Zulu Kingdom, the British would soon learn that the proudly resistant indigenous population might prove to be unreliable as laborers. As the British empire had abolished the slave trade in 1807—crucially, only on the heels of the successful 1804 Haitian revolution48 —and soon thereafter would abolish slavery entirely throughout their own colonies by 1833, they decided to explore other geographies in search of a pliant laboring class. Following exactly in the footsteps of their Dutch predecessors, they looked to their colonies in Asia. The British began sourcing indentured workers from India primarily to serve as laborers on sugar cane plantations. Beginning in the mid-1800s thousands of Indians arrived in Natal, making Durban the paradigmatically Indian-minority city in the country, paralleling Cape Town’s designation as a colored Mecca.49 Durban would emerge as a preeminent military bastion and port under British rule, exporting sugar cane and serving as an operations base in the long-running Anglo-Zulu

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wars of the late nineteenth century that marked the arrival of the age of imperialism and the scramble for Africa. As they “laid claim to extensive tracts of land,” the British made sure to feed “the outside world a picture of fierce Zulu militarism, and of devastation over a wide area of Natal. This ‘devastation stereotype’ took on a useful propaganda role,” and continued to feature well beyond the formal colonial era as a part of the dominant colonial trope justifying British occupation in films such as the 1964 British war epic “Zulu.”50 Wolfe argued that “elimination should be seen as an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence.”51 But once Africa is incorporated into the experiences of settler colonialism, as Robin Kelley has brilliantly argued, this conceptualization proves limited.52 The white people who came to South Africa primarily from Holland, France, Germany, and Britain were clearly settlers, but Wolfe’s framework—despite its overall utility—reproduces the marginalization of Africa in the global geopolitics of knowledge by refusing to deal adequately with such cases of settler colonialism in Africa. As Kelley makes clear, this is because South Africa troubles his delimitation of settler colonialism to the logic of elimination. It was as potential labor reserves that white settlers spatially confined the African population to particular territories. “In South Africa white settlement was both a structure and a process, not an event. But the complete elimination of the native was hardly the objective…They wanted the land and the labor, but not the people—that is to say, they sought to eliminate stable communities and their cultures of resistance.”53 This book offers a study of black radical praxis among contemporary shack dwellers in South Africa to demonstrate the ultimate failure of this settler colonial project to 54 eliminate the culture of resistance. But, like elsewhere, South African settler colonialism and capitalism have created devastation in their wake, and they set the terms for historical and contemporary forms of resistance to land dispossession and forms of both labor and existential precarity. My account is therefore one that underscores the ongoing dialectic between exploitation, elimination, and resistance. The discovery of diamonds and gold in the 1860s and 1880s led to the final colonial showdown between British colonists and the Boer Afrikaners. The last remaining Afrikaner heartland by this time was located inland to the north, in what were known as the Orange Free State and the South African Republic—precursors to the “Free State” and “Transvaal” provinces in contemporary South Africa—and it was here

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that a minerals boom took off. The global reach of racial capitalism again impacted local developments, as hegemonic Britain had set the trend for other industrializing countries by formally adopting a gold standard by the middle of the nineteenth century. Once the precious metal (together with other subterranean minerals and organic sources of energy) was found in great quantities in inland South Africa in the late 1800s, it shaped the trajectory of South African development, urbanization, and racist labor relations through what scholars would later call a “MineralsEnergy Complex.”55 As soon as gold was discovered in South Africa, therefore, the avaricious Brits began to push inland, and the result was the South African War of 1899–1902, previously referred to as the AngloBoer War.56 And while the eventual British victory over both settler white Afrikaners and black Africans unified the modern country for the first time in 1910 as the Union of South Africa, the minerals boom which precipitated this territorial unification also led to the growth of the third great urban racial regime in the country: Johannesburg. While inland Johannesburg quickly became the preeminent urban metropolis of the country, Durban grew alongside it, serving as a logistics hub of sorts with its port exporting the vast majority of the minerals taken out of the ground in the Witwatersrand region surrounding Johannesburg. When the apartheid government came to power under the leadership of the National Party in 1948, it bucked the global trend toward decolonization and instead moved to fortify the racist divisions of the prior colonial era. Part of what drove the rise of the National Party to power was an overwhelming feeling of resentment among the Afrikaner population toward the prior history of displacement and rule at the hands of the British. And yet, the dominant characterization of blaming only Afrikaners for South Africa’s white supremacist rule has long been dismissed by historians and black radicals alike. Immediately after having united the territory into a single Union of South Africa in 1910, the government passed the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. This act—which has fundamentally shaped South African history and the freedom struggle since—would prohibit Africans from buying or renting land outside of “scheduled areas” known as native reserves, which eventually amounted to a meager 13 percent of South African territory. The Afrikaner-led National Party did not invent what became known as the “Bantustans”—literally, homelands (-stan) of the African (Bantu) people—they merely reinforced and further entrenched the previous policy adopted under British colonialism of indirect rule, confining

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indigenous populations to their supposedly “traditional” rural lands, while reserving the cities and the best farmland for whites.57 Over the past three decades, historians have slowly begun to chip away at the myth of South African exceptionalism—be these racial or economic stories that set the country apart from the rest of the continent. We now understand just how much the South African racial regime served as a model for the forms of indirect rule that British colonialism institutionalized throughout the rest of the African continent. But we also know that South Africa’s racial regime was always transnationally articulated and derived, with roots stemming from the United States policy of reservations.58 While formal urban townships were built to accommodate and internally divide a limited number of Indian, colored, and African laborers in the cities, the “proper place”59 of the majority African population was always conceptualized as the rural underdeveloped “Bantustan.” Colonialism and Apartheid were fundamentally produced by a geographical imagination that conceptualized the city as a preeminently white and civilized space, defined in contradistinction to the rural, underdeveloped, traditional, and despotic Bantustan, a space for African people. Thus, settler colonialism and racial capitalism came together to form a regime of spatial production called “apartheid,” which was in turn always based on the simultaneous processes of separation and articulation60 between race and class, white and “non-white,” urban and rural. And just as Du Bois’s retheorization of the end of slavery in the United States foregrounds the self-activity and spatial flight of enslaved people from plantations—what he calls a “General Strike”61 —so too would apartheid be brought to its knees through the self-activity of African people in a movement transgressing their spatial confinement. Millions of people simply left the Bantustans and illegally moved into urban areas, most of them setting up homes in shack settlements that increasingly began to define the urban built environment in ballooning numbers by the 1980s and 1990s.

1.4 Apartheid Space and its Afterlife: From Township to Shack In an essay published in 1993, just as South Africa was be transitioning out of apartheid, Ruth Wilson Gilmore apartheid in fact represented the political logic of late Far from a bygone era, she would go on to argue that

supposed to claimed that capitalism.62 the moniker

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“apartheid” applied equally to the neoliberal, post-emancipation, postJim Crow United States and to the broader structure of the necessarily global relation of racial capitalism. Gilmore’s arguments imply that it should be no surprise, then, that the relations first established under the colonial rule of the Dutch and the British, and which were further sedimented by the 1948–1990 regime that would make the word “apartheid” infamous, would persist into the present day. These historical–geographical racial regimes were founded on the twin logics of separation and articulation. But just as Vasco da Gama was met with stiff resistance from the moment he tried to disembark at Table Bay in 1497, so too has the long arc of South Africa’s specific iteration of racial capitalism never gone unchallenged. This book foregrounds this dialectic between racial capitalism and freedom struggles by examining the modern-day relationship between shack dwellers and the municipal government in the city of Durban, South Africa. Grounded in the local realities of the struggle for housing and basic survival, the book makes broader interventions in national, continental, and global debates about political theory, race and class, African/a studies, and social movements. I argue that the shack settlement is emblematic of a democratic South Africa still profoundly shaped by apartheid’s afterlife. Tourists visiting South Africa today often go in search of historical apartheid by visiting “townships” like Soweto, icons of both apartheid’s segregated urban planning and the anti-apartheid struggle. While the township was a formally planned space shaped by the disciplinary, panoptic logic of apartheid’s sharply demarcated racial divisions, today’s shack settlement represents a move to a more spatially diffuse, post-apartheid logic marked by abandonment and the biopolitical drive of “letting die.”63 In short, shack communities continue a logic of separation that spatially demarcated black, Indian, and colored townships from white spaces under apartheid, while also unsettling it. Shack settlements often form within former townships or in peri-urban and rural areas where access to formal living conditions is lacking. But, especially in Durban, shacks also emerge in the interstices of former apartheid spaces, in crevices of undeveloped land alongside roads, ravines, factories, municipal dump sites, and sometimes immediately adjacent to suburban middle-class communities. As such, while apartheid-era townships constituted separate spaces, post-apartheid shack settlements can sometimes operate more like space-fillers, taking up the remaining meager urban land that has often been deemed uninhabitable by official zoning restrictions.

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Through their everyday acts of occupying land, I argue, shack dwellers have become the most successful agents in the desegregation of postapartheid South African cities. They have made significant headway toward de facto land redistribution and desegregation while the de jure policies of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) have either failed outright or moved far too slowly. At the same time, these same shack communities offer stark reminders of the continuity between apartheid and post-apartheid temporalities as they continue to represent racialized zones of exclusion and abandonment defined by premature death. This study takes up Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the “afterlife of slavery” to grapple with such continuities and breaks in apartheid temporalities from the mid-twentieth century to the present.64 The “afterlife of apartheid” connotes the many ways in which the logic of apartheid lives on in a postapartheid present defined by the “burdened individuality of freedom.”65 It draws our attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between “the threat of race” and neoliberalism, and to the ongoing effects of transnational racial regimes not just in the diaspora but on the African continent itself.66 Building upon these theories, my argument is that these lines of continuity are not merely reproductions of the past. Rather, they must be situated within a changing global context marked by crises in neoliberal globalization and corresponding openings on both the radical left and the authoritarian right. The book offers an intervention that moves analysis of enduring racial regimes in South Africa beyond the African continent to more fully accommodate the global dimensions of struggle playing out on the ground in peoples’ intimate and collective relations with the city.

1.5

The Zone of (Non)Being

In the preface to his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon identifies a “zone of non-being” to which the black subject is confined, but also from which a new human might emerge.67 This double-sided condition opens the door to competing theorizations of blackness, as illustrated in recent debates between Afropessimism and black optimism. As Fanon puts it: “Angering my black bothers, I shall say that a Black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge. In most cases, the black man cannot take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell.”68 On the one hand,

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then, blackness can be conceived as the condition of existing in the world as an object, what Constance Farrington’s mis-translated earlier English edition of Black Skin called “the fact of blackness,” and what Richard Philcox’s 2008 translation calls “the lived experience of the black.” As Fred Moten reminds us, while this condition is indeed stripped of every essential, making blackness operate as the paradigmatic affected object— rather than an agentive subject capable of acting upon the world—the capacity to be affected might still contain a clue to a radically different understanding of humanity that challenges Western modernity’s obsession with a self-determining man.69 In other words, as Grant Farred has argued, when understood as an entirely discrete space, there is a risk that the notion of non-being within Fanon’s “zone of non-being” amounts to “a philosophical nonsense.” As Farred astutely puts it, “in our determination to mark this as discrete from that, we are prone to uncoupling that which is best apprehended as entangled.”70 Being and non-being cannot be so easily torn asunder. Rather, they should be understood as part of a broader relational space defined by both apartheid and articulation. Nonetheless, the zone of non-being remains a real condition, one where premature and social death provides the condition of possibility for all other peoples to be recognized as human.71 Following Sylvia Wynter, we might situate the zone of non-being geographically within the “shanty-towns” of the global south and among the “captive populations of the urban inner-cities” in the global north.72 The zone of non-being is therefore fundamentally marked by antiblackness. Your understanding of antiblackness will change, however, depending on whether you conceive of it as a structural relation that endures in the afterlife of slavery, or as a product of the historically and geographically specific processes that many theorists term racialization.73 To emphasize the enduring logic of antiblackness over a more contingent and processual “racialization” is in some senses to offer a rejection of the prevailing post-structuralism in the Western academy and to insist upon a return to a structuralist analysis of race. Such a move also names antiblackness as a condition that has been remarkably durable over the longue durée, outlasting those moments— such as the abolition of chattel slavery, the overturning of Jim Crow legislation, and the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa—which the triumphalist and hegemonic narrative of liberal progress often points to as evidence of gradual improvement over time. While theorists like Fred Moten, Katherine McKittrick, and Clyde Woods do not deny the salience of antiblackness,74 they are often more

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interested in an affirmative study of blackness, understood as a condition of perpetual fugitivity from antiblackness and capital, “a movement of escape,” “an undercommon of disorder,” in which “some folks relish being a problem.”75 This study picks up on their work by paying close attention to the structuring logic of antiblackness in South Africa, while remaining attentive to the moments of fugitivity in the freedom dreams and enactments of dignity embodied in shack dweller politics. As such, it follows Moten’s central question: “How can we fathom a social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death, and which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly beautiful vitality?”76 And it similarly pursues McKittrick’s provocative remarks when she states: “How then do we think and write and share as decolonial scholars and foster a commitment to acknowledging violence and undoing its persistent frame, rather than simply analytically reprising violence?”77 In following this methodology of black study, we can highlight “the ways in which blackness works against the violence that defines it.”78 Such an approach in turn requires the centering of a countervailing metaphysical system that emerged “from the whole experience of Black people and not merely from the social formations of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism.”79 Cedric Robinson terms this system “the black radical tradition,” and it offers up an understanding of forms of radical politics that operate from a position of relative autonomy vis-à-vis Marxism, even as it remains a crucial part of fraught and productive debate within Marxism.80 It is from this lens that I believe we can best comprehend both the violent structures that shack dwellers confront as well as the alternative visions of a “living communism” that they seek to realize through their collective struggle.

1.6 Place-Based Shack Struggles in Global Context In addition to deploying the black studies methodology outlined above, this study implicitly synthesizes and transcends the ongoing debate in urban studies between a relatively Eurocentric political economy of planetary urbanization81 on the one hand, and a post-colonial study of everyday life in cities of the global south on the other.82 The book argues for closer attention to the black radical tradition and the explicitly organized forms of political mobilization at play in South African shack settlements and their necessarily global political imaginaries. These

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models of organization offer up what political theorist Alain Badiou calls “ruptures,” sharp breaks with the status quo, “when the very ground under our feet shifts in order to transform the point from which we see.”83 My central point is that despite facing incredibly difficult conditions, shack settlements continue to operate as communities and as important sites of political organization and experimentation. Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that “all liberation struggle is placebased liberation struggle,” even if the scale and size of those struggles “might differ wildly.”84 This book thinks across multiple scales by placing the local, place-based interventions of South African shack dwellers into conversation with (1) ongoing shifts in the geography of global neoliberalism and (2) the broader rupture produced by alter-globalization movements who continue to insist that “another world is possible.” While initial theorizations of neoliberalism emphasized its Euro-American basis in the “Washington Consensus,” my study shifts the geographical focus east and south to a second phase of globalization where neoliberalism has had to adapt to an emerging context of multipolarity best represented by the rising “state capitalism” of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). In this second phase of globalization, countries of the global south continue to apply much of the neoliberal doctrine, but they also importantly depart from its orthodoxy in their insistence on strong state enterprises and a simultaneous rolling-out—rather than merely a rolling-back—of developmental policies geared toward uplifting the poor. In part because this renewed focus on the possibilities of a developmental state reproduces some of the key ideas of the post-colonial developmental state, while also reworking these ideas to fit the contemporary neoliberal conjuncture, I borrow Sapana Doshi’s notion of a “redevelopmental state.”85 The redevelopmental state concept helps theorize the conjunction of state-led programs of redistribution under the ANC within a broader context where the ideas of homo economicus continue to dominate. I argue for understanding South Africa’s evolving housing policy in this context of the shifting geography of, and adaptations to, global neoliberal policy. This shift at the level of states and their transnational alliances only captures a change in globalization “from above.” To provide a more holistic account I insist we pay equal attention to what is happening “from below” at the level of organized social movements. “Alter-globalization” movements first emerged in the 1990s and together they argued for a radically different form of global interdependence that proposed a break

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with the dominant institutions of global neoliberalism such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Over the past two decades, a sharp divide has emerged within these movements between traditional state socialists and autonomist/anarchist currents arguing for a politics beyond the state and its reductive focus on elections. Shack dweller mobilizations in Durban offer an opportunity for synthesis between competing statist and anti-statist notions of the political. Operating at a distance from the state, and usually refusing to endorse any political party, the shack dwellers in Durban nonetheless have opened lines of communication with the local, municipal, and national South African state to their community’s benefit. Reciprocally, the local state has responded with a bifurcated program: on the one hand continuing to deliver housing for the poor in evolving policies of spatial planning ostensibly intended to desegregate urban environments and alleviate poverty, while on the other hand deploying police and paramilitary assassins to eliminate important actors within the shack dweller movement in order to crush any sign of popular opposition to the ANC’s hegemonic postapartheid consensus. This dynamic relationship between the movement and these competing local state strategies demands a grounded analysis of the nuanced and shifting relationship between movement and state. The study draws on seventeen months of fieldwork in Durban, South Africa, conducted between 2011 and 2018, with the longest stretch of nine months occurring in 2013. In addition to time spent on the ground with the shack dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo—attending meetings, protests, court cases, branch launches, youth summits, and festivals—I draw on extensive participation in academic spaces at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, film, documentary and literary festivals, and social movement summits. I rely on qualitative methods such as interviews, participant observation, archival, documentary, textual, and policy analysis. In the end, however, I am most interested in the broader political and theoretical ramifications of viewing the world through the lens of Durban’s shack dweller struggles, rather than in a straight-forward documentation of Abahlali’s story. This is partly due to the fact that I came to this study after many years of activist work in the United States, during which time I also had the opportunity to visit and learn from “autonomous” movements across Latin America, Europe, and Africa. As an active participant in a variety of small place-based but transnationally linked alter-globalization movements over the past two decades, the methodological horizon I pursued attempted to follow what the

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Argentine group Colectivo Situaciones calls “militant research.” Research militancy challenges the unstable distinction between doing politics and thinking politics, and it sees movements as always embodying complex forms of thought that are embedded in an organization’s everyday activities. As the translators of Situaciones, Sebastian Touza and Nate Holdren, put it: Militant researchers have to abandon their previous certainties, their desire to encounter pure subjects, and the drive to recuperate those subjects’ practice as an ideal of coherence and consistency. In this regard, we can say that Colectivo Situaciones seek to concretely embody two Zapatista slogans: ‘asking we walk,’ and ‘we make the road by walking’, such that, the act of questioning and collective reflection is part of the process of constructing power…Militant research does not teach, at least not in the sense of an explication which assume the stupidity and powerlessness of those to whom it explains. Research militancy is a composition of wills, an attempt to create what Spinoza called joyful passions, which starts from and increases the power (potencia) of everyone involved. Such a perspective is only possible by admitting from the beginning that one does not have answers, and by doing so, abandoning the desire to lead others or be seen as an expert.86

I say that I approached this methodology as a “horizon” that I was aiming for because I do not believe I accomplished it in practice in any fully realized fashion. Rather, it served as an inspiring framework for research pursued with and alongside subversive political organizations directly engaged in struggle that I used to orient my own project, even if always imperfectly and incompletely. Most importantly, I aimed to follow the notion that black radical struggles embody freedom dreams that are epistemological by nature; that is to say, as Robin Kelley succinctly puts it, “social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions.”87

1.7

Summary of Chapter Contents

Chapter 2, “Transition,” documents the transition from apartheid to democracy by paying close attention to its radical critics. It contrasts the celebrated discourse of transitional justice produced by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the mid-1990s with the reality of the persistence of apartheid logics in the post-apartheid era.

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The prevailing global resonance of South Africa’s “transition” tends to situate it within a liberal international discourse of human rights, as a successful model of transitional justice, shepherded in by the compassion and forgiveness of “great men” like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. In the South African context, however, the term also has two meanings: one race- and the other class-based. The racial connotation of transition necessarily implies transformation—the need for affirmative action policies and a final transition to a non-racial society. The class connotation of transition is rooted in the hundred- and fifty-year-old debates within Marxism regarding the transition phase from capitalism to communism via state socialism. This notion was later modified by the anti-colonial movements that insisted on the possibility of an additional step in the transition from racial (apartheid) capitalism to national self-determination in a context of liberal democracy, and eventually to a socialist state, with the hoped-for realization of a fully communist society fading into the distant future, beyond the immediacies of pragmatic alternatives. After synthesizing the various radical critiques of the limits to South Africa’s own “first transition” from apartheid to liberal democracy during the 1990s, I offer another critique of transition from the perspective of Abahlali baseMjondolo’s democratic praxis, where neither communism nor genuine democracy are future stages to be realized through intermediary transitions, but a “living politics” that can only be realized through active experimentation in the present.88 Chapter 3, “Ruptures,” introduces the broader terrain of postapartheid urban social movements that disrupted the status-quo achievements of the first transition and argues for an analytical chronology that divides these movements into three phases of struggle: 1998–2004, 2004–2012, and 2012–present. South Africa has experienced unprecedented upheaval over the past two decades, with some scholars arguing that it has the highest level of protests per capita in the world after China. Taken together, the plethora of resistance movements and protests which emerged in the early 2000s challenge hegemonic narratives of Africa as a paradigmatic site of underdevelopment and civil war, a continent in need of sympathy and aid. Rather, inverting the directionality of solidarity and aid, I argue, important lessons can be gleaned from the political experiments underway in South Africa for movements in other parts of the world. While South Africa has a strong radical tradition with a long history, this has proven to be a mixed blessing. It has meant that global currents

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of radical thought and praxis have remained alive in the present, but it has also entailed the continuing dominance of more orthodox left politics and analysis in many circles. This is evidenced by the ongoing prominent roles played by the South African Communist Party (SACP)—a partner in government alongside the ANC—and by the significant numbers of predominantly white Trotskyist dissidents from the SACP working in the country’s universities and collaborating with the first generation of social movements and now often working with left NGOs. The radical (critical of liberal and conservative visions) academic literature on social movements throughout the African continent has been dominated by this Trotskyist contingent, many of whom travel back and forth to Britain or North American regularly and work closely with the Socialist Workers Party (Britain), the International Socialists (Canada), or the now-defunct International Socialist Organization (US).89 Thinking against the grain of these accounts of African movements, I argue that the most interesting struggles have emerged from currents operating at a distance from these more orthodox left spaces. Those movements operating outside the spheres of traditional working-class politics have therefore been open to collaboration with other middleclass intellectuals drawing from heterodox currents of struggle, more firmly based in the black radical tradition and liberation theology than in communist orthodoxy. Abahlali baseMjondolo is one such movement. I introduce Abahlali, which first emerged in Durban in 2005, and describe the social composition of the movement, its repertoire, organizational structure, and primary antagonists. Throughout the chapter, I situate South Africa’s new social movements within debates about the post-political condition of technocratic governance which many lamented following the end of the Cold War, and the ruptures produced by new visions of the urban political at work in these movements. Chapter 4, “Development,” shifts from movement to state interventions at the scale of municipal governance by exploring Cornubia, the largest housing development in post-apartheid Durban. This chapter argues that the Cornubia development offers up one of the most prominent responses by municipal governments to the ongoing protests by the landless and homeless urban poor that have rocked the country for the past two decades. A mixed-use and mixed-income project, Cornubia was originally intended to provide up to 20,000 homes for some of the city’s 200,000 households living in shacks. This was a meager effort in

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the big scheme of things, but nonetheless an important and huge undertaking. It developed as an unofficial public–private partnership with the city’s largest landowner, Tongaat Hulett, the sugar cane multinational still headquartered in KwaZulu-Natal.90 The Cornubia project took root from 2005 to 2013, as national ANC policy was shifting away from its more neoliberal bent toward a discourse framed around the need for a “developmental state,” modeled on the “successful” late twentieth-century economic policies of the late industrializing “Asian Tigers”: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. This resuscitation of the developmental state, however, occurred at a time when economists had begun to speak of a post-2008 rise of “state capitalism,” best embodied in the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). I argue for understanding the state-led housing project of Cornubia within this broader context of an alternative project of global capitalism, or what I call an “alter-globalization from above.” Unlike hegemonic understandings of neoliberalism in the United States and Britain, where public housing projects were most often being torn-down or actively privatized, contemporary neoliberalism in semiperipheral BRICS countries is increasingly articulated with a renewed interest in development and direct redistribution.91 This second coming of the developmental state, I claim, is better conceived as a “redevelopmental state,” which “operates through simultaneously inclusive and exclusionary meanings that drive urban identities, spatial imaginaries of belonging, worthiness and desire.”92 Cornubia therefore alleviates poverty for the lucky few by allowing for micro-spaces of desegregation, but it also reinforces inequality, separation, and landlessness for the many by further enriching the same forces of historical dispossession with their roots in the colonial era. Chapter 5, “Precarity and Autonomy,” argues that the shack settlement has become a paradigmatic site of anti-black necropolitics in contemporary South Africa. It returns to the story of the shack dweller movement Abahlali and examines its members’ oscillating relationship with electoral politics and the repressive arm of the state. Foregrounding two shack communities where incipient grassroots mobilization led to breaks with local elected ANC officials, the chapter tells the story of political assassinations of Abahlali leaders. While the outright political repression of the movement began in earnest in 2009 with their displacement from Kennedy Road at the hands of an ANC-supported mob and the local police, this violence only gained steam in the ensuing years, eventually

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leading to the outright killings of two dozen members. This chapter tells the story of the first assassination of an Abahlali member, which occurred during the longest stint of research I conducted in 2013 in a community I had been visiting with Abahlali leadership. These assassinations and the struggles for survival they embodied demand that we retheorize Northern ideas of economic precarity centered around the workplace as existential precarity emphasizing the basic conditions of reproductive life. I ground contemporary theories of “surplus populations” intended to capture the global prevalence of permanent unemployment in the prior theorizations of surplus life under apartheid South Africa. This highlights a continuity in the disposability of black life from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries. At the same time, this chapter argues that theories of necropolitics—where the very possibility of politics is understood to be fundamentally intertwined with the prevalence of racialized death— must always be coupled with renewed theorizations of political struggle. Theories of anti-blackness can never be total; rather, they require a reconceptualization of dominant color-blind notions of the political together with a reckoning with actually existing black radical traditions. In the second half of the chapter, I explore the relationship between Abahlali and the state, arguing that their notion of the political is built upon a rigorous reading of the politics of the alter-globalization movements in the Americas. Abahlali’s notion of autonomy, I argue, provides us with a unique intervention into global social movement debates which elsewhere remain polarized between state socialist and anti-state anarchist positions. Similarly, in chronicling a series of meetings that Abahlali held between its membership and various political parties in the lead up to the 2014 national election, I point to competing notions of black politics in the country. In so doing I parallel recent interventions by scholars working at the intersection of race and critical geography who have called for more attention to intra-racial differentiation and political debates, what Adam Bledsoe and Willie Wright have called the “pluralities of Black Geographies.”93 The chapter concludes with a comparison of Abahlali politics and that of the Economic Freedom Fighters, a black nationalist political party established in 2013 with the aim of challenging the ANC from the counter-hegemonic radical left. Chapter 6, The Conclusion: “Dignity as Rupture and the ‘Becoming Black of the World’,” brings together the key findings of the book in order to argue that the post-apartheid metropolis represents a key site of contemporary struggle. As such, it shifts the scale of analysis in social

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movement studies from an abstract notion of the global to a grounded conception that captures the entirety of the local–global continuum.94 The initial round of alter-globalization movements which emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s tended to focus on summit-hopping, traveling to prominent cities hosting the new transnational architects of global governance in order to protest institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. In South Africa, this strategy was embodied by mobilizations organized at the United Nations World Conference against Racism held in Durban in 2001 and against the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002. The rise of the global war on terror arguably shifted the focus of these movements and drained them of momentum, forcing many into mere survival mode. Starting in 2011, however, a new sequence of global revolt emerged, and social movement protest has returned once again to the foreground.95 In this new sequence of struggle, I argue, movements must remain more attentive to the links between spectacular moments of global and national rupture represented in mass uprisings and protest—such as the inspiring globalization of the “movements of the squares”96 and the more recent Movement for Black Lives97 —and the more mundane spaces of everyday life in the city. Shack dweller struggles in Durban offer us one lens through which to capture the link between everyday life and social movement mobilization, across the entire local–global continuum. The book concludes by situating South African urban movements in this broader global conjuncture of a post-2008 world, whereby ongoing shifts in the global architecture of power have led to a bifurcation in the worldsystem, with openings on both the radical left and the authoritarian right.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

1993 “Apartheid USA,” 77. 2002 Freedom Dreams, 8. 1971 I Write What I Like, “Some African Cultural Concepts,” 47. A number of important changes have occurred in Durban, and within Abahlali, in recent years. For example, the organization is much bigger today than when I conducted most of my research, and it has an even more expansive national presence, especially in the Johannesburg area. Abahlali’s office in Durban is also in a new location. Finally, the violent repression of the movement which I

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5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

discuss in Chapter 4 has unfortunately intensified. By mid-2023, twenty-four members of the organization had been killed. Andy Clarno’s corrective for this popular misreading of apartheid as a term for a bygone era in South Africa, but a relevant description of contemporary Israel-Palestine, is one that this study seeks to build on. For more on this, see his excellent 2017 comparative study, Neoliberal Apartheid. Racial capitalism was a term used to describe the particularity of the apartheid regime in South Africa during the crucial race-class debates beginning in the 1970s. Only later was the term taken up by Cedric Robinson as a foundational concept for Black Studies and for understanding the globality of racial capitalism. For my extended commentary on this genealogy, see my 2020 “Thinking Racial Capitalism and Black Radicalism from Africa: An Intellectual Geography of Cedric Robinson’s World-System.” For important and generative critiques of the term racial capitalism, see Michael Ralph and Maya Singhal 2019 “Racial Capitalism,” and Charisse Burden-Stelly 2020 “Modern US Racial Capitalism.” For a critical account of how neoliberal development shapes the current and potential future trajectory of the port, see Aubrey Mpungose and Brij Maharaj 2021 “Megaprojects in the Context of Neoliberalism.” Mike Davis 1990 City of Quartz. For an extremely important and emblematic account of the struggle over such spaces, and in particular between competing visions of informality and mall-based development, see Brij Maharaj 2023 “Structural Violence and the Subversion of Participatory Planning.” 1992 The Production of Space; David Harvey 2008 “The Dialectics of Space–Time”. See Brij Maharaj 2020 “The Apartheid City” and “Durban: Betraying the Struggle for a Democratic City?” for complementary overviews of apartheid segregation and the persistent nature of inequality and neoliberal segregation in the post-apartheid present. For an important reflection on the centrality of urban land to the predominantly rural debates regarding land reform in South Africa, see Fred Hendricks and Richard Pithouse 2013 “Urban Land Questions in Contemporary South Africa.” Regarding the struggles of farmworkers, see the contributions by Ntsebeza, Helliker,

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and Hendricks in the same 2013 volume The Promise of Land. For a powerful account of the miners struggle around Marikana, see Rehad Desai’s 2014 documentary Miners Shot Down. For an early reflection on the complicated terrain of social reproduction in an African context, see Patricia Daley’s fantastic 1991 article, “Gender, Displacement and Social Reproduction.” 13. A wonderful account of what I’m calling “Africa in the World” is captured by David Henry Anthony III’s fascinating 2006 biography, Max Yergan: Race Man, Internationalist, Cold Warrior. It underscores the important local, transatlantic, and internationalist impacts that Yergan, who was born in the United States, had on South African nationalism and on early leading members of the African National Congress in the 1920s and 1930s (78). It also offers a nuanced account of Yergan’s later anti-communist turn that led him to become “an apologist for apartheid,” 265. See, in particular, chapters 3, 4, and 6 in Max Yergan. While deploying a different conception of “Africa in the world” from that which I detail here, many of Frederick Cooper’s thoughts in his eponymous contribution are still useful in this regard, including his (admittedly late) incorporation of diasporic Black studies in the study of Africa. Cooper 2014 Africa in the World. Perhaps the future-oriented articulation of what I see as Achille Mbembe’s own theorization of “Africa in the World,” Afropolitanism, best captures my own understanding. In Mbembe’s hands, Afropolitanism becomes a concept that moves the world forward through its radical openness and experimentation, flying in the face of all stagnant notions of identity that tend to do more to fix people and places in conditions of suffering. These older notions of Africa also miss a much more dynamic, on-the-ground set of processes that are unfolding across the continent, according to Mbembe. As he puts it in his 2021 Out of the Dark Night: “A name has been found for this African-world-to-come, whose complex and mobile fabric slips constantly out of one form and into another and turns away all languages and sonorities because it is no longer attached to any language or pure sounds, this body in motion, never in its place, whose center moves everywhere, this body moving in the enormous machine of the world: that name is Afropolitanism,” 6. Alongside this reflection, Mbembe insists: “‘Desegregating’ and

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disenclaving theory must become a constitutive part of the new agenda,” 39. 14. I agree with Mezzadra and Nielson (2019), who state: “While we respect the lures of ethnographic immersion, we are wary of claims that the distinct forms of engagement it offers provide an exclusive or reliable index of analytical depth. Rigorous and probing analysis, we submit, can be generated in other ways” (18–19). Ferguson (2006) makes a similar argument. 15. See Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s 2018 Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization, and his 2022 co-edited collection with Morgan Ndlovu, Marxism and Decolonization in the Twenty-First Century, respectively. A consistent theme in Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s work centers on his refusal to pit Marxism and decolonization against each other, a move that refreshingly swims against the tide of much theorizing emanating from the global north. Regarding the important notion of “resonances” between anti-systemic movements across the world, see the powerful and synthetic contribution by Sandro Mezzadra 2015 “Resonances of the Common,” and his 2019 co-authored book with Brett Nielson The Politics of Operations. 16. 2021 Out of the Dark Night, 10. This paradox results from the divide between two different traditions of thinking about Africa: what Mbmebe’s terms “descriptivism”—which “always ends up constructing Africa as a pathological case, as a figure of lack”— and rich historical-anthropological studies that he argues informed the theoretical turns in the West during the 1980s and 1990s but which have hitherto gone relatively unacknowledged, 26. Drawing primarily on the latter tradition, but also attempting to push beyond it, Mbembe elaborates an alternative way to think about the world from Africa: “The search for alternative acts of thinking requires the exploration of other ways of speaking of the visual, of sounds, of the senses, and it requires thinking as philosophically and historically as possible about the precariousness of life in Africa, the intensive surfaces of power, and the various ways in which events coexist with accidents. Indeed, if the project is to ‘rethink Africa’, or, for that matter, to write the world from Africa or to write Africa into contemporary social theory, then there is no better starting point than the question of time,” 28.

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17. “Resonances of the Common,” 217. For a lovely renewal of traditions of internationalism and a retheorization of the general strike in the contemporary feminist movement, see Veronica Gago 2020 The Feminist International. 18. 2021, 39. 19. For a more useful theorization of decolonization, drawing on Cesaire and Senghor, see Gary Wilder 2015 Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. 20. “Resonances of the Common,” 219. 21. Out of the Dark Night, 76. 22. Such examples abound. To point to just two of the more obvious and recent cases of the signs of a declining US hegemony, we can look to Russia’s horrifically bold challenge to NATO in its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, or to Saudi Arabia ignoring the Biden administration’s repeated requests to help lower oil prices to fight inflation. Instead, MBS decided to push OPEC + to cut output and raise oil prices in the run up to the November 2022 elections in the United States. 23. “Resonances of the Common,” 219–220. 24. 2012 Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, 8. 25. For examples of the limits of globalization-speak when applied to Africa, see James Ferguson 2006 Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, and Frederick Cooper 2001 “What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective.” Ng˜ ug˜ı’s notion of a “globalectical imagination,” however, resonates with what Cooper (2014) would later call the perspective of Africa in the World. 26. Darian-Smith & McCarty 2016 The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies, 44. 27. See Karin Shapiro 2021 “A Conversation with Jacob Dlamini” for reflections on temporality, rupture, and continuity in the telling of South Africa’s past and present. 28. Matthew Sparke’s 2013a Introducing Globalization offers a fantastic account of the many different forms of capitalist interconnectivity that globalization accentuates. Sparke’s 2018 article “Globalizing Capitalism” also usefully examines theorizations of geopolitics and geoeconomics to argue for a dialectical account of contemporary forms of globalization. See also the collection by Eunice Sahle 2015 Globalization and Socio-Cultural Processes in

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29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

Contemporary Africa, for a parallel insistence on thinking interconnectivity in Africa and beyond. Hannah Appel’s 2023 “Pan African Capital? Banks, Currencies, and Imperial Power” offers us another crucial example of why we need to update our categories of analysis and our theorizations of global capitalism, in part by pointing out how Western-dominated institutions like the IMF are slowly being displaced by the rise of Pan African Banks on the continent. In this regard, I build on the crucial arguments by Hisham Aidi regarding the provincialized nature of most African social movements, and the need to understand the far-reaching implications of struggles on the continent. See Aidi 2018 “Africa’s New Social Movements: A Continental Approach.” Giovanni Arrighi famously argues it is the Italian city-states who emerge as first hegemons, not the Portuguese or Spanish, while Wallerstein argues that the seventeenth-century Dutch were the first real-world hegemons in the world-system. For useful overviews of the cyclical rise and fall of hegemonic powers and world-systems analysis, see Arrighi 1994 The Long Twentieth Century, and Wallerstein 2004 World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. For how this impacted global and US history, see especially chapter 11 on “The Doctrine of Discovery” in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s foundational 2014 An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. For a concise and brilliant genealogy of modernity, starting with the Crusades, the Papal Bulls, Portuguese slavery, and the evolving, religiously and racially circumscribed, notion of the “human,” see Pithouse 2016 Being Human After 1492. Gerald Horne 2020 The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. Robert Ross 2008 A Concise History of South Africa, 22. See, for example, the Maritime Services Directory entry for Durban port: https://ports.co.za/durban-harbour.php. For an extended discussion of the early Portuguese presence in West Africa, see Michael Ralph’s fascinating discussion in Forensics of Capital, especially the eponymous chapter 1, 11–43. See also Pithouse Being Human After 1492, 7. A systematic destruction of the 1652 colonial narrative of terra nullius that continues to circulate in the present, coupled with a synthesis of the violent journeys of the many different peoples

1

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

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brought to South Africa, is offered by Patric Tariq Mellet (2020) The Lie of 1652: A Decolonised History of Land. The ongoing and globally interlinked protests against statues venerating figures responsible for colonialism and slavery in places like the United States, Europe, and South Africa have now evolved to include anti-Amazon gatherings in Cape Town, connecting past forms of exploitation and domination with contemporary struggles around land dispossession, logistics, and racial capitalism. Lalkhen and Roomanyay 2020 “If Rhodes Must Fall, then so must Jan van Riebeeck.” Karabo Mafolo 2021 “Bo Kaap’s ‘Walk of Resistance’ against Amazon’s River Club Development.” For a wonderful account of thinking across the local–global continuum from the specific site of frontier material culture, see Laura Mitchell 2014 “Global Context, Local Objects, and Cultural Frontiers: Unsettling South Africa’s National History in Four Moves.” The history of urban slavery in Cape Town is helpfully synthesized in Gerald Groenewald 2010 “Slaves and Free Blacks in VOC Cape Town, 1652–1795.” For slavery more generally in South Africa, see John Edwin Mason 2003 Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa. Regarding how slavery lives on (or not) in contemporary South African memory, see Pumla Gqola 2010 What is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa. On Islam and slavery in South Africa, see Gabeba Baderoon’s fantastic 2014 study, Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid. For more in the vexed and evolving history of the term “Colored” in South Africa, see Deborah Posel 2001 “Race as Common Sense.” Gqola 2010 What is Slavery to Me? 4. William Martin makes a parallel argument in his study of South Africa as a semi-peripheral country in the world-system. See his 2013 South Africa and the World Economy: Remaking Race, State, and Region. See Timothy Keegan 1996 Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order for a detailed account of this period and the corresponding emergence of a distinctly racial order during colonial times. Thanks to Tiffany Willoughby-Herard for this reference. These journeys “inland,” “upcountry,” or “into the wild” functioned symbolically to link space and race in the Pan-European

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43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

imaginary. The civilizing missions into a supposedly untamed state of nature thus pursued the core objective of extermination central to settler colonialisms. As Charles Mills explains, “In South Africa, the trekboers went on exterminatory hunting expeditions and subsequently ‘bragged about their bag of Bushmen as fishermen boast about their catch.’ So the basic sequence ran something like this: there are no people there in the first place; in the second place, they’re not improving the land; and in the third place— oops!—they’re already all dead anyway (and, honestly, there really weren’t that many to begin with), so there are no people there, as we said in the first place.” See Mills 1997 Racial Contract, 50. This genocidal logic behind the imperative to settle in settler colonialism need not necessarily result in a complete annihilation of the indigenous population, as in the case of Tasmania. At its core, it is fundamentally concerned with displacement. As Jared Sexton explains, “Settler colonialism…seeks over time to eliminate the categories of colonizer and colonized through a process by which the former replaces the latter completely, usurping the claim to indigenous residence. ‘You, go away’ can mean the removal of the native population, its destruction through direct killing or the imposition of unlivable conditions, its assimilation into the settler colonial society, or some combination of each.” Sexton 2014 “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign,” 585. This mythology should not be construed as singular in the annals of global history and national identity. Rather, it was part and parcel of what Benedict Anderson (2006) has termed “imagined communities,” a process that took place wherever the nation-state form took root. For an interesting comparative study of settler colonial mythmaking, see Annie Coombes, ed. 2006 Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa. Wolfe 2016 Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, 34. Ibid. 191. As T.J. Tallie succinctly puts it in Queering Colonial Natal, “British settlers and colonial officials alike envisioned Natal as part of a global nineteenth-century Anglophone settler project, predicated upon the dispossession and marginalization of indigenous peoples in order to claim access to their lands and labor” (2).

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48. After two hundred years of intentional forgetting, the twenty-first century has thankfully witnessed a flowering of scholarship on the centrality of the Haitian revolution to the modern world and to the rise of black internationalism. For a study of black internationalism that places both Haiti and South Africa at the center of global history, see Michael West, William Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins eds. 2009 From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution. 49. While Indians make up a little more than 2% of the overall population in the country today, they constitute roughly a quarter of all residents in Durban. The sugar cane plantations that Indians were brought over to work on remain in the hands of the largest landowner in KwaZulu-Natal today, the sugar cane multinational Tongaat Hullet. 50. Keegan Colonial South Africa, 192. 51. Wolfe 2016 Traces of History, 33. 52. Kelley 2017 “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native.” 53. Ibid. 269. Kelley’s fantastic intervention in “The Rest of US” is premised on at least two crucial points: the need to incorporate a black radical analytic into the stories of settler colonialism, and on the demand for “a wider geographic optic” (273). This study builds on Kelley’s insights. 54. For another critical appraisal of Wolfe’s work, see Max Ajl 2023 “Logics of Elimination and Settler Colonialism.” 55. Ben Fine 2010 “Engaging the MEC.” For the relationship between extractivism, capitalism, and urbanization in South Africa, see Bernard Magubane and John Yrchik 1977 “The Political Economy of the City in South Africa.” 56. The shift in names for the 1899–1902 war is in part intended to recognize the broader participation of 135,000 Africans, Indians, and coloreds as irregular troops, scouts, and in transportation. While the British and Afrikaners were vying for power, the war necessarily affected and involved all communities of color as well. See S. M. Molema 1920 The Bantu Past and Present. 57. Mamdani 1996 Citizen and Subject. 58. If Mamdani’s 1996 Citizen and Subject served as the model for understanding indirect rule as a continental phenomenon, his more recent 2020 Neither Native Nor Settler links the African story with other geographies, arguing for the origins of indirect rule

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59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69.

in the treatment of Native Americans by the United States settler colonial government. Other scholars of racial regimes have long argued for understanding their inevitable transnational formation. In this regard, see the foundational work of Cedric Robinson and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard. Paul Landau’s 2010 Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 offers yet another crucial account of some of this history, dismantling the colonial (and post-colonial) trope of delimited “tribal” polities as the supposed principal unit of political organization among Africans. Fanon 2008 Black Skin, Whites Masks, 61. Here I am using articulation to refer to the reliance upon people of color by the white minority, and more specifically to the conjoining of white people and people of color in a specific relation. I am also using it in the same vein as Stuart Hall, as Gillian Hart 2007 and Sharad Chari 2017 both explain in detail. For an extremely generative use of racial capitalism and settler colonialism to understand both South Africa and Palestine/Israel, see Andy Clarno’s 2017 Neoliberal Apartheid. See Du Bois 1998 Black Reconstruction, 55–83. “Public Enemies and Private Intellectuals: Apartheid USA,” 77. See Foucault 2003 and Mbembe 2019. Hartman 2007 Lose Your Mother. Hartman 1997 Scenes of Subjection, 115–124. Goldberg 2007 The Threat of Race; Al-Bulushi 2020 “The Global Threat of Race”; Pierre 2013 The Predicament of Blackness; Willoughby-Herard 2015 Waste of a White Skin; McKittrick 2006 Demonic Grounds; Woods 2002 “Life after Death”. For a wonderful reading of Fanon’s oeuvre, including Black Skin, see Nigel Gibson 2003 Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination. For a complementary analysis that places special emphasis upon the zone of non-being, see Lewis Gordon 2015 What Fanon Said. Fanon 2008 Black Skin, White Masks, xii, my emphasis. On this (useful) mistranslation of Fanon’s first book, see Fred Moten 2008 “The Case of Blackness.” On the opposition between self-determination and the capacity to be affected, see Denise Ferreira da Silva 2007 Toward a Global Idea of Race. For a fascinating rumination on the colorblindness of animal studies and an attempt to think beyond human and non-human, see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson 2019 Becoming Human.

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70. For Grant Farred’s extremely generative deconstruction of Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing,” see his as yet unpublished talk, “A Philosophical Nonsense: Fanon’s ‘Zone of Nonbeing’,” author’s possession. Both Farred and Moten draw extensively on Heidegger in their discussions of Fanon. 71. In this regard, see Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson 2003 “The Position of the Unthought.” 72. See Wynter 1992 “No Humans Involved”. 73. For the former, see Frank Wilderson 2020 Afropessimism and Jared Sexton 2016 “Afro-pessimism: The Unclear Word.” For the latter, see Howard Winant 2004 The New Politics of Race. For a recent critique of racial formation theory by Afropessimists and fellow travelers, see P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods, eds. 2018 Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation. 74. As Moten puts it: “The cultural and political discourse on black pathology has been so pervasive that it could be said to constitute the background against which all representatives of blacks, blackness, or the color black take place. Its manifestations have changed over the years, though it has always been poised between the realms of the pseudo-social scientific, the birth of new sciences, and the normative impulse that is at the heart of—but that strains against —the black radicalism that strains against it.” 2008 “The Case of Blackness,” 177. Responding directly to Afropessimism in a later article, he states: “In the past decade, the most exciting and generative advance in black critical theory, which is to say critical theory, is the announcement and enactment of Afro-pessimism in the work of Frank Wilderson III and Jared Sexton…I have thought long and hard, in the wake of their work…about whether blackness could be loved; there seems to be a growing consensus that analytic precision does not allow for such a flight of fancy…And this, perhaps, is where the tension comes, where it is and will remain, not in spite of the love but in it, embedded in its difficulty and violence.” 2013 “Blackness and Nothingness,” 737–738. 75. Moten “The Case of Blackness,” 179, 187. 76. Ibid. 77. McKittrick 2014 “Mathematics Black Life,” 18. 78. McKittrick 2014 “Mathematics Black Life,” 19. 79. Robinson 2000 Black Marxism, 168.

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80. For more on this relation, see my article, “Thinking Racial Capitalism and Black Radicalism from Africa.” 81. Brenner and Schmidt 2014 “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question”. 82. Myers 2011 African Cities. 83. Eisenstein and McGowan 2012 Rupture, 4. 84. Gilmore 2020 “Geographies of Racial Capitalism” https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=2CS627aKrJI. 85. Doshi 2019 “The Redevelopmental State”. 86. Touza and Holdren 2011 “Translators Preface,” 19&20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism, 8, 11. 87. Freedom Dreams, 8. 88. Kerry Chance 2018 Living Politics in South Africa’s Urban Shacklands. 89. See, for example, Leo Zeilig 2016 Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa. For an illustration of the South Africa-based variant of this tendency, see the magazine/collective Amandla! 90. For a study of its multinational sugar holdings in Zimbabwe, and the asymmetrical power relations involved, see Freedom Mazwi 2020 “Sugar Production Dynamics in Zimbabwe.” 91. See, for example, James Ferguson 2015 Give a Man a Fish. 92. Doshi 2017 “The Redevelopmental State,” 3. 93. Bledsoe and Wright 2018 “The Pluralities of Black Geographies”. 94. Darian-Smith and McCarty 2017 The Global Turn. 95. Paul Amar 2013 The Security Archipelago. 96. See, for example, Paolo Gerbaudo 2017 The Mask and the Flag. 97. The spirit of the Movement for Black Lives has now spread to tens of countries, including South Africa, where it dovetailed with recent decolonization protests tackling both physical remnants of the colonial era such as statues of Cecil Rhodes, and the epistemological remnants of colonial knowledge that continue to structure its elite university system. For more on this, see Gillespie and Naidoo 2019 “#MustFall” and “Between the Cold War and the Fire,” as well as the other articles included in the special issue they edited on “Fallism” in South Atlantic Quarterly.

CHAPTER 2

Transition: Fissures in the Time and Space of Democracy

Historically, there must undoubtedly be a special stage or a special phase of transition from capitalism to communism. Vladimir Lenin1 The genius of truth commissions is that they allow for the ethical betrayal of the time passed…Now that the past is ‘fully known,’ disclosed into public record so that a postapartheid history of the extended apartheid moment can be accurately written, the nation can be pastoralized—prayed, pained, absolved—into postapartheid democracy. Grant Farred2 If the right to the city has such a high price, is there any hope then? Yes – in the movements of the poor that are organising; in the work of our delegation that will go to Brazil; in all of our work to really transform the world as it is. Abahlali baseMjondolo3

South African society has undergone a prolonged transition to democracy over the past three decades since Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990. The liberation movement waged against apartheid from 1948 to 1990, led most prominently by the African National Congress (ANC), proclaimed that its goals reached far beyond an end to institutionalized racism, and that a post-apartheid South Africa would necessarily be a just society for all. The political outlook of the ANC might have © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City, Contemporary African Political Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42433-5_2

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been described as revolutionary nationalist, as it formed strong and lasting alliances during the struggle with the South African Communist Party, as well as with socialist countries around the world from Cuba to Tanzania. The Freedom Charter of the ANC, written in 1955 and still strongly adhered to by Mandela in a letter to the nation two weeks prior to his release from prison in 1990, contained central demands for the redistribution of land and for a people’s democracy. They read as follows: “The people shall govern!…The people shall share in the country’s wealth!…The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole…The land shall be shared among those who work it! Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger…All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose.”4 The charter also included important clauses guaranteeing the right to freedom of speech and assembly, and to decent housing as a human right. However, in the decades following the initial transition period of 1990–1994, when the white supremacist National Party conceded to popular pressure and allowed a democratic election in which the ANC won an overwhelming majority, standards of living for the vast majority of South Africans improved sporadically at best, and in some cases even deteriorated.5 Despite governing with a clear but diminishing majority— the ANC won 70% of the National Assembly seats in the 2009 election, 62% in 2014, and 57% in 2019—the government simply failed to deliver on many of its promises. Much of the basic vision of the Freedom Charter lay in ruins, and South Africans decried the supposed shift from a strictly white supremacist society to one where neoliberal capitalism rules.6 Scholars and social movements alike have attempted to grapple with this devastating defeat by searching for explanations as to what went wrong. How could a liberation movement clearly dedicated to implementing a more just society have so radically altered its position? How could the ANC and its allies—most notably the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP)—continue to govern the country while it was clear that the oppression they sought to ameliorate, if not erase, had outlived formal apartheid? In assessing three decades of ANC rule, it is important to note that overall poverty has in fact decreased throughout the country, primarily in the rural areas. However, urban poverty has increased, according

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to the South African Labour and development Research Unit. Ashwin Desai, Brij Maharaj, and Patrick Bond explain this apparent dichotomy as follows: “In other words, what ordinary observers view as a manifestation of dreadful policy failure—the peri-urban shack settlement stretching for miles with dreadful living conditions—is in reality an improvement over life in the depressed, hopeless rural periphery of South Africa.”7 Additionally, the two most widely accepted international instruments for measuring inequality—the Gini coefficient and the Palma Ratio— both concur that South Africa is the most unequal society in the world, demonstrating that the transition to an egalitarian democracy still has a long way to go. In 2021 the World Inequality Lab, co-directed by the renown French economist Thomas Piketty, reported that the wealthiest 3,500 adults owned more than the poorest 32 million (out of 60 million people). In addition, the report found that “the richest 10% of the population own more than 85% of household wealth,” and that “the richest 1% in South Africa have likely increased their share of wealth since the end of apartheid.”8 Moreover, South Africa boasts perhaps the most progressive constitution in the world—enshrining women’s rights, human rights, and even linguistic rights for underrepresented groups—yet also experiences one of the highest levels of social unrest in the world with more protests per capita than any other country besides China. One scholar even calls South Africa the paradigmatic “Protest Nation.”9 While it hosts the largest stock exchange on the continent, it also struggles with an official unemployment rate that hovers between 25 and 32%. Many of the unemployed, together with some workers in the informal economy, have mobilized politically into community organizations and social movements, predominantly located along the urban peripheries. While community organizations tend to be more small-scale and are often neighborhood based, social movements represent an intensification in scale, organizational capacity, and politicization. These social movements have been described as South Africa’s “new social movements.”10 In the early years of South Africa’s “transition to democracy,” they garnered a significant amount of attention and some commentators began to see them as embodying a new political subject in an increasingly post-industrial world where the traditional industrial working class, pressured by economic precarity, was finding it ever more difficult to exert political power.11 Indeed, given the shortcomings of the country’s first transition from apartheid to democracy, many movements began to understand the new round of political

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mobilization as collectively demanding a “second transition,” where the political rights enshrined in the constitution during the first transition would now be coupled with more substantive socio-economic rights. And yet, the discourse of transition belies certain continuities in the shift from apartheid to a society still fundamentally shaped by the afterlife of apartheid geographies. In its contemporary use within human rights paradigms, transition-speak now also masks the much more radical origins of the term. The original context for theories of political transition in South Africa has its roots in Lenin’s formulation of the need for a special transition stage between capitalism and communism, when the capitalist state would be seized from bourgeois rule and refashioned under the dictatorship of the proletariat into a workers state.12 This transitional phase is best understood as socialism, and it was conceived by Lenin as offering a necessary bridge between the hierarchical rule of capitalist society and the horizontalist moment of communism. Lenin argued that this period of prolonged transition would eventually lead to the “withering away” of the socialist state, which would be replaced by the direct and unmediated rule of the people over their own affairs—communism—no longer requiring any transcendent representative to govern from above. This notion of a transition phase understood as capitalismsocialism-communism was reformulated in South Africa into “the national question”,13 whereby the fundamentally racial problem of the color line was subsumed within national ideologies, now understood as inextricably linked with the colonial question. Lenin’s triad capitalism→socialism→communism was therefore replaced by a new, more drawn-out staged approach to liberation, colonialism/ apartheid→national self-determination/democracy→socialism. Here the immediate task of overthrowing apartheid rule demanded concessions from the various tricontinental Communist Parties to nationalist movements like the ANC, whose principal objectives were not the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist or communist society, but the dismantlement of white rule, to be replaced with national selfdetermination. Marxists and members of the South African Communist Party conceded to the aims of these nationalist movements for independence, in part as a result of Lenin’s parallel theorization of nationalist movements in the colonized world as forming a key line of anti-capitalist struggle through their confrontation with imperialist power structures on a world scale. As Eddie Webster and Karin Pampallis explain, “In 1920,

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Lenin had argued that anti-colonial national independence movements were objectively allies of the global socialist struggles, even if led by the bourgeoisie and based on underdeveloped peasant societies.”14 In the context of the anti-apartheid struggle and ANC-led postapartheid South Africa, socialists have understood the alliance between the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress as a product of this much older argument by Lenin that national selfdetermination may have to be achieved first before more radical gains became possible. Against this historical background, Marxist understandings of the need for a “second transition” in the current moment necessarily entail a struggle to realize a fully socialist society after now having won national self-determination. In this chapter, I assess a number of the debates that have emerged regarding the first transition that occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s—what the geographer Patrick Bond terms an “elite transition.”15 Specifically, I explore the radical critiques articulated by Trotskyist theories of uneven development (Bond), the autonomist Marxist emphasis upon the refusal of work (Barchiesi), the emancipatory critique of the state as the supposedly privileged site for politics (Neocosmos), and the argument that dominant discourses of transition, truth, and reconciliation all serve to mark an artificial temporal break between the time of apartheid and democracy, obfuscating the persistence and durability of antiblackness in the present (Farred). I then examine those groups most actively mobilized against the new government in the more recent push for a second transition: a burgeoning collection of social movements. The chapter closes by discussing the perspective of Abahlali baseMjondolo, which has become one of the most prominent of these movements. My main argument is that Abahlali’s reconstruction of the popular radical notion of “the right to the city” provides us with an alternative, and more radically democratic, theorization of “transition.” This conception of transition underscores the fact that the only way to get to democracy is by actively practicing democracy. As such, Abahlali’s lived experiments with notions of transition, democracy, and communism differ from liberal transitional justice and human rights notions of a “transition to democracy.” They also depart from Orthodox Marxist conceptions of a transition from socialism to communism, and from Third Worldist notions of a transition from anti-colonial nationalism to socialism.

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While much of South African society patiently waited for their lives to improve under the Mandela presidency during the mid-1990s, the late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a re-emergence of grassroots forces that directly challenged the new “majority-rule” government of the ANC. These movements have been incredibly diverse in outlook and program, but they share a number of general characteristics. They have most often highlighted issues of service delivery and basic needs such as health care, housing, electricity, water, and land. While all these issues played a role in mobilizing resistance during the anti-apartheid struggle, the most tempered in the initial post-apartheid round of organized opposition were the official organs of organized labor. The Congress of South African Trade Unions’ (COSATU) alliance with the ANC and the harsh realities of de-industrialization in South Africa initially led to a situation in which the labor movement was increasingly viewed as a peripheral and weakened force (Barchiesi 2006). Nonetheless, the massacre of a number of striking mineworkers at Marikana in August 2012, as well as the ensuing expulsion of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa from the tripartite alliance of the ANC, COSATU, and the SACP (the main driver of the expulsion), has brought the potential of a renewed radical labor movement back to the fore. Arguably the key factor determining the future success of such a breakaway movement will be the ability of these renegade unions to forge an alliance with the community-based social unrest and organized social movements that are most active in urban settings throughout the country.

2.1

Understanding the Limits of the First Transition

Patrick Bond takes up these issues in his account of the early years of ANC rule in Elite Transition. He surmises that the COSATU intellectuals who adopted a post-Fordist approach to the post-apartheid national economy16 were the most likely to form a cozy alliance with the ANC in its capitulation to International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) pressures to align the economy with the needs of foreign investment and structural adjustment. Domestic business elites, often working in partnership with international financial organizations and the post-Fordist intellectuals Bond critiques, developed a series of “social contract scenarios” during the transition in order to pacify left political elements and slowly solidify consensus around neoliberal policies. None

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of these scenarios tackled the historically weakest aspect of South Africa’s economy according to Bond: “overproduction of luxury goods as a result of high import barriers and the capital-intensive technologies of multinational corporate producers.” Ignoring these issues led to “capital flight, under-production of both machines and basic needs goods, and those speculative financial bubbles.”17 The social contract scenarios therefore succeeded in maintaining the status quo in South Africa by incorporating previously excluded elite members of society into the discussion, while simultaneously marginalizing the most progressive actors. Bond’s analysis of the failed transition to democracy centers on the framework of uneven development, and it is therefore conceived as a primarily economic problem.18 This allows us to grasp the important continuities in the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism in the way capitalism extends its tentacles to all regions of the world in a fundamentally asymmetrical manner. The common thread running through Bond’s analysis is that “the rise of financial markets during periods of capitalist overproduction—or overaccumulation crisis—amplified unevenness, as South Africa demonstrates clearly.”19 The process of overaccumulation leads to a perpetual displacement of the crisis throughout time and space. Unfortunately, the only real long-term solution to this crisis is the incessant process of creative destruction20 which plays out today through “widespread devaluation” of physical and human labor.21 Bond’s central argument is that “as overaccumulation begins to set in, as structural bottlenecks emerge and as profit rates fall in the productive sectors of the economy, capitalists begin to shift their investible funds out of reinvestment in plant, equipment and labor power and instead seek refuge in financial assets.”22 The rapid growth of the “non-productive” Johannesburg stock market in the past three decades was therefore coupled with a tremendous de-industrialization process nation-wide that has brought record levels of unemployment—25%-32% has been the relatively steady official unemployment rate over the past three decades. Bond pairs this analysis of the unevenness of capitalism with a corresponding state-based solution. Uneven development, it would seem, can only be curbed through a traditional socialist response that puts up delinking barriers to capital’s global reach while simultaneously facilitating re-linking in the form of global solidarity between various people’s movements and progressive governments around the world. Because neoliberalism entails an erosion of state sovereignty, the ANC was unable to fully determine the country’s destiny and was instead brought under

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the sway of international elite forces and ideologies advancing the Washington Consensus. This can only be solved through the re-assertion of South African sovereignty as a protective mechanism that guards against international incursions while cultivating the domestic resiliency to test alternative paths to development. Bond sees such an alternative as squarely within the tradition established by Samir Amin known as “delinking.” As unrealistic as this appears at first blush (recall this chapter’s long list of populists-turned-neoliberals), the recent, present and forthcoming conditions of global economic crisis appear to both demand and supply the material grounds for a profound change in power relations. The ideological hegemony and financial stranglehold that neoliberalism and its sponsors have enjoyed are discredited and could fast disappear.23

A key lingering question, however, concerns where such an internal oppositional force strong enough to seize state power in South Africa would emerge? On this matter, Bond demonstrates a clear desire for a truly oppositional South African Communist Party and for the apartheidera strength of the labor unions. This has remained as a kind of nostalgic first choice for almost all South African Marxists who continue to believe in the supremacy of labor and traditional Marxist politics over the newly emergent social movements, even when these parallel community-based struggles are acknowledged as important junior partners in the struggle toward socialism. Bond claims “there was always the possibility that the SACP—the only party on the South African Left with more than a few hundred cadres—would break free from the Alliance early in the twentyfirst century.”24 Regarding the labor movement, he asserts again that “there was always the hope that, perhaps, Cosatu would move leftwards again…After all, under generally less propitious conditions than South Africa, Moody observed, a series of political mass strikes by national workers’ movements had shaken Nigeria, Indonesia, Paraguay and Taiwan in 1994…and then with the 1998–99 crisis, many other important sites of East Asian, East European, African and Latin American proletarian suffering due to neoliberal economic disaster.”25 These passages demonstrate Bond’s clear allegiance to the traditional left alternative of instituting a socialist government through the establishment of a mass-based political party. Such a party would gather its support from those workers who hold a privileged point in the production process by virtue of their proletarian status and their supposed ability to lodge a

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monkey-wrench in the system of capitalist accumulation, and it would use this strength against capital in order to gain state power. We will return to this possibility toward the end of this book. By 2006, six years after Bond penned his penetrating critique of South Africa’s “Elite Transition,” the situation in South Africa had shifted significantly. The emergence of new people’s movements once again raised the hope that opposition to the ANC’s neoliberal platform was growing. Many believed these movements would open a window for implementing a more just society under the banner of the democratic transition most South Africans hoped would occur immediately after the fall of apartheid. And yet this new source of opposition was rooted firmly in social movements that did not appear to have sprung from either the organizing efforts of political party cadres or the center of proletarian power in the labor movement. Rather, these movements emerged in community settings in some rural and many urban areas, in particular shack settlements. Those in urban settings involve a mixture of formally employed proletarian and informally employed and unemployed lumpen proletarian classes that contemporary scholars have reframed as constituting a now globally hegemonic “precariat” class.26 In revisiting the potential source of opposition to the new ANC hegemony six years later, Bond tacitly acknowledged that neither the SACP nor the labor unions had been directly instigating the new social movements. Yet he focused on Johannesburg’s agglomeration of movements in order to demonstrate that while the actors may have changed slightly, “the Johannesburg left has simply reconstituted itself via community activists, while the traditional goals of socialism via state power remain intact.”27 For Bond, the “vast proletarian townships” located along the peripheries of Johannesburg have historically constituted these movements’ base. Hence current struggles build upon an earlier round of movement associated with the township civic associations that peaked in the 1980s.28 Prominent among these new movements were the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) and the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF), running socialist candidates for election in open opposition to the ANC. Rather than viewing these emergent movements as oppositional to the traditional left, Bond prefers to see them as part of a rescaling of struggle. Thus, instead of focusing only on the scales of the factory, the state, and the international realm of solidarity, the new South African social movements typified by the SECC and the APF grounded themselves in the scales of the body (most prominently through

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HIV struggles), the household, and the neighborhood as additional sites of class struggle and contestation with the state. According to Bond, this expansion of the terrain of contestation beyond the state and the factory also led to a corresponding reformulation of demands around the “political principle of decommodification.”29 This is a useful formulation, but framing the movements which emerged in the wake of the first transition through traditional Marxist objectives such as decommodification alone fails to capture the full extent to which these movements also mark significant breaks with earlier notions of privileged subjects of resistance emerging from the space of the shop floor. It is not just the localized scales of the community and the body that are noteworthy in post-apartheid era, but entirely new subjectivities which have emerged as well.

2.2

New Subjects Emerge

In contrast to Bond’s analysis of political rescaling to a more localized level, other scholars have taken the emergence of new social movements as a sign of even more profound changes in the composition of oppositional politics within South Africa. For instance, Franco Barchiesi argues that the failures of South Africa’s transition to democracy are best exemplified by ever-decreasing levels of voter-turnout throughout the country, a trend that has only escalated. “Popular participation in the elections has shown a trend to constant decline, which means that in 2004 the ANC was voted into power by an actual minority of eligible voters.”30 Concomitant with the decline in democratic participation through the electoral process, post-apartheid South Africa has experienced dramatic shifts in the labor market. We might juxtapose the current round of struggles, then, with those of the previous generation in order to grasp what has changed in the objective and subjective conditions underlying social change in South Africa. This requires an attempt to “relate the rise of new community movements to changes in waged employment and working class organizations.”31 While the labor union movement enjoyed an incredibly close relationship with the new ANC government, Barchiesi claims that the largely neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy (GEAR) of 1996—undemocratically adhered to by the ANC—gutted this partnership of any radical content. “The growing institutionalization of organized labor mirrored the deepening crisis in the living conditions of largely

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unemployed and un-unionized poor, and was unable to stem rising uncertainty, precariousness and vulnerability that face many union members as well.”32 Parallel to this marginalization of organized labor as a political force is a general rise in precarity of working conditions throughout South Africa. Precarious work emerged in part as a consequence of the de-industrialization and de-unionization effects of the rising neoliberal economy during the 1990s. While COSATU lost members by the hundreds of thousands, worker militancy was focused not simply on increasing wages but also on a rebellion against work itself . This extended a long tradition within the anti-work worker’s movement in South Africa that was particularly evident at the height of anti-apartheid activism in the late 1970s and 1980s. By de-centering the workplace as the site for improving one’s life, other arenas of struggle began to emerge. While under apartheid “the most relevant contribution on the left to mass grassroots organizing was undoubtedly provided by the growth of militant trade unions of the black working class,”33 Barchiesi claims that this militancy was never limited to the factory. Instead, due to a lack of formal citizenship rights under the apartheid regime, the struggle often exploded into the community realm beyond the factory: Coercive labor control in the absence of citizenship rights within colonial realities encounters insurmountable problems in enforcing workers’ loyalty and reducing their ability to escape from, and refuse, wage labor. In South Africa, workers’ refusal and subversion of the wage relation was translated into exporting worker militancy from the factory to the community. Workers’ refusal of the wage relation as a terrain of emancipation isolated from radical social change made deep-seated desires of liberation from wage labor co-exist with workplace-based demands for social and political recognition.34

This led to a split in the movement between the struggles organized around the sphere of production (the factory) and struggles coalescing within the arena of reproduction (community, housing, electricity, and water). As Altha Cravey and Georgia Ann Cravey argue, “attention to the material and bodily necessity of social reproduction is one way to sharpen our analysis of class struggle.”35 Bond and Barchiesi certainly concur in their conceptualization of this shift in their own competing terminologies: what Bond highlights as a shift in scale of struggle, Barchiesi sees

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as an expansion and transformation within the struggle against capitalist productive and reproductive realms. These commentaries on the history of the labor struggle, and the tensions already existing under apartheid between factory and community struggles, help us to better understand the post-apartheid resurgence of social movements in South Africa. Globally, the rise of precarious labor has dealt a blow to the once central labor movement, driven in large part by de-industrialization. South African labor struggles remain much more vibrant than those in most countries around the world with regularly occurring strikes, but workplace struggles have arguably been displaced by movements emerging within the space of the city as the principal site of antagonism with state and capital. Yet, argues Barchiesi, we cannot erase workers’ own subjectivity in this demise, in that much of their struggle historically entailed a fight beyond the factory. These struggles explicitly rejected the wage relation while concurrently insisting on the importance of struggle at the community level. In his examination of contemporary movements, Barchiesi points to the same organizations as Bond, but in doing so he stresses their break from earlier models of struggle rather than their continuity. “In general, these movements do not mobilize in alliance with mainstream unions, including COSATU ones, which express suspicion and even overt hostility towards them.”36 While Barchiesi celebrates the APF both for its open opposition toward the ANC and for its attempt to link struggles within the factory to community struggles by highlighting commodification as their common neoliberal enemy, he is also wary of the group’s continued insistence upon conquering the state apparatus as a struggle objective, and upon their centralized, “party-like” decision-making structure. He builds on Ashwin Desai’s37 own assessment of the resurgent South African social movements to drive home this critique: There is an agreement that while left values are still important to us, the left project often took on forms that became obstacles to realizing those values. This was true at least to the extent that left organizations are based on a mere philosophy of domination that confines social subjects to the role of either passive victims or card-carrying members of the revolutionary party. The left has been unable to recognize the teeming life in between. Life! (238)

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Such a concern with “life” is often traditionally confined to what is seen as the “private” dimension of citizenship in a republic. Older political models placed emphasis on the “public” realm of the state as that space where a general will could be forged among the otherwise divided masses. In this model community concerns were often sidestepped as inconsequentially specific, especially because they appeared to lack a direct relation to the privileged sphere of the economy which was understood to fundamentally determine much of political and social existence. But many theorists view South Africa’s new social movements as good examples of the refusal to accept any such split between public and private life. Defending his use of the term “multitude” to characterize this collapse between public and private citizens, Barchiesi explains that: Community movements’ prominent characters are the ‘unemployed, single mother, community defender, abandoned, neighbor, factory worker, popular criminal and rap artist,’ a social landscape that does not easily fit homogenous identities, especially when the national liberation ideology is undergoing a credibility crisis. Rather than delegating the definition of citizenship to political institutions, those subjects tend to experience it as a permanently fluid field of contestation. Many in the official left can dismiss community movements as ‘single-issue,’ ‘particularistic’ and ‘confused.’ It is however unquestionable that their very presence interrogates the established lefts’ ability to redefine the confines of the ‘possible’ and ‘feasible.’38

Indeed, the notion of “multitude”39 nicely captures the heterogeneity of subjects active in the new movements, where both unemployed, informally and formally employed, citizens and non-citizen migrants often all gather together to struggle in a particular organization. While these movements may congeal around particularistic and place-based demands, in aggregate they constitute the most important challenge to the hegemony of the post-apartheid government’s narrative of a successful and peaceful transition to democracy.

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2.3 Civil Society, the State, and Emancipatory Politics A similar concern with the limits of traditional left politics permeates reflections upon the intertwining relevance of civil society and the state in contemporary South Africa. Michael Neocosmos, for example, picks up from Barchiesi’s line of thinking regarding the contested terrain of citizenship and the challenge that new movements present to traditional conceptualizations of social struggle. Neocosmos, however, overwhelmingly directs his critique at what he sees as two interchanging forms of authoritarianism that consistently divide state and civil society: (neo)liberalism and state nationalism. He builds this framework in part by drawing from a particular Africanist perspective—developed in works by Ernest Wamba dia Wamba and Jacques Depelchin—in order to retheorize an emancipatory political tradition in Africa.40 He avoids framing the challenges of South African democracy in terms of the individual psychologies of ANC leaders, and instead focuses attention on structural dynamics in place preventing a real transition to democracy. When viewed as interchangeable authoritarian frameworks for governing, (neo)liberalism and state nationalism equally produce a civil society that is gutted of its political content. Instead, civil society operates merely as the arena where the reproduction of state hegemony occurs. By siphoning off the political content from non-state spheres, capitalism is able to prevent any true democratization in the realm of society at large. The countervailing project of politicizing society is rooted in Neocosmos’s belief that “the state is not the exclusive site of politics and it is clear that it is certainly not the site of an emancipatory politics on the continent.”41 This expansive understanding of politics runs counter to the traditional approach to social movements as operating within the realm of “civil society.” In this framework, civil society represents the paradigmatic space from which citizens can compete for influence upon the state and thus express their societal agency. This traditional view of civil society, which Neocosmos ascribes to neoliberal ideology, insists that “the more extensive this pluralism as manifested by the ‘vibrancy’ or ‘diversity’ of civil society, the more extensive supposedly is democracy itself.”42 Political theorists from Karl Marx to Partha Chatterjee present us with a different analysis of civil society by claiming that it is characterized by its divergence from the state in that the realms of society and the economy

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become “largely depoliticized”(63). Neocosmos tells us that this separation forms the basis for a continued authoritarianism at the heart of liberalism, fundamentally challenging the widespread recent debates about the resurgence of authoritarianism against liberalism. Liberalism’s internal authoritarianism is made possible by placing “politics out of reach of the society and the economy beyond the reach of politics.”43 Thus, when considering relations between state and civil society on the one hand, and the supposed universal goal of democratization in contemporary Africa on the other hand, Neocosmos is adamant that we must refute any correlation between a deepening of activity within civil society and greater democratization. Quoting Marx, he insists that democratization “consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.”44 Such a subordination of the state to society at large is extremely difficult to achieve within civil society when a group is only granted civil society status once it has ascribed to the state’s preferred and recognized criteria: namely, not being a member of a purportedly illegal or underground organization. Tellingly, Neocosmos claims that the vibrant political resistance movements that spread throughout the townships in 1980s South Africa were never constituted as part of civil society precisely because they were viewed as openly subversive by the state and therefore beyond the realm of “mutual recognition” between state and society required to gain civil society status. The same could be said of contemporary social movements in South Africa, who consistently challenge the legality required to operate within civil society through subversive activities such as illegal electricity connections and land occupations. The framework for achieving social justice commonly referred to as “human rights” might equally fall under Neocosmos’s critique. Precisely because human rights are presented as universal values that the state must provide to its subjects, they become potentially problematic as part of the depoliticization of society as a whole. “These rights, even though fought for and achieved through popular struggles throughout society, are supposed to be “delivered” and “guaranteed” by the state. They are taken out of popular control and placed in a juridical realm, where their fundamentally political character is removed from sight so that they become the subject of technical resolution by the judicial system.”45 Or, to use the language of Antonio Negri, rights talk operates to shift the terrain of struggle from the constituent power of people’s assemblies to the constituted power of reified constitutions. Thus, rights

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become subsumable under the technocratic process of governing properly, rather than a means to increasing the democratic political power of all people living in a particular society. This helps us comprehend how it is possible for post-apartheid South Africa to simultaneously be the home of the most progressive constitution in the world while at the same time maintain the highest level of inequality of any country in the world.

2.4

Human Rights and the First Transition

There are at least three critical positions available for assessing the successes and failures of what I’m calling “the first transition” in South Africa, often associated with the negotiations between the ANC and the National Party (1990–1994), followed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was established once the ANC came to power (1995– 1998). The first position sees the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the defining moment in the first transition in South Africa, but it views it as a project with tremendous shortcomings. In distinguishing between political and economic rights, and in choosing to focus the proceedings of the TRC on supposedly political violations, the TRC missed an opportunity to frame apartheid as a crime that mapped onto a broader context of colonial rule. This argument centers on coerced labor and forced removals, two of the principal crimes of apartheid, as being in fact simultaneously political and economic.46 Land dispossession --a crime that dates back to the beginning of colonial conquest although it is often understood to have begun in 1913 --is taken off the table as a non-issue for the TRC. The bifurcated rule of apartheid, where rural tribal homelands confined much of the African population to a structure of rule outside the apartheid legal framework, meant that treating apartheid’s crimes as principally a matter of unethical laws, as the TRC did, simultaneously failed to grapple with historic and ongoing forms of rural despotism that facilitated apartheid rule. In a similar fashion, one might argue that the problem today in SA is not that political rights haven’t extended into the economic terrain, but that political rights are accessible only to those elite communities that have access to the realm of civil society. Here, a critical interrogation of civil society becomes crucial: Michael Hardt47 profoundly reconstructs the Leninist thesis by arguing that it is civil society rather than the state that is withering away in the era of late capitalism; Partha Chatterjee48 and Michael Neocosmos49 argue that civil society is a space where only

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privileged sectors of the urban population can interact with the state; and Frank Wilderson50 argues that a foundational antiblackness shapes civil society, constituting an exclusionary paradigm predicated on gratuitous violence. This paradigm in turn enables the very condition of possibility for non-black subjects to make claims on the state from their recognized positions within civil society.51 The idea that the TRC represented the realization of political justice along with an ethical commitment to acknowledge past wrongdoing is problematic for many reasons. It represents a continuation of an exclusively ethical tradition in political theory that still fails to grapple with the reality of power relations as a central terrain upon which justice must be realized. It also ignores the ongoing struggle for a second transition in South Africa, whereby economic rights continue to be pursued as a result of having been entirely bracketed during the first transition symbolized by the TRC. And it ignores the persistence of precisely that form of rule thought to be paradigmatic of apartheid: racialized forms of dispossession in post-apartheid South Africa.52 The second critical position regarding the TRC identifies a break in transitional justice that occurred with the end of apartheid, whereby the transition from white rule would mark a third paradigm in the history of human rights. In this framework, human rights first emerged as an explicitly political project in the Rights of Man outlined during the eighteenth-century French Revolution. A second iteration of the human rights project emerged during the post-World War II era in an attempt to confront the evil of the Holocaust by proclaiming “never again.” This second phase framed human rights as principally an ethical project rather than a political one, for it was politics that was blamed for bringing about mass killing in the first place. Emanuel Levinas and perhaps Judith Butler today are two principal figures in this ethical philosophy of responsibility to the Other. As Mahmood Mamdani has argued, this paradigm of human rights evolved into the present by basing itself in the lessons of defeat rather than the lessons of revolution.53 Importantly, the Nuremberg model of human rights that gathered steam in the late 1970s was predicated upon a notion of criminal violence with responsibility ascribed to individual perpetrators. A third phase in the evolution of human rights entailed problematizing its assumptions of universal application, which was what the South African TRC was supposed to accomplish. The purported universality of human rights discourse led some Third

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World scholars to reframe human rights as “the Trojan horse of recolonization.”54 In this sense, it is important to remember that the modern human rights movement gathered steam in the wake of not only the Holocaust but also following the decolonization movements which had reclaimed state sovereignty for colonized populations. The fall of South African apartheid constituted one of the last acts of this global movement. And yet, the fall of apartheid and the first transition that accompanied it also broke with the second phase of human rights in that it challenged some of the universal aspects of the earlier discourse. Rather than endorsing the framework of mass violence as an ethical problem, the first transition in South Africa managed to reframe it as a political problem, involving collectivities. It is in this sense that Mamdani argues that “political violence requires more than just criminal agency; it needs a political constituency. That constituency, in turn, is held together and mobilized by an issue. More than criminal violence, political violence is issue-driven.”55 While Nuremberg is thought of as approaching justice as a matter of criminal proceedings, the first South African transition and the negotiations that the ANC undertook with the departing National Party were supposed to have been framed around a notion of “survivor’s justice.” Survivor’s justice here is thought of as a collective project of reconciliation, whereby the categories of victim and perpetrator are transcended in a collective healing process that allows all populations to move forward into a new, post-conflict moment. More important than the late 1990s TRC in this first transition, then, were the early 1990s negotiations between the ANC and the National Party when the groundwork was laid for the dismantling of juridical and political apartheid. In these early negotiations, precisely by ceding power to the formerly dominant white minority, the ANC is thought to have overcome the traditional model of victim’s justice. As Mamdani argues: If South Africa is a model for solving intractable conflicts, it is an argument for moving from the best to the second best alternative. That second best alternative was political reform. The quest for reform, for an alternative short of victory, led to the realization that if you threaten to put the leadership on either side of the dock they will have no interest in reform. This change in perspective led to a shift, away from criminalizing or demonizing the other side to treating it as a political adversary. It led to displacing the paradigm of criminal justice identified with Nuremberg”…These earlier set of negotiations “prioritized political justice…Political justice affects groups

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whereas criminal justice targets individuals. The object of criminal justice is punishment, that of political justice is political reform.56

However, this second critical position, which celebrates the early negotiations between the ANC and the NP as a promising model of survivor’s justice predicated upon political justice, is also easily critiqued by a third position regarding the first transition in South Africa. The notion of “survivor’s justice” could be accused of reproducing exactly what Grant Farred denounces about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “The TRC can only perform its political function if it suspends the past, if arbitrary temporal barriers, separating the past from the present, are imposed.”57 And more forthrightly: The genius of the truth commissions is that they allow for the ethical betrayal of the time passed. Because of the TRC, the time known can now be represented as the time unknown, the time unknown until now, until the justice-instituting event of the TRC…The TRC allows for the postapartheid nation to be ‘asboluted’ into the nonracial, democratic present…The reconstituted nation makes the past different from, but no longer disruptive of, the present. To be absoluted is to allow for the confession of guilt and the national forgiving of the perpetrators, the erasure of historical erasure, and the coming into absolute oneness of the new nation.58

Here Farred provides us with a temporal critique of the suturing together of apartheid and post-apartheid societies, in a manner that still maintains the image of an absolute break that has been healed through the TRC. The core argument in this third critique of the TRC is that white South Africans and other elites are left off the hook, and this is all possible through South Africa’s particular version of rainbow nation color-blindness, a project that ultimately guarantees a thriving afterlife for apartheid. This absolution complicates Mamdani’s insistence elsewhere that the primary legacy of colonial rule in the post-colonial moment is ethnic, rather than racial rule.59 This may have been an extremely poignant analysis of the period between 1990 and 1994, when the Zulu nationalist Inkatha movement (later renamed Inkatha Freedom Party) became a principal perpetrator of violence throughout the country and attacked supporters of United Democratic Front. Mamdani’s critique was that this was possible because the liberation movement, like the TRC as a whole,

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failed to take account of the particular nature of colonial rule. An urban bias in the ANC caused it to neglect the rural areas that were ruled under a “tribal” logic of decentralized despotism, and thus the movement failed to unite across tribal lines. And yet, while Mamdani is correct that the South African state has been de-racialized in the post-apartheid moment, society remains fully racialized. Farred therefore offers us a model for how to think through the persistence of articulations between race and class, rather than just ethnicity, as a central problem in post-apartheid South Africa. He deploys a temporal critique of the continuities between an apartheid past and ongoing forms of exploitation in the purportedly post-apartheid present. We might ask what the spatial corollary would be of this temporal “absolutizing”? Spatial justice has been foreclosed in the post-apartheid present in a dual fashion. By delimiting its period of investigation to 1960–1994, the TRC avoided discussion of land reform and forced removals from urban areas. These forms of dispossession, when they do surface, are usually dated back to the 1913 Native Land Act. But as more recent scholarship has correctly underscored, they have their real origin in the launch of the settler colonial project starting in 1652.60 In part because of an inadequate reckoning with this history, apartheid geographies are allowed to persist in the “post-apartheid” present. Rural people struggle to eke out a living on land they were confined to over a hundred years ago. In the absence of meaningful land reform, many migrate to cities and set up precarious dwellings in shack communities, which pepper all urban landscapes throughout the country. While the ANC-led government has constructed four million homes since the end of apartheid in an effort to provide shelter to this population, because it refuses to link the urban and the rural in its policies, it simply cannot keep pace: another couple million still sit on housing waiting lists throughout the country. And yet these same shack settlements make up many of the few instances of desegregating urban South Africa, penetrating the heart of the historically white cities in an effort to access public resources, transportation, and jobs. The model of transitional justice in South Africa, then, clearly lacked a corresponding notion of spatial justice. And it is in their agentive production of space from below that poor South Africans open a window to an alternative understanding of transition from below, beyond the hegemonic state-mediated models so popular in international human rights law.

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Democracy from Below

Given the blind-spots and shortcomings of the first transition, one might legitimately ask at this point what other kinds of politics actually exist that do not fall into the bottlenecks of the human rights framework celebrated by the TRC, or the elitist tendencies of the domain of civil society? For Neocosmos, the answer is clear: “popular-democratic or consistently democratic politics are the kind of politics which are by their very nature emancipatory and which are of greatest interest to the majority of the people of Africa—the poor and the oppressed.”61 Such criteria open space to critique the ANC’s own liberal authoritarianism and offer a template for oppositional movements seeking to produce new social relations in South Africa that can provide the basis for a true transition to democracy. For Neocosmos, a better model for the transition to democracy pre-existed the 1990s era of top-down mediation through state and international institutions. Here he is interested in what he calls the “sequence” of revolt that produced a partial rupture with ANC modes of politics in the mid-1980s. Drawing our attention to the years 1984–1986, Neocosmos argues that a popular democratic politics emerged within what was called the United Democratic Front (UDF), an alliance between community organizations and workers unions (FOSATU) within the antiapartheid movement. It is important to recall that the ANC was forced to operate from a position of exile after its banning in the early 1960s. This meant that their struggle shifted to guerrilla camps in nearby African countries such as Tanzania.62 But the domestic anti-apartheid movement continued, with groups such as the Black Consciousness movement taking up the mantle from the mid-1960s through to the late 1970s, and the UDF continuing this popular mobilization into the 1980s. By 1984 the UDF had reached such intensity that it constituted a form of “people’s power.” While this form of power was not without its own problems— Neocosmos cites periodic “authoritarian tendencies, sexism, urban–rural contradictions, and deference to well-known nationalist figures and to the ANC in exile”63 as just a few examples—nonetheless “the UDF as an umbrella of independent organizations and affiliates was organizationally novel.”64 As he elaborates: In this understanding, society had to be transformed prior to—and hence independently from—the attainment of state power and the transformation of the state…The two main questions raised by popular struggle in

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the 1980s, particularly in 1984-1986, the core years of this sequence, were: What is popular democracy? And how should a popular democracy be achieved and consolidated? These questions differed fundamentally from what most intellectuals were debating at the time, such as the relative importance of capitalism versus socialism, the state, the nature of the economy, race, and class…These politics constituted an alternative to state politics and were not just oppositional, as the ANC leadership has regularly maintained ever since (e.g., Mbeki, 1996). That organizations were able to construct their own political culture, their own embryonic local state structures, their own (often highly democratic) modes of decisionmaking, shows that they went beyond instilling political agency among citizens, and delved into thinking new forms of politics of a fundamentally popular-democratic character. This is show by the fact that ‘class leadership’ was theorized as democratic practice and not simply as party dominance, despite the frequent lapses into bureaucratic-statist conceptions and practices. The weakness, if not absence, of party forms of politics, and the absence of the idea of the seizure of power, constituted major influences on the formation of these politics, as did the necessity to construct majority popular support around all issues. There was clearly military imagery involved, but little in terms of militarist politics… It’s fundamental contribution to the thought of emancipation was to make political self-activity thinkable and possible.65

Neocosmos argues that the UDF’s approach to popular democracy represented what Alain Badiou has called “movement communism,” in contradistinction to the capital-C Communism of the Communist Parties aligned with Stalinism or different periods of top-down internationalism under the leadership of the Soviet Union.66 This formulation of democracy as “movement communism” was claimed by UDF spokesperson, Murphy Morobe, in a now famous 1987 speech, “Towards a People’s Democracy.” Notably, Morobe articulates a notion of democracy as transition: “Democracy is the means by which we conduct the struggle…By developing active, mass-based democratic organizations and democratic practices within these organizations, we are laying the basis for a future democratic South Africa.” Here there is no division between democratic means and ends. This is counterposed to our dominant notion of representative democracy, or what in South Africa is a “parliamentary democracy.” But Morobe is not opposed to the tricameral parliament of the 1980s simply because it was constituted on an anti-black basis as a late apartheid reform to incorporate Indian and colored communities as “junior partners,” while excluding the African majority. He goes further

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than this, insisting that even a truly non-racial parliamentary democracy would stand opposed to the movement democracy developed by the UDF. “Not only are we opposed to the present Parliament because we are excluded, but because parliamentary-type representation in itself represents a very limited and narrow idea of democracy.”67 The eventual foreclosure of this sequence of popular democratic politics was solidified by the slow creep of “civil society” and “human rights” discourses in the emerging model of a transition mediated from above, starting in the late 1980s and continuing into the 1990s. The class content of such a shift represented a transposition of agency from the popular classes—Neocosmos argues that the UDF exceeded traditional class analysis by incorporating not just workers but broader segments of the oppressed, which have been referred to in other literature in the language of the multitude, the subaltern, or the masses—to the middleclass human rights experts and ruling class power brokers who occupied state and corporate power. South Africa went from one of the most mobilized societies in the world, with millions of people out in the street, to one under the rule of post-political technocracy. As Fanon had already elaborated, a key part of the post-colonial predicament arises when “the people are told to go back to their caves.” Replacing the popular democratic mobilization by a plurality of subjects in revolt, the political party, according to Fanon, now becomes an instrument not of popular liberation but of ruling class repression. “The party becomes a tool for individual advancement…The party, which has become a genuine instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, reinforced the State apparatus and determines the containment and immobilization of the people. The party helps the State keep its grip on the people. It is increasingly an instrument of coercion and clearly antidemocratic.”68 No better description exists of the post-apartheid kleptocratic ANC today.69 The contradiction between nationalism and liberalism found in geographically distinct parts of the world might therefore comprise an internal contradiction within the contemporary South African state when viewed through Neocosmos’s framework. While there existed a relative confluence between national interests and the interests of capital under Fordism, under post-Fordist regimes of accumulation the divergence between the two means that the ANC is increasingly incapable of balancing the two forces. As pointed out by Gillian Hart, the intensity of both white bodily flight and white capital flight from late twentiethcentury and early twenty-first-century South Africa is just one instance

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of this geographically scrambled post-apartheid predicament.70 In order to grasp this new predicament, Hart argues, a re-thinking of transition is required. “We need to go back and rethink the transition from apartheid. Rather than just an elite pact—although it was in part that—the transition is more usefully understood in terms of simultaneous processes of de-nationalization and re-nationalization that have been playing out in relation to one another in increasingly conflictual ways.”71 Thus the liberal state is unable to provide national solutions to correct past wrongs and bring about justice (case in point: the failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, notwithstanding its own attempt to produce a re-nationalized “rainbow nation”) while it is equally hampered in its efforts to advance national development through the market as witnessed by the failure of Structural Adjustment Programs throughout the continent. This de-nationalization, though, is coupled with new forms of re-nationalization as the ANC struggles to define post-apartheid peoplehood. For Hart this requires a revisiting of the “national question” so central to the history of the anti-apartheid movement and to the history of the relationship between anti-colonial struggles and the global socialist movement. While some states across the world revert to nationalist authoritarianism in the wake of the de-nationalizing effects of neoliberal globalization, the ANC has paid lip service to nationalist interests through its programs of Black Economic Empowerment, enabling a select few to become members of a new black elite while doing far less for the vast majority of poor South Africans.72 All of this reinforces Neocosmos’s belief that the state is a feeble instrument when it comes to instituting social justice. As he argues, “the possibility for the development of emancipatory-democratic politics therefore will tend to be found primarily within the popular domain of politics as, despite the contradictions within it, the domain of state politics is founded on administrative, managerial and bureaucratic concerns, the nature of which is anything but democratic.”73 Neocosmos’s skepticism about the state notwithstanding, he is careful to say he is not an anarchist. Nor is he arguing that the state should be abolished or not taken into consideration: “Clearly this should not be taken to be an argument against the state as such, but only an argument against reducing politics to the state.”74 But what does this mean when the state is taken into account regarding specific social movements in South Africa? Both Neocosmos and Barchiesi are quite skeptical of movements that fall victim to reproducing the

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weakest dynamics of the old left through vanguardist approaches and centralized leadership structures. They are both equally critical of attempts to re-direct such movements toward the direction of the state by subsuming them under the exclusive guidance of an existing or alternative political party. Bond too, approaching the issue from a more traditional socialist perspective, recognized the importance of the new social movements that emerged in South Africa during the interregnum between 1999 and 2004 when the country began to once again witness strong oppositional grassroots forces. Interestingly, many of these movements met their demise just as a second period of rebellion was emerging in 2004 (see Fig. 2.1). This second period has been termed a “rebellion of the poor” and a “movement beyond movements” because of the relatively unorganized nature of the mass rebellion.75 In other words, discontent continued, but outside the purview or control of top-down formal movements with more traditional leadership structures. The questions that began to divide oppositional voices concerned what direction the original movements should take, and how we should understand their composition in relation to prior iterations of transformative political projects. These questions take on renewed urgency today in light of the fact that the ANC’s project of a democratic transition has now been met with such tremendous grassroots discontent, proclaiming the still unrealized nature of any transition to a just society. Abahlali, the central focus on this book, emerged in this juncture, as a uniquely organized movement within this second phase of revolt constituted by a generalized and popular rebellion of the poor. My own contention is that the period of transition to democracy left much to be desired, when viewed from above. But it is precisely this situation that has forced people amassing in shack settlements to prefiguratively enact the transition to democracy in their own communities. As uneven and inconsistent as this may be, it is a project that refutes the argument that South Africa’s transition never took place. Rather, it is taking place. The question is where is it taking place? Rather than seeing democracy as something located at the state-level, democracy might be understood as something akin to what French critic and spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre76 termed “autogestion”: collective self-government in all realms and at all scales of life. In this vein I would like to use Lefebvre’s concept of autogestion to introduce the post-apartheid movement

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Fig. 2.1 Delegates arriving at Abahlali’s Unfreedom Day at Kennedy Road (Photo by author)

that will serve as a looking glass in our examination of themes of transition, rupture, development, precarity, and autonomy throughout the remainder of this book.

2.6 Autogestion and the Withering Away of the State: The Transition Reconceived In their introduction to the collection of essays by Henri Lefebvre entitled State, Space, World, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden reflect on the fact that Lefebvre’s writings on the state were largely produced during the height of Fordism in Europe just as it was transitioning to a postFordist society. Writing thirty years later, they ask their readers: what would “a Lefebvre-inspired interpretation of the current round of worldwide sociospatial restructuring entail?…And how successfully is Lefebvre’s

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work able to “travel,” to offer insight into the very different geographical regions?”.77 In what follows I offer some preliminary reflections on the relevance of Lefebvre’s thoughts concerning the state for post-apartheid South African society. In so doing, I seek to answer the very questions Elden and Brenner pose to their readers as a challenge. I hope to reveal the continued relevance of heterodox Marxist thought in the twenty-first century as well as the extent to which Lefebvre’s ideas do not simply explain current events but rather serve as a lens through which we can uncover social formations congealing in our current global conjuncture that all too often remain confined to the invisible. I do not seek an explanation that might retroactively condemn the ANC for selling out the movement, but instead explore one of the most promising political formations that has emerged despite—and often in direct opposition to—ANC hegemony over the reconfigured South African state. Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), or the shack dwellers, emerged out of the rebellion of the poor in the city of Durban in 2005, at the same time that the previous generations of social movements were in decline. While the group is largely confined to the city of Durban and a number of smaller towns in KwaZulu-Natal, it also has a small presence in the eastern part of the Eastern Cape (Mpondo land), in Mpumalanga Province, and in Johannesburg. There was a brief but failed attempt to extend the movement to Cape Town. Today it is the most visible social movement in the country. After many years of waiting for basic services to be delivered to their informal communities, the shack dwellers began to give up on the newly elected “liberation” government.78 At first, they began to appeal to the local ANC government. Soon, this turned into outright protests, demanding attention be brought to their squalid conditions. Eventually, a coalition was formed among a number of the various shack-dwelling communities located throughout the city in an attempt to formalize and strengthen an otherwise dispersed movement for what were understood as basic survival services: water, electricity, and decent housing. As local elections approached in 2006, the movement began to realize that the same ANC officials who had been ignoring their demands now began approaching them to solicit their vote. The black poor still comprise one of the ANC’s strongest voting blocks, while the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, is composed disproportionately of white, colored, and Indian supporters. The shack dwellers used

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this dependence upon the black poor against the ANC, and quickly inaugurated an abstention campaign under the banner of “No Land, No House, No Vote!” This built on a 2004 popular slogan “No Land, No Vote” by the Landless People’s Movement (LPM). Such slogans shift the locus of power from state-centered to people-centered politics. Without the people’s consent and cooperation in the form of the vote, the state’s power, and especially the ideological role it serves as representative of the people as a whole, begins to stand on shaky ground. Three years later, in the fall of 2009, Abahlali suffered a major attack at the hands of paramilitaries under the guidance of the local ANC.79 Many of its leaders were arrested on false charges, and numerous shacks were completely destroyed. The community center opened by the movement was shut down by force and many of its members were forcibly relocated. At issue were both the growing effectiveness of the organization in organizing voter abstention campaigns and the refusal of the members to be relocated to a distant area so that land speculators could begin to make money off the land they were occupying. In State, Space, World, Lefebvre’s otherwise fragmented notes on the production of social space help to capture these tensions that emerged in the city as it transitioned from a Fordist to a post-Fordist urban regime: From the space of productive labor to the global production and management of space. Conflict between the production of a rationalized space by the State (regulator) and the production of space by “private” capitalism and institutions that escape the control of the center (localities, regions, peripheries). Conflicts between so-called productive investment and socalled social investment (the framework of life, etc.) The State and urban problems. Conflicts between integration and segregation. Integration and disintegration. Disintegration. Social relations. Violence and fear.80

More recently, Abahlali has moved steadily along a trajectory that began with a politics of opposition, transitioned to a politics of confrontation while withholding participation, and has ultimately become what they call a “living politics.” Their “living politics” is one that is not defined by the terms laid out by the state for its citizen-subjects, but rather seeks to produce its own platform for doing politics. This is a platform that moves slowly away from mere appeals to the state toward an ethos of self-organization. This living politics of Abahlali organizing has emphasized the establishment of their own university, community

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gardens, day-care centers, cooperatives, soccer tournaments, and the organizing of cultural gatherings around dance, music, and poetry. It is a politics that is extremely aligned with the self-organization celebrated by Lefebvre in his attempts to theorize autogestion as an affirmative project designed to bring about the withering away of the state.81 Lefebvre states: Autogestion, far from being established once and for all, is itself the site and the stake of struggle…Each time a social group refuses to accept passively its conditions of existence, of life, or of survival, each time such a group forces itself not only to understand but to master its own conditions of existence, autogestion is occurring…This definition also includes all aspects of social life; it implies the strengthening of all associative ties…This theoretical definition points toward a practical struggle that is always reborn with failures and setbacks.. Above all, this definition points to the fundamentally antistatist tendency of autogestion, the only efficient and active form of the famous “counterpowers.”…The democratic nature of a State or any other apparatus can be evaluated in terms of its capacity to avoid snuffing out contradictions by restrictions or by formalism; it should not only allow their expression and allow them to take shape but should also directly provoke them. This does not happen without real struggles. Autogestion must continually be enacted. The same is true of democracy, which is never a “condition” but a struggle.82

It is precisely this understanding of self-organization as the primary form of Abahlali’s “living politics” that is emphasized in its members’ writings and actions.83 A delegation of shack dwellers was invited to attend the Social Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro in March 2010. The forum was organized as an alternative venue for urban social movements to gather and discuss their visions for a just city, while government delegates and international NGO participants were gathered at the same time in Rio for the World Urban Forum organized by the United Nations. In preparation for this meeting, the shack dwellers issued a statement called “The High Cost of the Right to the City.” The statement warns forum attendees of the many attempts governments will make to incorporate them into local government systems: “Some of the ways that the militant slogan of the “right to the city” can get taken and tamed are when: it can be reduced to a “technical” issue of working out how the state system can “deliver” services and amenities to the people;

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it can be turned into a legalistic issue of “human rights” fought over in the courts of law between lawyers; it presents the only possible solutions in terms of “participation” in “good governance” as defined by the power-players in the system of the state and the political parties. In our own struggles as Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) we have taken up all of these avenues and issues to fight for justice for shack dwellers—but our living politics and our total struggle do not start and end in these limited definitions and confined spaces.”84

This framework for doing politics is one that exceeds the highly technocratic project of better service delivery and instead emphasizes democracy and dignity as the central concepts of movement mobilization. While careful not to be overly dismissive of a plurality of avenues for politics, it directly critiques the models and language of “good governance” as potentially disempowering of already existing decision-making structures at the community level. In a statement strikingly similar to Lefebvre’s own remarks on self-management and his critiques of urban planners, the movement proclaims that: There is really no such thing as a ’right’ that can be given to you by a government or NGO. As the poor we have to organise ourselves to increase our power and to decrease the power of the rich and the politicians. The only way to succeed in making the right to the city a living reality for everyone instead of a slogan which repressive governments can hide behind is to democratise our cities from below.85

And yet, in its daily functioning and in the campaigns it has adopted, Abahlali clearly does not adhere to any purist model of politics that would refuse any interaction with the institutions of the state. One of their most effective campaign strategies has entailed legal struggles in the courts. They have tried to uphold aspects of the country’s constitution when confronted with the municipality’s plans to demolish their homes in a shack eradication initiative. At other times the movement has sought out meetings with local councilors and officials within the municipality in order to have their voice represented and to push for the implementation of more democratic modes of local government and community development. Thus, what emerged from my investigation of Abahlali’s

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diverse campaign strategies and movement orientations was an appreciation of their ability to simultaneously apply a mixture of internally oriented democratic practices and institutions with externally directed platforms to hold the state accountable for its developmental responsibilities, broadly conceived as the provision of housing, electricity, water, and sanitation to marginalized residents.

2.7

Transitions, Rebellions, Democracies

Reconceptualized through the language of transition, Abahlali’s internal democratic practices and their organizational autonomy arguably constitute a better model of the “transition” to democracy than the political rights enshrined in the written post-apartheid constitution, or the new hegemonic force of a democratically elected ANC government. As Michael Hardt argues in his engagement with Thomas Jefferson’s work from a different moment of historical transition to democracy, “A transition ruled by a hegemonic figure does not teach people anything about self-rule; it only reinforces their habits of subservience and passivity. People only learn democracy by doing it.”86 This was precisely the thinking that developed in the anti-apartheid trade union movement after 1973, in which the slogan “build tomorrow today” was taken to mean “incubating” democracy.87 Decades after the end of apartheid in 1990 and the country’s first democratic election in 1994, it may now be useful to return to Jefferson’s thoughts on the relationship between transition, rebellion, and democracy. Rather than celebrating any formally enshrined laws or electoral system as the ultimate objective of a democratic society, Jefferson placed faith in the embodied assembly88 of everyday people as living democracy. For this reason, he argued that periodic rebellion was required to throw out the old and bring in the new. Every constitution, Jefferson stated, required a revolutionary upheaval at nineteen-year intervals. “No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation…Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.”89 In Hardt’s reading, [Jefferson] provocatively brings together, on the one hand, constitution and rebellion and, on the other, transition and democracy. In other words,

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for Jefferson the work of the revolution must continue incessantly, periodically reopening the constituent process, and the population must be trained in democracy through the practices of democracy…Jefferson insists on the virtue and necessity of periodic rebellion—even against the newly formed government. The processes of constituent power, he says, must continually disrupt and force open an establishment of constituted power.90

This chapter has identified, in broad strokes, different approaches to theorizing the transition to democracy in South Africa. The woes of the post-apartheid moment in South Africa have generated an incredibly diverse and productive debate. This debate has been helpful for identifying the multiple challenges facing those sectors of the population that are still pursuing the dream of a just society. The next chapter (3) continues the discussion of post-apartheid social movements by periodizing three rounds of post-apartheid rupture, which in turn allows us to contextualize the interventions of Abahlali baseMjondolo. It then details the repertoire of Abahlali as a movement, its social composition and organizational structure, as well as its primary antagonists. In Chapter 4 I turn our attention to the realm that lies “above” movements: the state. Through an examination of the local municipal government’s shifting position with regard to informal housing communities in Durban, I explore the extent to which the ANC has transitioned from a neoliberal first transition to a developmental logic of governance in the second South African transition, and its potential benefits for the most marginalized sectors of the city.91 The book closes in Chapter 5 with an exploration of precarity and autonomy from a South African vantage point by situating the assassination of Abahlali activist Nkululeko Gwala within broader debates regarding surplus populations, spontaneity, and counterhegemonic electoral forces. A uniting theme throughout the chapters is the articulation between post-apartheid redevelopmental neoliberalism and processes of racialization that are spatialized in dramatic fashion in the particular site of the shack settlement.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

1992 The State and Revolution, 77. 2007 “Many are Guilty, Few are Indicted,” 159. 2010 “The High Cost of the Right to the City”. 1955 The Freedom Charter http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac. za/inventories/inv_pdfo/AD1137/AD1137-Ea6-1-001-jpeg.pdf. Marais 2011, Bond 2000. Gibson 2006. Maharaj, Desai and Bond eds. 2010, 3. Sguazzin 2021 “South African Wealth Gap Unchanged Since Apartheid”. Duncan 2016 Protest Nation; Bond 2010 “South Africa’s Bubble meets Boiling Urban Social Protest”; Alexander, Runciman, Ngwana, Moloto, Mokgele, and van Staden 2017 “Frequency and Turmoil”. Ballard et all 2006; Desai 2002. Saul 2011. Lenin 1992 State and Revolution, 77. Webster and Pampallis 2017 The Unresolved National Question. Ibid., 4. Bond 2000 Elite Transition. See Appel 2017 “Toward an Ethnography of the National Economy” for a rumination of the vexed nature of discussing “the economy” and for a valuable rendering of the national economy through ethnographic research in Equatorial Guinea and a critique of the “resource curse” discourse. Ibid., 75. Uneven development is rooted in capitalism’s overaccumulation crisis as spelled out most famously by Rosa Luxemburg 2003, The Accumulation of Capital. Bond 2000 Elite Transition, 6. Creative destruction is an idea first elaborated in depth by Joseph Schumpeter. It was later built upon by David Harvey and others. Bond 2000, 10. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 245. Ibid., 246–247.

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

Standing 2011, Saul 2011. Bond 2006 “Johannesburg’s Resurgent Social Movements,” 116. Mayekiso 1996 Township Politics. Bond 2006, “Johannesburg’s Resurgent Social Movements,” 120– 121. Barchiesi 2006 “Classes, Multitudes,” 213. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 227–228. Cravey and Cravey 2008 “Lucy Parsons and Haymarket Days,” 26. Barchiesi 2006 “Classes, Multitudes,” 227–228. Desai 2002 We Are the Poors! Barchiesi, 2006 “Classes, Multitudes,” 239. The notion of multitude as an intersectional approach to class struggle has been most rigorously theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. See, for example, 2004 Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire and 20,219 “Empire, Twenty Years On.”. Neocosmos 2016 Thinking Freedom in Africa. Neocosmos 2006 “Rethinking Politics,” 60. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 67. Mamdani 2002 “Amnesty or Impunity?”, 39). Hardt 1995 “The Withering Away of Civil Society”. Chatterjee 2011 Lineages of Political Society; Chatterjee 2004 The Politics of the Governed. Neocosmos 2006 “Rethinking Politics”. Wilderson 2007 “Biko’s Problematic of Presence”. Barchiesi’s later turn from Autonomist theory to Afro-pessimism also adopts this Wildersonian perspective on civil society. See, for example, his 2020 Afro-pessimist account of “African Social Movements.” Hart 2002 Disabling Globalization, Hart 2014 Rethinking the South African Crisis. Mamdani 2011 “Beyond Nuremburg”. Esteva and Prakash 1997 Grassroots Postmodernism.

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55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

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Mamdani 2011 “Beyond Nuremburg,” 8. Ibid., 16–17. Farred 2007 “Many are Guilty, Few are Indicted,” 156. Ibid., 159. Mamdani 1996 Citizen and Subject. Patric Tariq Mellet 2020 The Lie of 1652. Neocosmos 2006 “Rethinking Politics,” 78. For a parallel discussion of the Southern African war for liberation as seen from Tanzania, see my Third World Thematics article “Dar es Salaam on the Frontline.” Neocosmos 2016 Thinking Freedom in Africa, 152. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 148–151, my emphasis. Ibid., 139. Murphy Moroboe 1987 “Towards a People’s Democracy.” For a parallel formulation of radical democracy from within the antiapartheid movement, see General Secretary of the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu), Joe Foster’s 1982 speech “The Workers’ Struggle: Where does Fosatu Stand?” Also see Kenneth Good 2014 Trust in the Capacities of the People, Distrust Elites. Fanon 2004 Wretched of the Earth, 116. The contemporary South African discourse deployed to grapple with this Fanonian predicament and the extent of graft and individual advancement occurring through the ANC is “State capture.” Useful empirical accounts of the degeneration of the ANC as a political party can be found in Crispian Olver 2017 How to Steal a City, Jacques Pauw 2017 The President’s Keepers, and Ivor Chipkin and Mark Swilling 2018 Shadow State. While extremely useful in their empirical account of the decadent nature of the trajectory of this form of “transition” from above, none surpass in theoretical acumen the original formulation by Fanon. See Hart 2014 Rethinking the South African Crisis, 163. She draws in part on the work of Samantha Ashman, Ben Fine, and Susan Newman 2011 “Amnesty International? The Nature, Scale, and Impact of Capital Flight from South Africa.” Hart 2014, 156.

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72. The forthcoming work of Anne-Maria Makhulu promises to shed significant light on this issue. See also, on global authoritarianism flowing from south to north, and on the constitutive role of anti-black racism, Makhulu’s 2020 “Trump, Zuma, Brexit.” Following Hart’s intervention, and for a parallel re-examination of the national question in the history and present of South Africa, see Edward Webster and Karin Pampallis 2017 The Unresolved National Question. 73. Neocosmos 2006 “Rethinking Politics,” 78. 74. Ibid., 85. We will return to this nuanced position on the state in Chapter 5. 75. For an assessment of the genealogy of this concept, and how it is a racialized notion, see Anna Selmeczi 2015 “Haunted by the Rebellion of the Poor.” 76. Nigel Gibson offers a wonderful synthesis of Lefebvre and Fanon in his 2011 Fanonian Practices in South Africa. 77. Elden and Brenner 2009 State, Space, World, 32. 78. See Raj Patel 2009 “Cites without Citizens” for a useful account of the movement’s origins. 79. Abahlali 2009 “Our Movement is Under Attack”. 80. Lefebvre 2009 State, Space, World, 117. 81. Kirsch 2012. 82. Lefebvre 2009 State, Space, World, 134–135. 83. For a parallel assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Lefebvre’s theorization of democracy and differential space, see Mark Purcell 2022 “Theorizing Democratic Space With and Beyond Henri Lefebvre.” As he succinctly puts it there: “Democracy is not a panacea; it is a project” (3056). For a careful theorization of democracy in South African social movements, see Antina von Schnitzler 2016 Democracy’s Infrastructure. And for an exploration of the usefulness of Lefebvre’s right to the city in South Africa, see Huchzermeyer 2014 “Invoking Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’ in South Africa Today.” 84. Abahlali 2010 “The High Cost of the Right to the City”. 85. Ibid. 86. Hardt 2007 Michael Hardt Presents Thomas Jefferson, xx.” 87. The radical accounts of democracy operative within the antiapartheid labor movement is covered in the classic work by Steven Friedman 1987 Building Tomorrow Today. For a synthetic and

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89. 90. 91.

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accessible account of the centrality of Durban and the 1973 strikes in setting off the sequence of worker and student revolt that would define the next fifteen years, see Dossier no. 60 published by The Tricontinental 2023 “The 1973 Durban Strikes.” For a longerterm comparative study of worker struggles in Durban and San Francisco, see Peter Cole 2018 Dockworker Power. For an extended transversal theorization of the centrality of democratic forms of assembly to contemporary social movements around the world, see Hardt & Negri 2017 Assembly. Jefferson 2007 Michael Hardt Presents Thomas Jefferson, 56–57. Hardt 2007 Michael Hardt Presents Thomas Jefferson, xii. For a discussion of the alternative politics unveiled through understanding the porosity of the city, see Enright & Olmstead 2023 “The Potential Politics of the Porous City.” Porosity is theorized here in ways that underscores and requires a constant process of urban becoming that escapes attempts to (socio-spatially) fix the city. It is therefore incredibly conducive to understanding how shack settlements take up space in the crevices of urban life, seeping into the city gradually, opening an epistemological and material space for the more radical politics of defending urban land occupations by movements like Abahlali. The authors understand, however, that porosity is not always and everywhere a positive attribute of urban life, but that it contains a generative ambivalence.

CHAPTER 3

Ruptures: From Post-politics to the Urban Political

The historical and social limits of the political must be recognized in order to evaluate the articulation of needs and the forwarding of claims in domains relegated to the privatized or nonpolitical. Saidiya Hartman1 Rupture is the occurrence of the impossible, when the very ground under our feet shifts in order to transform the point from which we see. Paul Eisenstein & Todd McGowan2 Tracking the ways we resist, rupture, and disrupt that immanence and imminence. Christina Sharpe3

3.1 From Post-political Consensus to the Urban Political With the end of South African apartheid in 1994, the most commonly recognized political spaces of the state and the workplace came under the rule of a new liberation government and the mediating force of authorized union representatives. This transition occurred during an era defined most often by the spread of neoliberal globalization. Such changes

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City, Contemporary African Political Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42433-5_3

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seemed to entail a shift from the radical political projects of the antiapartheid movement to technocratic questions of proper governance and the management of an efficient economy. If politics at its core is understood to contain some form of contestation,4 this broadly depoliticizing trend has been described in contrast as the shift to a post-political consensus. Indeed, the end of the Cold War brought with it a series of proclamations about the end of history, the end of ideology, the end of utopias, and the transition to a consensus around universalizing liberalism. Liberalism however had largely lost its earlier emphasis on political questions of justice and freedom and instead was now understood to mean the natural, automatic, and smooth functioning of laissez-faire capitalism, administered by the gentle guiding hands of well-trained technocrats who best understood the “science” of economics and could rise above the messy din of “polarizing” politics. In response to this stultifying condition, some theorists began to counterpose a dynamic conception of the political to the routine consensus-building of everyday (neo)liberal politics. As Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw explain, the term “post-political” refers “to a situation in which the political—understood as a space of contestation and agonistic engagement—is increasingly colonized by politics—understood as technocratic mechanisms and consensual procedures that operate within an unquestioned framework of representative democracy, free market economics, and cosmopolitan liberalism.”5 In South Africa, the administration of Nelson Mandela (1994–1999) cloaked this shift from the liberatory political aims of the anti-apartheid movement to the technocratic post-political management state in the additional mystifying ideologies of rainbow nationhood, truth, and reconciliation. This chapter examines the ruptures with this period of post-political governance produced by three phases of mobilization outside and against the structures of state governance. Despite this post-political trend, toward the very end of Nelson Mandela’s first and only term in office, it gradually became clear that all was not well among the country’s poor. South Africa remained de facto demarcated according to racialized zones. High rates of poverty and unemployment persisted among the majority groups of color. And the number of people infected with HIV/AIDS continued to grow exponentially. In response, new spaces of the political began to open that challenged the continuity in the disposability of black life between apartheid and what emerged in its wake. These spaces emerged principally among urban movements in community settings where residents

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occupied streets, squares, and neighborhoods, transforming them into the central sites of contestation with both state and capital. The struggles can be divided into three phases or sequences of movement revolt in an era defined by the afterlife of apartheid (see Table 3.1). In the first phase, from 1999 to 2004, a series of new social movements emerged. While the labor-focused South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions capitulated to post-political technocracy by forming two of the three branches of the new government’s tripartite alliance alongside the ruling African National Congress, the new social movements tended to highlight issues beyond the confines of the traditional workplace. These movements highlighted social reproduction struggles around HIV/AIDS, basic services, home evictions, and land reform.6 Although the first round of revolt by social movements from 1998 to 2004 accomplished a lot by gradually normalizing a critical stance toward the new liberation government of the ANC—lionized by most South Africans and the world-at-large—these groups also faced a number of challenges that led to the eclipse of this initial period. In its wake, during a second phase of revolt from 2004 to 2012, the country experienced what Gillian Hart has called a “movement beyond movements.”7 This phrase captures the relative demise of formal structures and organizations with elected representatives and official platforms as they broke apart, while protest, riot, and general rebellion among the poor, outside the official confines of organizational politics—community based or otherwise—only grew in number and increased in regularity. During this period, the government reported more than eight thousand protests per year, each involving at least fifteen people throughout the country8 — amounting to more than one hundred protests a day. These protests were often characterized as unruly and “spontaneous,” meaning that no formal organization with a name and decision-making body claimed to have organized them. As such, it is best to understand this second period of movements beyond movements as self-organized but dispersed, largely escaping the grasp of middle-class intellectuals seeking to lead or steer such formations toward particular programs or political lines. Abahlali emerged out of this second period of movement decomposition and recomposition that largely escaped middle-class mediation, but as a uniquely organized formation. Its more formal structures of organization allowed it to intensify and endure amidst a sequence of movements defined too often by temporary and fleeting bursts, while also permitting it to avoid some of the pitfalls of the anger of “the rebellion of the poor,”

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Table 3.1 Typology and periodization of prominent post-apartheid movements Years

1999–2004

Dominant Movement “Movement of Type/Sequence Movements”, New Social Movements, Alter-Globalization Struggles Specific struggles Anti-Privatization Forum

2004–2012

2012–present

“Movement Beyond Movements” & Rebellion of the poor

Return of traditional political actors? workers, miners, students, new political parties Massacre of striking miners at Marikana Striking farm workers in Western Cape #RhodesMustFall #FeesMustFall Students Economic Freedom Fighters, NUMSA break with ANC & COSATU, formation of Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party Abahlali faces increased repression, and sporadically re-engages electoral process

Slow demise of “new social movements”

Treatment Action Campaign Anti-Eviction Campaign Landless Peoples Movement

Abahlali baseMjondolo

Abahlali first emerges in 2005

which it consistently warns can “go in many directions,” worst among them, toward xenophobia. Beginning in 2012, a third period of revolt began to emerge. Wildcat striking mine workers were massacred by state police at Marikana, apparently after Cyril Ramaphosa—a former militant leader of the National Union of Mineworkers in the anti-apartheid struggle who eventually replaced Jacob Zuma as South African president in 2018—asked the police minister to crack down hard on the striking miners, who he referred to as criminals.9 The wave of miner strikes that followed the state massacre at Marikana was bolstered by striking agricultural workers in the Western Cape who were fighting for an increase in the minimum

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wage. These worker movements, coupled with the formation of two new radical political parties in the Economic Freedom Fighters (2013) and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (2018), seemed to signal a potential radical opening in the space of traditional labor and electoral politics that had been initially foreclosed by the post-political moment that began in the 1990s. In 2015, South African students took over the protest baton, organizing around the phrases #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall.10 Highlighting the continuities of a pedagogy steeped in coloniality between apartheid and post-apartheid regimes, these students have been demanding a reduction or elimination of the cost of education and a decolonization of the South African landscape—both physical and intellectual.11 The notions of “sequence”12 and “class composition”13 are particularly useful in grasping the above typology of post-apartheid movements. Sequence forwards an understanding of rebellion that argues for comprehending their different waves, and the characteristics that come to predominate in each wave. This means that strategies that work in one wave may not apply to another. And it underscores the futility of trying to transpose any particular wave of movements, with its own particular characteristics, demands, and subjectivities, back onto prior eras such as Russia in 1917. In other words, what comes next cannot be easily judged as an incorrect version of what came before. Each phase of movement struggles must be understood on its own terms, and within its own spatio-temporal conjuncture. In its emphasis upon the heterogeneity of subjects that might congeal in particular sequences or conjunctures, class composition substitutes for sociological class analysis—in which classes are often understood to be measurable by income rather than politically produced—and for an older notion of class struggle that too often deployed a more homogeneous notion of the working class as the revolutionary subject.14 What dynamics allow the emergence of particular subjects of resistance to come together, even if temporarily, in particular spaces and times in order to constitute a force capable of challenging or side-stepping dominant subjectivities and institutional practices, then become a key part of class composition analysis.15 The above sequences of movements, and movements beyond movements, demand that we push back against the predominant academic focus and media portrayals of Africa as simply a site of structural underdevelopment and ethnic conflict.16 Instead, we might ask what insights we can take from the experience of these movements for programs of

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struggle in other parts of the continent and the world-at-large. David Harvey makes a parallel call to explore the concrete experiences and ideas of urban movements that have defined the post-2011 “global spring” conjuncture when he states that “if…the idea of the right to the city has undergone a certain revival, then it is not to the intellectual legacy of Lefebvre that we must turn for an explanation (important though that legacy may be). What has been happening in the streets, especially among the urban social movements, is far more important.”17 In the foregrounding of movements, however, it is important to avoid romanticism. As such, I will take a cue from the methodology of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri who explain: “Our method, rather than projecting what people should do and what they should want, is to start where people revolt, to start from people’s political passions, and, from there, develop political projects…The first rule of political thought is that we must begin not from a version of people as we think they ought to be but from people as they are.”18 This approach represents a philosophy of praxis grounded in the actually existing conditions of struggle facing movements today. Such a methodology follows Alex Loftus’s suggestion that we should avoid speculation and “the privileging of conceptual abstraction over contextualized readings of historically and geographically specific practices.”19 In the course of conducting such contextualized readings, we also need to be weary of the academic cooptation of a critique of romanticism. In South Africa, and arguably elsewhere throughout the academic world, such critiques often surface when discussing radical political formations, or those who break with mainstream, acceptable forms of doing politics through established political parties—be they radical or liberal—and civil society appeals for policy reforms.20 These critiques that scholars are “romanticizing” radical struggles are often more about dismissing heterodox radical political imaginations for expressing a politics that is too distanced from normative notions of acceptable political conduct. This is made most evident because often the same people leveling critiques of romanticism in discussions of radical social movements have never built direct and sustained dialogues with the adherents of such a politics. In summary: romanticism is a real potential pitfall in discussions of social movements. I will aim to avoid its perils and to instead follow the concrete practices of movements rather than their idealized forms. But as I do so, I will also attempt to delineate a fidelity to the radical practices of actually existing struggles, even when

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they appear to be far-fetched to more normative thinkers who often judge them from an uninformed distance. In this chapter, I detail the rupture signified by the re-emergence of mass protest in the post-apartheid era. After summarizing some of the key movements to emerge in the first period of protest from 1998 to 2004, I then focus on the experience of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack dwellers. In the early years of the third sequence of post-apartheid movements when much of this research was conducted, Abahlali was comprised of representatives from roughly forty-five shack settlements scattered primarily throughout the city of Durban in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. While South Africa continues to experience turmoil in the form of an ongoing rebellion of the poor and the chaos of in-fighting within the ANC as it steadily loses ground to the more orthodox neoliberal Democratic Alliance and to the more radical Economic Freedom Fighters, Abahlali has been a steady presence in the lives of shack dwellers in Durban since it first emerged in 2005. It bucks the trend toward a movement beyond movements during the second phase of South African rebellion from 2004 to 2012, and its own experiences of repression at the hands of state officials preceded and foreshadowed the much more widely covered Marikana massacre of miners that announced a new period of national revolt in late 2012. My discussion summarizes the new spaces of the political which at the turn of the century produced a rupture with the technocratic postpolitical consensus of the post-Cold War world and within the urban fabric of South Africa, still shaped by the afterlife of apartheid geographies. I then describe the social composition of Abahlali’s movement, its repertoire, organizational structure, and primary antagonists. Together with the earlier rebellions of the poor, Abahlali should be credited with unsettling the significant hegemony the ANC enjoyed in the early 2000s. These interventions by the poor in part resulted in the removal of Thabo Mbeki from his position as president of the ANC in the 2007 Polokwane conference, and the eventual rise of Jacob Zuma to the presidency in 2009. Zuma’s rise—on the back of populist rhetoric drawing from ethno-nationalism,21 a developmentalist discourse,22 and a crisis in social reproduction23 —foreshadowed parallel trends that have shaped our global whirlwind since 2011, when movements from the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Wall Street have been met with similar forms of co-optation and retrenched authoritarianism in the likes of General Sisi in Egypt and Trump in the United States.24

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3.2

New Spaces of the Political

The 1990s offered up two contrasting global discourses about Africa. On the one hand, the overthrow of the apartheid government was immediately co-opted by an “end of history” narrative that pigeonholed the transformative possibilities in South Africa into the path of all other multi-cultural, neoliberal, free market “democracies.” As Wilson and Swyngedouw point out: “The master of these new signifiers is surely now ‘Mandela’, whose life embodied the post-political transition from the violent confrontation of opposed world-views to the consensual endorsement of global capitalism, and whose death was marked by world leaders gathering in South Africa to invoke the sanctity of ‘democracy’.”25 “Democracy” remains in scare-quotes here because the version of democracy celebrated by the same world leaders who had once denounced Mandela as a terrorist but who flocked to pay their respects at his funeral was one in which white corporate power—domestically and internationally—was protected from the threat of redistributive and reparative policies in the name of the sanctity of private property and multi-cultural inclusion. This prevailing discourse that South Africa had “joined the world community of free market democracies”—the supposed destiny of all countries—was challenged by a counter-discourse around failed states and the original Afro-pessimism.26 The best example of an event generating this pessimistic discourse about Africa’s prospects at the time was the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.27 While South Africa has largely avoided the mass atrocities that plagued Rwanda and other African countries that have dealt with civil war,28 violence remains an ever-present feature of precarious life for the poor.29 And this existential precarity has helped to stimulate the three sequences of post-apartheid revolt, beginning at the end of the 1990s. The contrast between a post-political end of history and new forms of contestation and revolt could not be starker. As Wilson and Swyngedouw again elaborate: “As soon as the practices of government were reduced to the bio-political management of the ‘happiness’ of the population and the neoliberal organization of the transformation of nature and the appropriation and distribution of its associated wealth, new specters of the political appeared on the horizon.”30 Beginning with the formation of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in 1998, new social movements began to challenge the ruling party’s legitimacy, both indirectly and directly. A renewal of popular protest blossomed between 1999 and 2004, much of it

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organized through the formal channel of organizations drawing upon the legacy of the anti-apartheid movement. These groups denounced the new government for failing to realize many of the original struggle objectives. The TAC highlighted the plight of people living with HIV/AIDS who were struggling to survive in a society weakened by the monopoly powers of the pharmaceutical industry and plagued by official state denial of the disease. The movement sought broad anti-retroviral treatment access and deployed mass civil disobedience as a means of publicizing the plight of their constituency. It was also careful to highlight the new but unrealized rights enshrined in the post-apartheid state’s progressive constitution.31 Soon after, the Anti-Privatization Forum formed in 2000 in Johannesburg as a collective attempt at critiquing the deleterious effects of the ANC’s neoliberalization.32 Toward the end of that same year, the AntiEviction Campaign was founded in Cape Town in an effort to prevent evictions and service disconnection in the city’s poorest communities.33 The Landless People’s Movement followed suit in 2001, placing the unfulfilled demand for land reform back on the table by highlighting the plight of rural and peri-urban landless communities, something the group saw as potentially bridging the rural–urban divide.34 While the TAC attempted to walk the fine line of being “within and against,” refusing to break officially with the ruling party, other movements all took strong stances against the ANC and most other political parties. Collectively, these groups filled the relative vacuum left in oppositional politics by the labor movement’s (COSATU’s) decision to form an official alliance with the ANC as a part of the tripartite governing parties, alongside the South African Communist Party (SACP). Each movement represented a particular window into the broader global conjuncture of alter-globalization struggles. For example, in emphasizing the threat posed by AIDS at the very same moment that the ANC seized control of the state and established a liberal democracy, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) highlighted a crucial element of the afterlife of apartheid. Indeed, the movement for antiretrovirals offered a shining example of success in finally forcing a denialist South African government to provide antiretrovirals to the public. More than that, however, the movement underscored a temporal (colonialism → apartheid → democracy) and spatial (North America → Caribbean → South Africa) continuity in the disposability of black life across different political regimes and geographical regions. As Jared Sexton has cogently argued:

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AIDS is both an effect and a cause of globalization; proliferating along itineraries etched by flows of populations, images, commodities, and capital, AIDS simultaneously structures such flows while mechanisms of regulation and repression are established in response. The racial imaginary that accompanies these strategies of social control slates the black body as the primary source of danger to planetary public health: what ‘the inner city’ is to the US national scene, ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ and ‘the Caribbean’ are to the world.35

In highlighting the struggles against commodification in Johannesburg, the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF) joined the global critique of neoliberalization processes that were often playing out at the urban scale of municipal governments. Cities began to outsource their services to private firms, balance their budgets through cost-recovery measures, and transition from a mode of managerial government to that of an entrepreneurial governmentality through public–private partnerships and inter-urban competition.36 For the Landless Peoples Movement (LPM), the central objective was to hold aloft the persistence of the land question and to repeatedly point out that the ANC had failed to embark upon the long-promised need for land reform to right the balance of settler colonial dispossession, sanctified in the 1913 Native Lands Act. The LPM therefore paralleled movements around the world highlighting the persistence of struggles against racialized dispossession, generating renewed conversations around the dramatic return of primitive accumulation in the neoliberal era. And in basing itself in the struggle for a home, the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) presaged the mortgage crisis of 2008 in the United States, while it also adopted forms of protest from the Argentinean Unemployed Peoples Movements where the struggle clearly shifted from questions of immediate industrial production to that of social reproduction.37 The AEC was arguably also the most successful in maintaining a relatively autonomous politics, free from the meddling of NGO structures or a potential middle-class leadership. In contrast, both APF and LPM had to fight to free themselves, with differing levels of success, from such structures or top-down influences.38 The movements that punctured South Africa’s global kumbaya moment in the late 1990s therefore collectively highlighted the “pitfalls of national liberation” by situating their critique of the post-apartheid state within a broader conjuncture defined by the twin prerogatives of homoeconomicus 39 and a global antiblack color line.40 The precise political

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make-up of the movements varied from insider-today, outsider-tomorrow status in relation to the ANC, ex-SACP activists purged from the party for Trotskyist tendencies to Pan-Africanist41 and Black Consciousnessinspired organizers. It also included those who were not active historically but became politicized by the disappointments of post-apartheid democracy. How to categorize these new political formations became a matter of important debate among scholar-activists, but the most common consensus emerged around the idea that they represented a combination of new formations that continued to draw from older traditions of struggle. “Although these movements are ‘new’ in the sense that they have emerged in response to the ANC post-apartheid government,” argues Nigel Gibson, “they also trace a lineage to the militant township ‘civics’ who have pitted some of the most sustained and active movements against late apartheid regimes/policies.”42 The political visions that undergirded the stakes of the struggle, however, remained highly contested. Some believed they could be most successful by pushing the boundaries of liberalism in deploying rights-based approaches to address inequality and injustice.43 Others thought that the movements collectively represented a shift to a political terrain beyond the state-civil society framework.44 By 2004, however, many of these groups were already facing a crisis of durability and experienced a slow decline in membership and effectiveness (Fig. 3.1).

3.3 Abahlali baseMjondolo: Organizational Structure, Repertoire, Social Composition, and Primary Antagonists In its early first phase that lasted from 2005 to 2009, the epicenter of Abahlali baseMjondolo was the Kennedy Road shack settlement. The name for both an actual road and a larger community of residents spread out along the hillside adjacent to it, Kennedy Road represents one of many “black spots” dotting the urban landscape of South African cities, occupied by African residents choosing to escape what the apartheid regime had decided was their “proper place” in the countryside by migrating to the cities and squatting on precarious or unsettled urban land. In this case, Kennedy Road is located in the neighborhood of Clare Estate, an area zoned exclusively for Indian residents under apartheid.

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Fig. 3.1 Cato Crest shack community. Shacks are often constructed from a variety of surplus material (Photo by author)

Clare Estate borders the N2 freeway, a high-speed route that stretches north toward Eswatini and southwest all the way to Cape Town, spanning more than 2,000 kilometers. Opposite the highway at the far eastern end of the settlement, Kennedy Road borders the municipal dump, where no one else had previously wanted to settle for obvious reasons. But for resourceful people with few other options, the dump offers access to recyclable materials and indeed squatters from nearby areas used to visit the dump daily in search of raw material for constructing their shacks.45 The residents of Kennedy Road broke with their local ANC leadership after years of trying to work within the existing representative structures of the ruling party. They quickly joined with other disaffected residents of shack settlements scattered throughout the city of Durban as Abahlali baseMjondolo, Zulu for “residents of the shacks.” The organization developed a formal central leadership structure that is voted

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into office by the broader body of members at annual general assemblies. It also has a women’s league with its own leadership body and a youth league. Each local branch can mirror these structures on a smaller scale: representatives of the local branch as a whole, representatives of the branch’s women’s league, and representatives of the branch’s youth league. Abahlali believes in direct democracy, reflected in their insistence that local branches have complete control over local affairs and over the direction of the specific struggles in each shack settlement. In order to join Abahlali, you must gather a group of at least fifty people who reside in a single shack community. After extended consultation with the central leadership, local communities must organize a meeting and hold a vote in which at least fifty people must decide to join the organization by forming an official branch and elect a local leadership council. These leaders must swear to abide by the principles of Abahlalism, which include no formal relationship with any electoral parties, leading by obeying the will of the local communities, and the fight for land, housing, and basic services like water, sanitation, and electricity through the paramount pursuit of collective dignity. In practice, this means that the movement repertoire of the organization is quite varied. In the absence of the bare necessities for survival, the movement will often assist shack dwellers to connect to local sources of electricity and water by tapping into existing supply lines to nearby neighborhoods that enjoy the benefits for formal urban planning. Where the acquisition of such basic needs is thwarted, the local leadership may enter into sustained dialogue with local and municipal elected officials in the pursuit of formal housing and a right to stay put on squatted land. If these negotiations break down—and they almost always do—Abahlali will often organize marches and street blockades to disrupt the fabric of everyday city life in a bid to force local officials to meet their demands (Fig. 3.2). When the state or private actors respond with force, illegally demolishing shacks, beating residents, and, as discussed in Chapter 5, assassinating movement leaders as well as rank-and-file members, Abahlali will also resort to the court system in alliance with sympathetic lawyers who understand their role as serving the movement rather than dictating the strategy from the top-down. Given the formal progressive nature of South Africa’s constitution, the court system has served the movement

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Fig. 3.2 Abahlali land occupation. T-shirt reads “Land, Housing & Dignity” (Photo by author)

well at times, offering limited stays on evictions, and even the overturning of provincial legislation designed to facilitate “slum clearance” in advance of mega-events like the 2010 FIFA World Cup. In 2016, the movement finally brought to justice two local ANC Councilors involved with violent attacks on the movement and outright assassination. More often, however, court victories can in practice be ignored by local officials and the municipal government, who consistently flout de jure precedents protecting the rights of shack dwellers in the name of de facto realities where forcible displacement wins the day.46 Political education is crucial to the movement. In this regard, an epistemological grounding in the concrete experience of living in shacks is paramount, and this is constantly reinforced in movement meetings to discuss relevant tactics and strategy. The movement pairs these forms of experiential knowledge with the intentional efforts at self-education. The “University of Abahlali” operates without any formal recognition or

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accreditation and serves as a vehicle to organize periodic study groups and extended discussions. In these university spaces, members often deliver long speeches on the persistence of black suffering. They also collectively engage in a close examination of important shifts in ANC policy and the global political economy, while also celebrating noteworthy accomplishments of radical movements in other parts of the world. Crucially, while Abahlali privileges these autonomous ways of knowing that combine lived knowledge with political education from below to form a shack dweller geography of reason, the organization does not at all discount the knowledge of “experts.” Nor does it outright dismiss the relevance of the knowledge of those who may never have even set foot in a shack community, let alone lived in one. Instead, it seeks to build with and learn from anyone, regardless of class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, citizenship, religion, or formal educational status. But the movement insists on being treated with dignity and as intellectual equals in such exchanges, something that sadly proves difficult for many outsiders who have grown accustomed to the interchangeably dismissive attitudes of disparaging, fearing, or pitying shack dwellers. A final pillar in the repertoire of Abahlali includes the establishment of local, national, and global networks of solidarity that facilitate encounters with other movements engaged in parallel struggles. This has led to: visits by Abahlali members to most cities in South Africa; the establishment of a Poor People’s Alliance, which briefly brought together Abahlali with the Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Landless People’s Movement, and the Rural Network47 ; visits to Occupied Palestine to build solidarity across environments defined by apartheid; to Mexico to attend United Nations conferences; to Brazil for gatherings on the right to the city and to visit the Landless Worker’s Movement (MST); to the World Social Forum in Kenya; to Haiti to build ties with communities displaced by the earthquake; to the United States for meetings with homeless movements; to European countries for dialogues with anti-austerity and migrant rights struggles; and to Ghana to attend and address the Third Annual conference of Pan-Africanism Today, a network of labor unions and radical activists in solidarity across the African continent. The individuals who make up Abahlali come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some are elders and were involved in a variety of local struggles against the apartheid regime, whether as labor organizers in a factory, members of the ANC or the United Democratic Front, or as members of

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the Inkatha movement which had been a powerful force in the Bantustans as well as in the hostels in Johannesburg. Others may have been apolitical, or lacking in much concrete political involvement until they joined the movement on the basis of their experiences living in a Durban shack settlement. The age of movement members ranges from teenagers involved with the Youth League to elderly people in their 60s and 70s. The age of the central leadership committee members while I conducted research ranged from mid-20s to mid-60s, but most were in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. At the local branch rank-and-file level the membership is roughly 60% women, meaning that overall there are more women in the movement than men. Branch leaders are often women, but in central leadership positions this is usually slightly reversed, with a few more men in elected positions than women. I would estimate that 99% of members are black, with an occasional Indian or colored person joining the movement. This is roughly representative of the demographics of shack communities in general in Durban. Ethnically, the group is largely comprised of different branches of the Nguni people—primarily Zulu, Xhosa, and Mpondo speakers—although the few immigrant members who trace their roots to outside the country obviously come from still different backgrounds. Religiously, the movement is largely Christian, although it also counts Muslims, Hindus, and atheists among its ranks. In Abahlali, Christianity most often surfaces in the form of prayers and liberation theology-inspired politics. Critiques of mainstream religion and religious organizations are common in movement meetings. This takes the form of a denunciation of the belief in salvation only in the afterlife. Whenever Christianity or spirituality is raised affirmatively, then, it is usually coupled with an additional clarification “that we mean liberation in the here and now, not only in the afterlife.” Two of the movement’s most stalwart religious allies have been the radical “guerilla priest” Bishop Emeritus Rubin Phillip and the members of the Church Land Programme, a liberation theology-inspired non-profit whose explicit mission is to work “in solidarity with the landless poor.”48 For his part, Phillip is “a quiet timer, who lives and works below the media radar.”49 But he is also a lifelong committed radical. In the late 1960s, Phillip was elected deputy president of the South Africa Students Organization (SASO). This meant he was second only to Steve Biko in the organization that developed an expansive political philosophy of Black Consciousness. Like Abahlali, the Black Consciousness Movement held a critical relationship with Christianity that nonetheless embraced it by pushing it toward

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material changes. As Phillip says of Steve Biko: “He played a very critical role in meeting with church leaders, who tended to follow rather than lead when it came to the struggle. In many ways, he saw the church as a Western invention to dull our minds, but he also understood that it was where black people drew their inspiration and strength.”50 As a student, Phillip was a keen reader of Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Gustavo Gutiérrez. When he came to the United States for his master’s degree at the Union Theological Seminary, he took classes with the leading black liberation theologian, James Cone, and with Cornel West, a lifelong synthesizer of Marxism, Christianity, and the black radical tradition. It is this intellectual genealogy, grounded in his own experience with radical praxis, that explains his ongoing commitment to both avoiding the limelight and offering material and spiritual support to organizations like Abahlali, who work within a very similar tradition of radical politics. As a result of Abahlali’s localized struggles, contestation is usually established with representatives of the local state. This means that the primary antagonists of the movement are without a doubt the governing African National Congress. But in many wards, alternative political parties are active and sometimes also in power. Therefore, the movement’s antagonists extend beyond the ANC to all electoral parties, most prominently the Democratic Alliance (DA), the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and the National Freedom Party (NP). The possibility of alliances with the few openly radical political parties operating in the country—the Economic Freedom Fighters and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party—is a story I tell in Chapter 5. In addition to lines of antagonism being drawn with the leading political parties, the movement has often criticized big business and landholders such as Tongaat Hulett, a multinational agro-processing company with its roots in the sugar cane industry in the late nineteenth century, and today the largest landowner in Durban.51 Abahlali members are also quite cognizant of threats to their well-being emanating from multinational corporations based in the global north, from global governance bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, from the imperialistic interests of the United States, the European Union, and China, and from the developmental neoliberal alter-globalization from above BRICS alliance. The movement understands the broader structural problems produced by capitalism writ-large, but these global entities and forces often form a more abstract background to Abahlali’s mobilization. They surface periodically in study groups but are usually drowned

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out by more immediate enemies that present themselves directly through the local state in the day-to-day activities of the group and its various members.

3.4

Abahlalism as Rupture

Shack dweller communities in South Africa reveal an implicit, and at times explicit, program to rupture apartheid geographies by claiming a right to the city for the country’s majority black African residents. Black people make up 81% of the population and are understood narrowly here to exclude the colored and Indian communities (which the Black Consciousness movement embraced in their definition of blackness).52 However—and this is part of why I have chosen a more exclusive definition of black in this book than the Black Consciousness movement did53 —according to the 2011 census, black families earned only 60,000 Rand per household on average, half of what the average colored household earns, a fourth of what the average Indian family earns, and a sixth of what the average white family earns. In the case of Abahlali, the struggle to access economic opportunities in the city has often benefited African migrants who do not hold South African citizenship, and who also seek out ways to earn a living close to the formerly white city centers and the economic opportunities that ring the downtown core in nearby peri-urban areas. Predominantly black shack settlements often constitute the new “black spots” dotting the formerly white, colored, or Indian-zoned areas of the city. The initial movements into the city and the construction of shacks on squatted land often constitute forms of “quiet encroachment” by “non-social movements.”54 James Holston makes a similar argument, drawing from his research in Brazil but thinking more broadly about the dynamic of urban politics around the globe: it is not in the civic square that the urban poor articulate this demand with greatest force and originality. It is rather in the realm of everyday and domestic life taking shape in the remote urban peripheries around the construction of residence. It is an insurgence that begins with the struggle for the right to have a daily life in the city worthy of a citizen’s dignity.55

In the case of Abahlali branches, scattered across Durban’s urban and peri-urban landscape, the urban space won through forms of quiet

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encroachment56 has also been coupled with explicit forms of movement mobilization in order for such gains to be sustained and enhanced.57 Once squatters claim territory in the cracks of urban space, they face an existential precarity reminding them that black life is always potentially disposable.58 This is evidenced by the unsanitary conditions they are forced to live in, the forms of state violence they face, and the general territorial stigmatization shack dwellers confront in a popular discourse which portrays their neighborhoods as dangerous, filthy, and unlawful. The shack settlement therefore represents a paradigmatic site of what Frantz Fanon called the “zone of non-being,” where people struggle to assert their right to have rights, and where routine premature death in the form of shack fires, disease, and state violence go largely unheeded by the broader public.59 Rather than entering the formal electoral process of mainstream politics where the post-political notion of consensus rules, Abahlali argues that autonomy from elected parties will take them further in their pursuit of justice. The ANC has let them down, but so too, they argued, had all the opposition parties. South Africa’s government promised them rights— to housing, protest, and basic services—but these rights would never be delivered from on high. Instead, movement leaders argue, shack communities would have to continue mobilizing, now outside the confines of the liberation party and electoral politics. In the eyes of Abahlali, the liberal conception of democracy—realized in the one-person one-vote polity won in 1994—was in grave need of reconfiguration. Movements like Abahlali often put into practice a panoply of more rigorous forms of the rule of all, such as deliberative, participatory, radical pluralist, and revolutionary democracy.60 Most importantly, only by activating the power of the minds of the poor—something routinely denied by popular portrayals of urban squalor and illiterate ignorance—does Abahlali believe squatters will regain their dignity and be able to assert their capacity to both stake a claim in urban space and to plan the most appropriate use of that space according to their own vision. Direct action protests are deployed by shack dwellers who use their power to disrupt urban life and the roadways which serve as nodal points connecting people and goods throughout the city. The burning of tires, the blocking of roads, and the disruption of political offices all tend to appear in the public discourse as a series of chaotic, spontaneous events produced by the unruly mob.61 Understanding the formal and informal forms of planning behind such events, however, and the way they produce

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a break in the status-quo through their resounding “No!” to the public indifference in the face of their apparent disposability, resituates such acts as forming part of the reconstitution of the urban political in a largely post-political society.

3.5

Forcing the Government’s Hand

The re-establishment of lines of antagonism accomplished by Abahlali places them in conversation with the broader rebellion of the poor in South Africa that, as I mentioned earlier, has been characterized as a “movement beyond movements.” They adopt similar strategies to this broader rebellion, but as “the guardian(s) of the history of emancipation in intervallic periods,”62 Abahlali pushes the efficacy of the riot from its immediate, reactionary nature, to a form of riot and revolt that is latent with a new subjectivity.63 Ultimately, by grounding such ruptures of urban space in claims of dignity, Abahlali attaches their condition to the idea of the radical pursuit of equality. As Badiou argues, this idea of equality necessarily attacks all forms of spatial segregation: “‘justice’ today is also, or even primarily, to be understood the eradication of separating worlds.”64 And yet, as I discuss in Chapter 5, the consequences of laboring to pry open the shuttered gates of the political can often be fatal. The radical interventions by groups like Abahlali nonetheless forced the government’s hand. In the face of dwindling support, the ANC had to demonstrate an ability to meet the needs of the country’s poorest residents, now fast amassing in the cracks of South African cities. The ANC faced a growing electoral challenge in the form of a more orthodox neoliberal Democratic Alliance—in broad terms a successor to the apartheid-era white Progressive Federal Party that has now formed what amounts to an antiblack alliance with sectors of the Indian and colored middle classes. The waning loyalty of a crucial pillar of its own base in the black poor—still landless, houseless, and now increasingly immuno-comprised—threatened to undermine the authority of a postapartheid consensus. In the face of the ongoing rebellion of the poor expressed in both organized and unorganized urban protests throughout the country, the ANC began to increasingly adopt a developmental rhetoric and policy geared at placating these masses. In the next chapter, I turn to the most prominent example of such developmental projects by examining the largest post-apartheid housing project in Durban, Cornubia.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

1996, Scenes of Subjection, 65. 2012 Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political, 4. 2016 In the Wake, 13 (quoted in Myers 2021, 11). Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. The Post-Political and Its Discontents, 6. Gibson 2006 Challenging Hegemony; Loftus 2006 “Reification and the Dictatorship of the Water Meter”; Madlingozi “Post-Apartheid Social Movements;” Loftus 2012 Everyday Environmentalism. Rethinking the South African Crisis. Bond, “South Africa’s Bubble Meets Boiling Urban Protest.” Alexander, “Marikana,” 613. Mupotsa “Knowing from Loss”; Gillespie and Naidoo 2019 “Between the Cold War and the Fire”; Veriava 2019 “Leaving Solomon House”; Kenyon and Madlingozi 2022 “‘Rainbow is Not the New Black’.” See the discussion of some of these radical movements, and convergence of parallel tracks of decolonial and Marxist-inspired struggled, in my two-part interview with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2022 “A Resurgence of Decolonization” https://antipodeonline.org/ 2022/06/15/interview-with-sabelo-ndlovu-gatsheni-part-1/ and “A Practical Explanation” https://antipodeonline.org/2022/07/ 05/interview-with-sabelo-ndlovu-gatsheni-part-2/ See also his “Intellectual Imperialism and Decolonisation in African Studies.” Neocosmos has elaborated the notion of sequence, which he borrows from Sylvain Lazarus, to understand the history of African movements, and in particular the anti-apartheid struggle. The notion of “class composition” is most often associated with Italian Operaismo and Post-Operaismo. For a classical formulation, see Sergio Bologna’s “The Tribe of Moles,” republished in the edited collection by Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi 2007 Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. Interestingly, “The Tribe of Moles” is also the name of a collective of radical Johannesburgbased scholar-activists and militants working with the notion of class composition in South Africa. For a window into this important project, see Ahmed Veriava 2015 “Introduction: Reopening the Constituent Process” and Prishani Naidoo 2015 “Between Old and New: Struggles in Contemporary South Africa.”

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14. A very useful notion of the “heterogeneity of labor” is found in Mezzadra and Neilson 2013 Border as Method. 15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s 2019 reflection on the many different subjects that have defined the past decade of global revolt is also particularly useful in this regard “Empire Twenty Years On.” Their notion of “multitudinous class” and “intersectional class” analysis is intended to capture something similar to Mezzadra and Neilson’s notion of the “heterogeneity of labor.” In other words, it represents a synthesis between theoretical and political traditions emphasizing worker struggles and those focused more on understanding forms of social difference. 16. In this regard see the important continental study by Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly 2015 Africa Uprising. Their work also underscores the importance of the urban dynamics at play in many twenty-first-century African movements and uprisings, arguing for a need to update Mamdani’s 1996 formulation of a colonial bifurcation of rural and urban to the contemporary bifurcation of the urban itself. 17. Harvey, Rebel Cities, xi–xii. 18. Hardt & Negri 2000 Empire, Quoted in Team Colors Collective, Winds from Below, epigraph. 19. Loftus, “Against a Speculative Leftism,” 230. 20. Many of the discussions around abolition politics in the United States take this form unfortunately, including from the class abstractionist left. That is to say, the very same people who are dismissive of abolition politics as utopian, as romantic, or as not connected to the experiences of everyday working people and their own political imaginations, have not participated in abolitionist movements themselves or bothered to attempt to the historical and geographical specificity of such political imaginations. For a critique of class abstractionism, see Michael McCarthy and Mathieu Hikaru Desan 2023 “The Problem of Class Abstractionism.” For the most robust theorization of the historical and geographical specificity of an abolition politics conducted over the past four decades, see the collected essays of Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2022 Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. 21. Hart Rethinking the South African Crisis, and “Relational Comparison Revisited.”

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22. Turok, Development in a Divided Country; Terreblanche, Lost in Transformation, 116–123. 23. Hunter, “Beneath the ‘Zunami’.” 24. See Paul Amar’s 2018 “Military Capitalism” for a crucial account of this emerging transnational authoritarian political economy. The case for South Africa foreshadowing global trends is made by Makhulu 2020 “Trump, Zuma, Brexit.” 25. “There is No Alternative” 302–303. 26. Prior to it being taken up affirmatively by Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton as an intentional theoretical project seeking to point out the limits of liberatory left discourses predicated on a foundational anti-blackness, Afro-pessimism was a term deployed to critique the presumably racist narratives of the Western and white press about Africa. In this discourse, Africa represented all that was unwell in global politics: disease, poverty, civil war, and corruption. See, for example, Toussaint Nothias 2012 “Definition and Scope of Afro-Pessimism.” 27. Fred Cooper usefully contrasts these two events—the 1994 end of apartheid in South Africa with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda—in his 2002 Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. 28. See Mamdani 2020 Neither Settler Nor Native for the most optimistic account of South Africa’s relative “success” here. 29. Pumla Gqola has extensively documented the distinctly gendered nature of this ever-present violence in post-apartheid South Africa. See her 2022 Female Fear Factory and her 2015 Rape: A South African Nightmare. 30. “Seeds of Dystopia,” 3. 31. Mbali, “TAC in the History of Patient-Driven AIDS Activism.” 32. Naidoo and Veriava, “Re-membering Movements.” 33. Oldfield, “Building Unity in Diversity.” 34. Alexander, “Rights Beyond the Urban–Rural Divide.” 35. Amalgamation Schemes, 235–236. 36. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism.” 37. Mason-Deese, “Unemployed Workers’ Movements and the Territory of Social Reproduction”; Interview with Ashraf Cassiem, 2013; Losier, “We Oppose the Authorities.” 38. It is not that the AEC refused to work with sympathetic members of the middle class. Martin Legassick, Toussaint Losier, and Sophie Oldfield are just a few of the left intellectuals who have actively

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39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

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supported their efforts over the years. The point is that the AEC usually managed to build these ties on their own terms. This is a point that was underscored by former AEC member Ashraf Cassiem when I interviewed him in June 2011. Read, “Homo-economicus.” Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 244; Al-Bulushi 2020 “The Global Threat of Race and the Decomposition of Struggle.” While traditional Pan-African reference points—such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere—endure into the present, South Africans have also begun to return to the rich tradition of struggle articulated by Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso. A recent collection edited by Amber Murrey offers us a brilliant synthesis of Sankara’s many contributions to Pan-Africanism: see Murrey, ed. 2018 “A Certain Amount of Madness”: The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara. Challenging Hegemony, 4. Robins, From Revolution to Rights in South Africa. Neocosmos, 2006. Annecke, “The Apartheid of Basic Facility Provision.” For a legal critique of the “deification of the constitution” and the “fetishization of human rights” in South Africa that builds off the work of Abahlali, see Tshepo Madlingozi 2017 “Social Justice and Neo-Apartheid Constitutionalism,” 129. This book follows Madlingozi’s account of the persistently anti-black nature of the afterlife of apartheid, what he calls “neo-apartheid,” and his insistence that another world is possible. For a fascinating reflection on the uses of history in the post-apartheid present, see Karin Shapiro 2021 “A Conversation with Jacob Dlamini. The Poor People’s Alliance became defunct when the other movements collapsed. Church Land Programme website: http://www.churchland.org. za/?page_id=5. Amato 2020 “The Guerilla Priest.” Amato’s account is the most recent and most detailed account of this crucial anti-apartheid figure who has remained a strong supporter of struggles rather than the state in the post-apartheid era. For a bit more on Emeritus Bishop Rubin Phillip, and the broader relation between Liberation Theology and the Black Consciousness movement, see Dan Magaziner 2010 The Law and the Prophets.

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50. Amato 2020 “The Guerilla Priest.” 51. As this book went to press, the South African media reported that Tongaat Hulett was experiencing severe financial difficulty and was looking for a “business rescue.” It appears the organization had taken on excessive amounts of debt, but also that it had nurtured suspicious financial practices that had long remained covered under “a culture of deference…that led to employees not questioning accounting practice.” Karl Gernetzky 2022 “Tongaat Hulett Enters Business Rescue as Lenders Run Out of Patience.” 52. In an attempt to unite the majority of people of South Africa who were people of color, and in recognition of the fact that colonial and apartheid South Africa pursued a policy of indirect rural rule over African “natives” while allowing for the urban (segregated) concentration of Indians and coloreds in an effort to divide and conquer, the Black Consciousness (BC) movement spearheaded by Steve Biko understood blackness in a broad sense to include people of color: black Africans, coloreds, and Indians. BC adherents also repeatedly insisted upon blackness as a political identity rather than a biological one, encouraging a transformation in the consciousness of the oppressed that would celebrate and embrace blackness rather than merely pursuing a colorblind alternative to apartheid. The interventions of the black consciousness movement had longlasting effects, although today they have been eclipsed by the reality of a persistent antiblackness that more often unites not all people of color, but all non-blacks against the majority African/black population. It is for this reason that I use black in the more restricted sense, although as I have pointed out already, my own sympathies lie with the deployment of the category blackness to capture a political project rather than just an identity to mark specific forms of exploitation, threat, and domination. 53. Chari 2017 “Three Moments of Stuart Hall in South Africa,” 841. 54. Bayat, “Un-civil Society”; Makhulu Making Freedom. 55. “Insurgent Citizenship in an Era of Global Urban Peripheries,” 246. 56. Ballard, “Geographies of Development III.” 57. Pithouse 2009 “In the Forbidden Quarters.” 58. Zeiderman, “Submergence.” 59. Black Skin, White Masks, xii. 60. Purcell, Recapturing Democracy, especially 33–74.

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61. Pithouse 2022 “Hit the Tire.” 62. The Rebirth of History, 41. 63. See Joshua Clover 2016 Riot. Strike. Riot. for the most sophisticated theorization of the riot, and one that situates it historically as marking a return to predominance in the present conjuncture, what he calls “riot prime.” 64. Ibid., 77.

CHAPTER 4

Development: A Promised Land Called Cornubia

All people shall have the right to live where they choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security…Slums shall be demolished, and new suburbs built where all have transport, roads, lighting, playing fields, crèches and social centres. 1955 Freedom Charter, South African Congress of the People. After more than fifteen years of caution, as the statistics of persistent inequality, poverty and unemployment become ever more embarrassing, the ANC and the state are turning once again to the idea of development, under the concept of a ‘developmental state’, as the way out of their difficulties. Ben Turok1 What is significant about the vocabulary of shared prosperity or inclusive growth is not its remedial character but rather its implied reference to a new world order of development and underdevelopment, the rearrangement of prosperity and growth across global north and global south. Ananya Roy2 Social plans and the militarization of the urban peripheries are two sides of the same attempt to control populations outside the reach of the state. Raul Zibechi3

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City, Contemporary African Political Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42433-5_4

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4.1

Abahlali and the Birth of Cornubia

The first public action that led to the formation of what would later become Abahlali baseMjondolo was to take to the streets in frustration on March 19, 2005. Blocking the N2 freeway running adjacent to their Kennedy Road shack settlement, about 750 shack dwellers demanded land in the city so they would not have to remain cramped on a precarious hillside next to the largest municipal dump in the country. Six months later in September, the movement formally launched under the name of Abahlali by mobilizing 5,000 shack dwellers to march against the local ANC councilor. They demanded that he step down because of a failure to provide their community with a sense of permanence through services, land, and housing.4 By the end of the year, Durban mayor Obed Mlaba announced that the municipal government would build a major low-income housing development in the Northern part of the city. The development—later called Cornubia—was intended to provide between 15,000 and 20,000 lowincome housing units at a range of prices. Some would be provided free of cost, like the so-called RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) homes the government had been building throughout the country. Other homes would be built for those earning above a certain threshold, initially R1500/month—at the time the equivalent of $230/ month—and would be allocated with a bond (the South African term for a mortgage). It was therefore intended to be a mixed-income housing project, one intended to address the legacy of apartheid geography that still plagued all South African cities. The development would not, however, be located near the heart of the city center, where many shack communities, including Kennedy Road, were located. Instead, it would be based next to an edge city called Umhlanga, a predominantly white, middle- and upper-class beachfront community that had taken off in part as a product of white flight from the city core after the fall of apartheid.5 The announcement by Mayor Mlaba fit within a broader developmental state strategy that the ANC increasingly adopted during the first decade of the new millennium. Often confined to the bygone era of post-independence governance,6 developmental policies and discourses are once again experiencing a boom throughout the global south. But they are reappearing in a new context, following four decades of liberalization policies that have increased inequality and converted millions of people into surplus populations. The re-adoption of development rhetoric

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and policy by states in the global south is, therefore, better conceived as “redevelopmental.” As Sapana Doshi argues, redevelopmental state policies seek to balance competing imperatives of ongoing liberalization and market-based growth with the pressing needs of poor people. “Redevelopmental rule advances life-threatening slum clearances through ostensibly life-enhancing resettlement housing, with (often ethnicized) fault lines dividing those who receive support and compensation from those who experience only dispossessing sovereign force.”7 This chapter locates the ANC’s turn toward a redevelopmental state project at the conjuncture of two forces. First, developmental “megaprojects”,8 particularly around issues of affordable housing, represent a response to movements like Abahlali, agitating from below in increasing numbers since Mandela stepped down from the presidency in 1999. Second, Cornubia and the ANC developmental state project should also be situated within a global rise in state capitalism, culminating with South Africa joining the BRICS community (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in 2010 in the wake of the global economic crisis and the corresponding perception of crucial bottlenecks in neoliberal policy. While neoliberalism remained dominant in the 1990s, the developmental state gained renewed purchase by the 2000s, especially in semi-peripheral regions experiencing rising inequality. By historicizing and spatializing the local developmental state in Durban, we can identify the rise and fall of capitalist strategies of planning and movement co-optation. Finally, the chapter assesses the Cornubia project on its own terms, seeking to answer the following questions: How has the state responded to the new movements in South Africa? What forms of governance have emerged as a method of placating or appeasing the poor?9 Is the state actually answering the demands of movements or merely re-directing their energy while reproducing the central problems driving poverty and inequality in the country? Missing from many accounts of neoliberalism, this chapter will conclude that the redevelopmental state marks an important shift in governance that is both producing entrenched dispossession10 and at the same time fulfilling certain movement demands. In order to situate South Africa within a broader global context, the chapter moves through multiple scales of analysis, from global development narratives following World War II, to specifically African continental trajectories of development under both colonial rule and independence governments, to South Africa’s own transition from apartheid to liberal

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democracy, and the post-apartheid devolution of responsibility for development projects to the local state at the scale of municipal governments.11 At the back of our minds sits Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s understanding of the dialectic between centralized national development and decentralized local development.12

4.2

Development(s)

Development is a central part of any capitalist society and, as Gillian Hart has argued, can be divided into two distinct but interlinked processes: capital-D Development and small-d development. The latter, development, represents the in-built imperative for capitalism as a global system to grow quantitatively and qualitatively, extensively through space and intensively through time. This imperative grew parallel to the outset of global capitalism with the arrival of European conquerors in the Americas in 1492. The former, Development, represents the explicit strategy of containment of anti-capitalist movements alongside gradual state-bystate incorporation into the world capitalist economy. The Development project was launched following the Second World War. The contingent processes of reconstruction in Western Europe, the rise of the Cold War between first and second worlds, and the decolonization of the third world combined to drive the United States and the transnational institutions of capitalism to launch a Development project in the third world geared in large part toward preventing the spread of socialism.13 Perhaps the most devastating critiques of the Development project came from the work of Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson.14 Their analyses underscored the way in which development operated as a normative discourse that exceeded the supposedly centralized power of the state, and drew from Foucault’s arguments concerning socialism’s failure to develop a genuinely alternative art of government, distinct from that of the capitalist societies to which it was often opposed.15 The latter contribution was particularly important as it highlighted the manner in which state redistribution of wealth following World War II was not merely a capitalist strategy to fend off the influence of the Soviet project. Rather, many newly independent socialist-identified countries throughout Africa sought to promote national development as a model of post-colonial success but were often limited both by the normative nature of their productivist orientation as well as by top-down programs of implementation

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and the structural impediments rooted in the dynamics of global uneven development. While we tend to think of the Development project as having been deployed exclusively in the former colonies in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Ananya Roy, Stuart Schrader, and Emma Crane have importantly argued for the need to situate the project domestically within the United States as well. Here Development emerged as a specifically urban policy during the 1960s, understood as the necessary solution to anti-racist urban rebellions that had rocked the country. Crucially, policy was conceptualized in a transnational context, whereby domestic urban development at the community level mirrored counterinsurgency efforts abroad, especially as the United States set out to confront the threats of non-aligned socialism and black power simultaneously. Although these efforts remained open to their own co-optation by radical movements such as the Black Panther Party, Roy, Schrader, and Crane usefully remind us that “a history of community development must necessarily be a history of pacification, and that such a history is in turn a global history.”16 When thinking of the specificity of the African continent’s experience with development, we need to highlight the overlaps and divergences with the dominant critiques of the Development project. For instance, the Developmental project on the continent arguably preceded World War II.17 The 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s saw a range of anti-colonial revolts emerge throughout the continent18 which brought about arguably the most intensively reformist and developmentalist variant of colonialism in Africa.19 France and Britain in particular responded to these uprisings with a placating program of development. Britain passed the “Colonial Development and Welfare Act” in 1940 whereby part of the surplus extracted from the colonies would be put toward infrastructure, service provision, education, and housing for the colonized populations. After experiencing a parallel wave of revolt and labor strikes, France passed similar legislation in 1946 entitled the “Investment Fund for Economic and Social Development.” The Africanist historian Fred Cooper argues, “Both Great Britain and France thought they would regain control through their new concept, ‘development’…Developmental colonialism was in part a response to the narrowing grounds on which a convincing case could be made for the exercise of state power over people who were ‘different’.”20 Furthermore, while the meaning of development has become somewhat muddied today, at the time of independence in Africa,

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it was strongly correlated with the project of nation-building elaborated by Frantz Fanon, wherein “Development became the centerpiece of the construction of a nation, through giving the rural poor majority (in particular) access to the benefits of modernity and industrialization.”21 Slowly, state politics subsumed civil society, becoming more authoritarian, and less developmental in the African context. As Michael Neocosmos chronicles, “by 1980 the collapse of the old neo-colonial-statist form of development meant the collapse of the developmental state on the continent.”22 In South Africa, however, the earlier continental drive to mobilize development as a placating strategy deployed against anti-colonial movements instead morphed into a policy of separate development with the ascendancy to power of the apartheid government in 1948.23 In fact, “separate development” was one of the key ways in which the National Party defined apartheid. Thus, in many respects, South Africa unmasked the brutal reality behind the general colonial project of Development. France and Britain promoted the idea that patient Africans—through Development—might one day become as civilized as their European counterparts. In South Africa, by contrast, Development brought real material benefits to the white minority through mineralinduced economic growth combined with state redistribution programs of general welfare, education, and housing, while it simultaneously disenfranchised and underdeveloped the majority who were people of color. The apartheid government managed its reliance upon laborers of color by permitting a certain percentage of workers to move into segregated and dilapidated peri-urban townships close to mines, factories, and urban service economies. Simultaneously, it confined the surplus majority of Africans to quasi-sovereign24 tribal homelands that would be entirely responsible for their own populations’ well-being.

4.3

Planning Durban

As South Africa transitioned from apartheid to liberal democracy in the 1990s and early 2000s, critics rightly identified the hegemony of neoliberal ideas in the ruling ANC government. However, we should be somewhat wary of contemporary narratives that analyze post-apartheid South Africa as embarking upon a uniform transition to neoliberalism with the ANC’s ascendancy to power. This narrative fails to account for the persistence of a growing developmental logic under ANC rule that,

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while certainly heavily influenced by neoliberal doctrine, also seems to contradict aspects of the Washington consensus. Bill Freund, for example, avoids wholeheartedly endorsing the neoliberal framework to understand contemporary South Africa because, since its rise to power, the ANC has also placed a high emphasis on tackling urban issues that affect South Africa’s most impoverished citizens.25 Indeed, the post-apartheid ruling party was successful in expanding local government to include edge cities potentially outside their purview in order to increase the pool of revenue they could draw on to redistribute wealth throughout the city. The eThekwini Municipality (Durban) is perhaps the best case in point, where boundaries were redrawn in 1999 to capture potential white flight and to demobilize the power of traditional rulers who governed the peri-urban sections of Bantustans. In Durban, the apartheid government mandated that the KwaZulu Bantustan be extended to include peri-urban settlements. This extension incorporated townships like Umlazi, today home to roughly 400,000 residents, the second largest township in the country after Soweto. The 1996 and 2001 extension of the Durban municipal boundaries would incorporate the southern township of Umlazi, and the northern edge city of Umhlanga—the precise community where the Cornubia housing development is seeking to harness to provide jobs to low-income housing recipients. Umhlanga had developed as a site of white flight, principally from the previously all-white downtown parts of the city.26 This process paralleled the similar pattern occurring throughout the United States following desegregation, when wealthier white communities moved to the expanding suburbs and state funds were re-allocated to support the burgeoning peri-urban and suburban neighborhoods in order to preserve white privilege. And yet, unlike the United States, the ANC was able to successfully expand the spatial boundaries of municipalities in order to preempt the emergence of upper class, largely white tax havens operating outside the confines of the major cities.27 As Freund has argued: In more than one sense, Umhlanga symbolizes the typical features associated with the globalized city: a sharp division between a cut-off and protected right and growingly unwanted and irregularly supported poor, an obsession with security, and the hunger of capital for exploitation of new land for constructing houses and commercial property. The architectural models used are eclectic and international with little or no use of any South African indigenous building forms. While the expansion of

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Umhlanga served to decenter Durban, as in many international examples, the gentrification option is however also present in the form of upgrading the wealthiest part of the older inner suburbia of Durban. The stereotyped view of Africa assumes that the entire continent is simply cut out of these trends typical of richer nations and banished to some outer hell by globalization. In reality, the example of Durban…shows that these new divisions also form within Africa itself.28

Durban was unique in the broader African trajectory of urban planning due to “its successful development of a large community of professional urban managers and technical specialists following the English model.”29 This basic bureaucratic and technical infrastructure for an urban developmental state dates back to the transition to apartheid during the 1940s.30 The city’s very existence is owed to its historical ties to Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand region where much of South Africa’s minerals are found. Durban became the port city of choice for exporting these minerals and grew solely as a result of the minerals boom that began in the 1880s. Industrial agglomeration effects occurred, allowing for a sizeable textile and car manufacturing industry to emerge alongside the port. The spatial outsourcing of the developmental needs of people of color to the townships and Bantustan authorities, however, meant that rural Zulu authorities in the province of Natal did not provide any of the same developmental services to which white South Africans were entitled. Prior to the minerals boom that led to Durban’s growth as a port city, however, the most important income generator in the region was the sugar cane business, first launched in the area in 1843. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1815, many colonies turned toward the recruitment of contract laborers from India, which also proved a fruitful alternative in Durban by 1860. As in the Americas, native resistance to agricultural labor played a key role in the eventual decision by colonial authorities to rely upon imported labor.31 To this day, the province remains home to more than half the country’s 1.3 million citizens classified racially as “Indians,” and Durban itself is 24% Indian (well above the national 2.5%). In the late nineteenth century, several of the largest colonial sugar cane landholders in the area combined to form Tongaat Hulett. Tongaat became the largest sugar cane company in the region and remains the largest landowner in Durban to this day. With the transition to a more globalized post-apartheid economy in the 1990s, Tongaat diversified its

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holdings by embarking upon a property development component that has grown rapidly. To complement this property arm, the firm developed a spatial planning division called The Tongaat Hulett Planning Forum. The Planning Forum aimed to influence the long-term spatial planning of city officials in order to harness public planning toward the firm’s private interests. The Cornubia housing development was launched adjacent to Umhlanga as an unofficial public–private partnership between Tongaat and the eThekwini Municipality. So far, it has mirrored precisely these dynamics of deploying public resources toward private benefit. What is significant is that the perpetuation of Tongaat’s influence upon local government occurred at a time when Durban flouted the broader neoliberal trends by expanding the purview of developmental local government rather than contracting it. These trends of a parallel expansion of public–private partnerships—thought to be paradigmatic of neoliberal governance—alongside the growth of a strong state government involved in economic and spatial planning as well as the redistribution of wealth through social programs—come together to lay the groundwork for the renewal of a developmental state discourse in post-apartheid South Africa. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the demise of developmental thinking worldwide as the neoliberal political-economic platform became hegemonic and was seen by many as unchallenged in a post-Cold War era. As previously discussed, parallel to its abandonment as an explicit project emerged a strong critique of the development discourse.32 South Africa’s first majority-rule government took power under the ANC at the same time as these sweeping changes were taking place worldwide. Despite the legacy of broadly progressive politics within the anti-apartheid movement, this global conjuncture led the ANC to quickly shift from a largely Keynesian macroeconomic plan under the Reconstruction and Development Program in 1994 to a heavily neoliberal economic framework under its Growth Employment and Redistribution plan by 1996.33 A number of important early critiques of the transition to postapartheid society therefore denounced it as a wholesale capitulation to neoliberalization.34 For some, this meant that the old idea of the developmental state was now simply an anachronism. “The developmental state of the twentieth century,” argues Michael Neocosmos, “has been fundamentally and irretrievably transformed along with the collapse of development as a state project in Africa, under the twin pressures of hegemonic globalized neo-liberalism, and the popular struggles of the 1980s and 1990s.”35

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And yet, despite the plethora of examples of ANC adoption of neoliberal policies, by the early 2000s, it became clear that in fact the ANC model of development was perhaps better understood as a mixed, hybrid form of political economy, where standard neoliberal politics blended with a more developmental oriented state.36 This situated South Africa within a broader multi-polar moment37 of the first decade of the twenty-first century, where thinkers from China, Africa, and Latin America—some of whom were even being incorporated into the World Bank itself—saw the resurgence of the developmental state as challenging both the neoclassical model and the theories of underdevelopment.38 One of the key recent findings of theorists who have been following its rise, fall, and resurgence is that “the life of the developmental state is no longer confined to the nation-state but has been extended to the local or sectoral developmental state.”39 The city of Durban is a perfect setting to examine a scaled-down developmental program within a broader neoliberal context. Durban offers a unique example of an African city that blends models of development, with a strong history of explicit urban planning coexisting alongside a broad-based informal economy.40 Just as South Africa challenges the deployment of neoliberalism or development as mutually exclusive categories, the city of Durban provides us with a correction for the monolithic categories of the global city of the developed North and the megacity of the underdeveloped and chaotic South. With its equal mix of formal and informal economies, planned and unplanned city-making processes, Durban offers a window into a wide variety of global patterns of urbanization. As Padayachee and Freund argue, “Perhaps coming to grips with Durban is a way to start bringing two kinds of literature together in order to enrich our picture of what is happening to cities generally in the contemporary world.”41

4.4 BRICS, State Capitalism and a Changing World-System In March 2013, Durban hosted the Fifth BRICS Summit that brought together Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. When South Africa joined the BRICS countries in 2010, it represented an important step toward a more complete South-South integration of the Latin American, Asian, and African continents within this alternative global alliance. The BRICS countries—most particularly China—are often presented as paradigmatic examples of a growing form of state capitalism. This

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trend led The Economist magazine to dedicate an entire issue to the phenomenon in early 2012, out of concern for what it meant for the long-standing tradition of liberal capitalism. State capitalism is on the march, overflowing with cash and emboldened by the crisis in the West. State companies make up 80% of the value of the stockmarket in China, 62% in Russia and 38% in Brazil. They accounted for one-third of the emerging world’s foreign direct investment between 2003 and 2010 and an even higher proportion of its most spectacular acquisitions, as well as a growing proportion of the very largest firms: three Chinese state-owned companies rank among the world’s ten biggest companies by revenue, against only two European ones. Add the exploits of sovereign-wealth funds to the ledger, and it begins to look as if liberal capitalism is in wholesale retreat…The Chinese have a phrase for it: ‘The state advances while the private sector retreats.’ This is now happening on a global scale.42

The concerns expressed in The Economist represented a Western recognition that the era of triumphant neoliberalism and the supposed “End of the Nation State”43 had never fully come to fruition. What is more, following the 2008 crisis stimulated by the housing collapse in the United States, neoliberal orthodoxy was everywhere under question. Despite the response of austerity in Europe and the West, many other areas of the world were bulking up their state and its corresponding nationalized firms and social welfare programs. As the authors of the special report in The Economist argued: “Trotsky always insisted on the impossibility of ‘socialism in one country’. The same logic applies to state capitalism. State-capitalist powers inevitably look outward as well as inward. China is the world’s biggest exporter as well as its biggest energy consumer. Russia and the Gulf states are energy superpowers. But they are also conscious that they are newcomers in a global market that was created by America and Europe. So they frequently stick together, striking deals among themselves and forging ever closer ideological links.”44 The Durban conference presented precisely such an opportunity for further entrenchment of a South-South alliance as one alternative to the post-Washington Consensus. The conference attendees initially proposed to create a $50 billion BRICS New Development Bank that would begin to challenge the hegemony of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as the premiere international financial institutions. BRICS partners ultimately agreed to a $100 billion fund. The conference also

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launched a BRICS think tank that played a central role in elaborating the precise nature of the BRICS developmental state model and penned a “BRICS Multilateral Infrastructure Co-Financing Agreement for Africa” intended to facilitate the co-financing of infrastructure projects by BRICS countries throughout the African continent. In a keynote address to the newly launched BRICS think tank, South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, argued against the view of some critics that the new alliance represented a collection of “‘sub-imperialist’ countries that are joining the club of traditional powers. These critics talk of what they call a ‘new scramble’ for Africa, comparing the growing interest on our continent by BRICS countries to the late nineteenth century when European colonial powers partitioned Africa among themselves” (2013: 6). Nkoana-Mashabane claimed that sub-imperialism was not a category that could be applied to the BRICS alliance because Wallerstein’s center-periphery model no longer mapped onto the more properly globalized context that BRICS nations faced. The minister went on to cite Paolo Freire, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Amartya Sen in a speech that argued for BRICS as a unifying project because their countries shared “a history of struggle against colonialism and underdevelopment, including the spirit of Bandung” (7). Nkoana-Mashabane’s remarks represent a self-conscious framing of BRICS as a prominent alter-globalization from above—the global south’s top-down attempt to challenge the hegemony of the Washington consensus by co-opting the historical legacy of the anticolonial and non-aligned movements to forge new forms of transnational cooperation through the formation of innovative economic and political communities45 (Fig. 4.1). Others were much more skeptical of the prospects emerging from this body that was claiming it represented a re-ordering of geoeconomic global structures.46 “While we recognize the importance of developing the infrastructure of our continent, the example of South Africa is a case in point,” argued Fatima Shabodien, a feminist political activist. Infrastructure without a defined redistributive mechanism does not do much for poor. Yes, it may grow businesses, but how does it lift people out of poverty? It is a cold comfort to the South African poor that they live in the African country with the most developed infrastructure on the continent while struggling to access water, electricity, decent housing and quality education for children.47

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Fig. 4.1 BRICS from below convergence of protestors & social movements (Photo by author)

And if the model of South African infrastructure couldn’t be exported as a poverty-alleviating project, Patrick Bond went further in denouncing the entire BRICS program for colluding with an imperialist agenda. South African, US, European, Australian, and Canadian firms have been joined by major firms from China, India and Brazil in the region. Their work has mainly built upon colonial infrastructural foundations—road, rail, pipeline and port expansion—for the sake of minerals, petroleum and gas extraction. BRICS appears entirely consistent with facilitating this activity, especially through the proposed BRICS Bank.48

Yet, this new alliance of middle-income countries should not be viewed simply from the perspective of the conquering of foreign resources under the guise of developmentalism. Most initial critics positioned BRICS as cooperating with Western imperialism, or as part of a multilateral global project that presents its own project of sub-imperialism. Few analysts

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captured the importance of BRICS within a broader context of a shift in global hegemons. Bond highlighted the danger that BRICS interest in Africa would present in the face of increased US military presence on the continent, especially through AFRICOM. But this militarism should also be situated within an overall decline of US power, something Immanuel Wallerstein has been arguing since the mid-1970s. While the United States enjoyed a brief period of global hegemony for two decades following World War II, it soon ran up against a global crisis that Wallerstein analyzed as in part a product of the success of the anti-colonial struggles. When the cumulated Third World pressures, most notably Vietnam, were added on, a restructuring of the world division of labor was inevitable, involving probably in the 1970s a quadripartite division of the larger part of the world surplus by the U.S., the European Common Market, Japan, and the U.S.S.R. Such a decline in U.S. state hegemony has actually increased the freedom of action of capitalist enterprises.49

Following the 2013 Durban conference, Wallerstein re-assessed the decline of US hegemony within the context of the rise of the BRICS countries, arguing that a multi-polar structure of eight to twelve powers indeed seemed to be filling the vacuum left by “the post-hegemonic decline of U.S. power, prestige and authority.”50 This misrecognition explains why the South African elite at first perceived BRICS as an opportunity to take advantage of new markets, both across Africa and between Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Only later, especially with the geopolitical fallout created by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the South African government’s refusal to condemn it, did the white South African liberal elite and media turn against BRICS when they realized it was a body aiming not to extend the West but to challenge it head-on, even if from a similarly capitalist position. For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, however, a similar decline of US hegemony is best captured by the collapse of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, encapsulated in their own terms as “a failed coup d’état” over the global power structure. Drawing from the US State Department’s Richard Haas, Hardt and Negri make the claim that Wallerstein’s assessment of an emerging multipolarity is still based on an outdated model that privileged nation-states as lying at the exclusive center of the global political economy. In its place, they put

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forward the idea of “a form of network power, which required the wide collaboration of dominant nation-states, major corporations, supranational economic and political institutions, various NGOs, media conglomerates, and a series of other powers.”51 This represents a world dominated by what Richard Hass calls “non-polarity,” and Hardt, and Negri term “Empire.”52 The world of non-polarity should not necessarily be read as the product of a shift toward what Hardt and Negri termed—borrowing from Deleuze—as the geopolitically “smooth space” of global empire.53 Rather, drawing from Saskia Sassen, Hardt and Negri understand the de-nationalizing trends in the contemporary interregnum between imperialism and Empire as operating at multiple, striated geographical scales. According to Hardt and Negri, The emerging global order, she [Sassen] argues, is forming not only outside of nation-states, but also, and more important, within them, initiating a process of the ‘denationalization’ of certain components of the nation-state that makes them increasingly oriented toward global agendas and systems. The global is within the national, in other words, just as much as the national is within the global.54

Cities thus become a crucial site for rethinking the processes of globalization: not simply as concrete instantiations of an abstract theory of the global, but as a de-nationalizing scale with its own concrete dynamics linked up to processes that transcend the national or regional. “Sassen thus proposes reading the emergent global political and institutional order in terms of assemblages in which ‘the nation-state and interstate system remain critical building blocks but they are not alone, and are profoundly altered from the inside out’.”55 The heterogeneous processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization56 that occur within globalization should be situated as flowing not only from the outside in but also from the inside out. In South Africa, this has meant that the developmental state program has in fact been displaced from the national to the local terrain of government. Thus municipalities, especially the eight major metropolitan areas of Buffalo, Cape Town, Ekurhuleni (Johannesburg), eThekwini (Durban), Johannesburg, Mangaung (Bloomfontein), Nelson Mandela Bay, and Tshwane, are tasked with implementing both regional economic plans and with redistributing wealth through public housing and adequate service provision. Often, city administrations adopt a platform of developing their

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municipality into a “world city”57 capable of attracting global flows of investment, tourism, and prestigious summits like the one Durban hosted for the BRICS countries. The city-scale is thus partially able to transcend the national-scale in leaping immediately to the global through such a world city platform. The danger here is that the developmental plan will not only be subsumed under the demands of neoliberal globalization, but also that the local developmental initiatives of each municipality will evolve independently of its surrounding rural countryside, still home to roughly four out of every ten South Africans. This spatially bifurcated nature of the developmental state in South Africa is perhaps most obvious when the local state is assigned the task of dealing with the problem of shack settlements. Most of the shack dwellers that have set up a home in the precarious areas of informal settlements over the past thirty years are the product of rural-to-urban migration patterns whereby Africans continue to move from the “traditional homelands” known as Bantustans into the forbidden quarters of the formerly white apartheid city (see Fig. 4.2).58

4.5 Urban Informal Settlements: The Growth of Shack Communities While they are an old phenomenon dating to the arrival of Dutch settlers in the Western Cape, urban informal settlements began to experience exponential growth with the repeal of the influx control laws in the 1980s.59 These laws, dating most prominently to the Native Urban Areas Act (1923), aimed to allow a limited number of Africans access to white cities to provide labor, while the majority would be confined to periurban townships and the countryside. After coming to power in 1948, the apartheid government enacted a series of measures intended to restrict black African, coloured, and Indian access to the city even further, while physically confining most of the African population to rural Bantustans (Fig. 4.2). A number of “pass laws” severely restricting the freedom of movement for people of color were repealed in 1986, in an effort to prolong the apartheid government’s hold on power by realizing one of the central demands of the anti-apartheid struggle. Instead, it led to a dramatic peak in rural-to-urban migration with Africans setting up shacks in any open land they could find on the outskirts of the city and sometimes even within its very heart. In 1984, approximately one million shack

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Fig. 4.2 Map of apartheid’s geography of homelands (Source © MATRIX Michigan State University)

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dwellers lived in Durban, and by 1988, two years following the repeal of influx control, this number had skyrocketed to roughly 1.7 million.60 Part of the specific dynamic fueling the growth of shack communities in Durban was the ongoing war between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Movement throughout the entire province of Natal in the 1980s and early 1990s. Often when violence peaked in the countryside or the surrounding peri-urban areas, entire communities were displaced and took up new homes in a shack community further within the heart of the city. “But not all shack dwellers were political refugees,” argues Richard Pithouse. For example, the new shacks could enable the reunification of families split apart by the migrant labor system. This included families where women domestic workers had been living in their employer’s outbuildings. Shacks also enabled people fleeing rural poverty to access the opportunities of the city. Some shack dwellers had been evicted from white farms, while others were in flight from abusive conditions on those farms. The settlements also provided an important safety net for people—especially women, teenagers and sometimes even children—fleeing abusive relationships. They created living space for newly formed urban households and as many as half the residents of new settlements were already urbanized. Sometimes these were people who had grown up in township houses, and in many other instances they were people who had previously been living in backyard shacks in townships.61

The growth of shack communities in Durban is illustrative of patterns of urbanization predominant in the global south and which urban theorists of informality have termed “insurgency”62 and “quiet encroachment.”63 As “social nonmovements,” these processes represent relatively successful attempts by poor people to improve their lives by acting primarily as individuals, outside the parameters of formal organizations and state institutions. These actions also often occur outside the dominant legal parameters of a given society. “These nonmovements are not based in ideology, nor on organized demands, nor are they coordinated as such. However, the collective effect of these disparate actions is to shift the locus of control away from planners and privileged interests and toward those at the margins.”64 The attempt by urban theorists to highlight these often-invisible forms of agency has proved crucial in grappling with global south processes of urbanization that are almost always illegible to both state planners and

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political activists operating according to either modernist notions of technocratic politics or Old Left principles of political mobilization. And yet, these theorizations should not blind us to the fact that “social nonmovement” processes sometimes appear side-by-side with formally organized mobilizations that similarly manage to escape both governmental and traditional Leftist imaginaries. Indeed, several organized land invasions also occurred in South Africa during the late 1980s and early 1990s, forming part of organized movement attempts to further destabilize a crumbling apartheid regime.65 Many informal settlements were also born through such formally organized movement processes. In sum, we need to recognize the key role played by what urban theorists focused on the global south call “insurgency” and “quiet encroachment” as crucial methods that poor people rely upon to improve their lives. These processes are too often occluded by the dominant categories deployed to understand marginalized communities. As Asef Bayat rightly points out, “precisely because of this largely silent and free-form mobilization, the current focus on the notion of ‘civil society’ tends to belittle or totally ignore the vast arrays of often uninstitutionalized and hybrid social activities which have dominated urban politics in many developing countries.”66 But this exclusion from “civil society” also has multiple valences and is recognized by formally organized groups like Abahlali, whose members have relied on both social nonmovement and social movement strategies to improve their lives. The words of Abahlali leader S’bu Zikode capture this critique of liberal narratives of political mobilization well: “Voting did not work for us. The political parties did not work for us. Civil society did not work for us… We have no choice but to take our own place in the cities and in the political life of the country.”67

4.6 Spatial Justice, the Rural–Urban Divide, and Post-Apartheid Housing Policy Rural landlessness was a key driver of the rural-to-urban migration in South Africa, partially conceived here as a social nonmovement. If the apartheid government was successful because of its ability to draw upon a long legacy of centralized despotism in the cities and a decentralized despotism in the countryside, then the anti-apartheid struggle and its eventual ANC government both suffered from a lack of attention to the legacy of this spatially bifurcated structure of power.68 With the exception

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of ongoing debates on land reform, which has suffered from a countervailing focus on the countryside at the expense of the need to redistribute urban land, policy debates have focused primarily on urban areas, both as sites of potential economic growth and as the principal areas in need of redistributive developmental initiatives. Housing policy has been no exception. The two central pieces of policy in the arena of housing have been the 1994 White Paper on Housing and the 2004 Breaking New Ground. While the evolution of housing policy appears to point to an overall progressive shift within the ANC, broadening the lens of analysis to include the lack of continuity between successive administrations, the low availability of land for housing developments, and urban policy as a whole, allows us to recognize why efforts to develop a truly progressive approach to housing in the country have fallen short. The 1994 White Paper on Housing reflected the extent to which market-based service delivery was to penetrate ANC policy over at least the next decade. The document enshrined key principles such as the right for all South Africans to “a permanent residential structure with secure tenure, ensuring privacy and providing adequate protection against the elements; and potable water, adequate sanitary facilities including waste disposal and domestic electricity supply.”69 The way the state proposed to realize such admirable goals was largely market-based. Rather than the state building homes and transferring ownership to individuals below a certain income, or renting them out at a heavily subsidized rate, the plan was to incentivize private developers to enter the state-subsidized market for low-income housing while providing future homeowners with the start-up capital to access the credit and resources that would enable them to purchase a home within this subsidized market. “The intention was to deliver a ‘starter house’ (sometimes consisting of building materials, where the subsidy only covered land and servicing costs), which beneficiaries would add to and consolidate over time. This incremental way of achieving the right to housing was related to a key assumption in the policy that beneficiaries would be able to access loan finance, which would be spent on improving the house.”70 Already by the end of Mandela’s presidency, this market-based logic had evolved slowly by moving beyond the provision of starter materials toward a more comprehensive promise of delivering completed homes. As a result of being placed lower down on the list of national priorities, the homes that were built were often located on the urban peripheries, where cheaper land was available, but where corresponding services such

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as roads, electricity, water, and sanitation were not readily available, as originally promised in the 1994 White Paper. Additional complaints were raised by housing occupants who were concerned by the dramatic increase in transportation costs for them to commute from distant urban peripheries into the city core where job opportunities were more abundant. The crucial issue of spatial justice was clearly neglected by an overly technocratic approach to housing delivery. Kate Tissington, a senior researcher with the Socio-Economic Rights Institute in South Africa, underscores this point: The location and density of affordable housing makes a significant difference to the overall costs and benefits of housing to South African society over time and that housing that is well-located in urban centers, even though it financially costs much more to build, (due to higher land prices) actually has more benefits for society and costs less over time than does much cheaper housing on the periphery.71

Indeed, many people who receive a state-subsidized house72 eventually sell their homes or decide to rent them out illegally, while choosing to remain in more centrally located informal settlements. As one consultant working on Cornubia for the eThekwini department of housing told me, “There is often times resistance from people that are living in the far south to be relocated here because they live in squat camps because they can find work closer to where they’re living. Or they’ve got a social structure that they’re reliant on and they prefer to go with it.”73 Although the overall delivery numbers might appear impressive, the location, quality, and size of the homes were all problematic, while the way the homes were delivered reflected a technocratic approach that was compartmentalized off from the central issue of land reform in the countryside. While the ANC boasted of approving the construction of 3 million low-income homes by 2007, and 4 million by 2022, the criticisms of the policy’s short-sighted, segregated approach to housing are raising several important issues, the most glaring of which is arguably the unfulfilled promise of land reform. As Tissington noted, “the government often notes that the backlog is increasing due to rapid urbanization, amongst other factors. It currently estimates the backlog at around 2 million units.”74 The steady growth in the housing backlog since then simply underscores the scale of the problem and threatens to undermine

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any of the temporary gains that housing construction and subsidies have achieved to-date. A decade after the government penned its original White Paper on Housing, South Africa was witnessing a massive “rebellion of the poor” with some of the highest rates of urban unrest in the world.75 In this context, the National Department of Housing (later renamed the Department of Human Settlements) signaled a comprehensive shift in policy with the announcement of its “Breaking New Ground” report in 2004. Part of BNG’s shift included a recognition by the ANC that local government should take the initiative away from the private sector with regard to developmental initiatives. The reasons for the shift to local government were arguably multiple and complex. According to Charlton and Kihato, the reasons for this include a combination of the following: a move towards the creation of a strong local state more generally after 1999; the political imperative of local government councilors to gain greater influence over a visible aspect of state delivery; the need for spatial and programmatic alignment with integrated development planning (particularly with respect to the delivery of bulk services); reaction to the negative perceptions of the white construction industry; a concern for getting the best deal for beneficiaries through maximizing the value of the subsidy and perceptions of poor construction and abuse by private developers; the withdrawal of private sector actors from low-income housing delivery due to tightening environmental regulations; delays in township registration and transfer of title deeds; and increasing financial risk. Some saw this shift to state control of housing delivery as a positive move that would reduce the interest of the private sector in housing and enable a strong, development-orientated local state. Others, however argued that the shift was due to the fact that private developers had struggled to make profits from low-cost housing projects and wanted to be free of such obligations.76

The new BNG policy emphasized a need for government to focus more on quality than quantity, while paying greater attention to the process of home allocation rather than the mere ends of delivery. This was supposed to entail a larger participatory role for community members most directly affected by housing initiatives, while seeking to go beyond the allocation of a set number of homes toward the total eradication of slums by the year 2014.77 Ten years later, the problem of slums not only persists, but also has grown in each major metropolitan area of the country.

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This underscores the limits of a purely legalistic or policy-based approach to social change in housing, as legal scholar Tshepo Madlingozi has argued in his critique of constitutional fetishism.78 This critique is shared by the leading non-profit organization working to support grassroots social movements among shack dwellers in South Africa, the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI). SERI’s executive director, Nomzamo Zondo, has been at the forefront of such efforts. SERI uses the court system as just one prong in a broader struggle for social justice, alongside direct support for mobilizations among the poor and rigorous policy reports that are not subject to the usual forms of state capture as academic policy work often is through its funding mechanisms and revolving doors. As Zondo recently stated: “2021 is the year our constitution turned a quarter of a century, which provides us with a good opportunity to reflect on the relevance of the constitution and its ambitions, especially its inefficiency in transforming our country into a country that is improving the quality of life of everyone living in it.”79 If the constitution has proven to be an inadequate vehicle for genuine social transformation absent mass mobilization, so too have the respective iterations of supposedly progressive housing policy. As Marie Huchzermeyer—arguably the leading scholar of informal settlements in Africa, and one of the most supportive academics of social movements and everyday community mobilizations based in shack communities—explains, the slum eradication language of BNG was adopted from the United Nation’s own Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).80 The MDGs were clearly targeting slums for eradication with the idea of providing alternative accommodation for people forced to live in shacks. Unfortunately, the language of “slum eradication” was adopted by governments around the world, including South Africa, in a manner that focused exclusively on beautification through removal of the “unsightly” shacks, rather than on improving the lives of shack dwellers by providing them with more secure living conditions. The BNG document also aimed to better integrate the diverse aspects of city planning within the new approach to housing. Economic development, employment, and spatial planning would now be considered alongside housing in order to avoid some of the shortcomings of the earlier approach to housing delivery. Arguably the two key innovations in policy included in the BNG revolved around the emphasis upon local government as the lead actor in delivery and the recognition of in situ upgrading as a valid approach to new housing construction. The primacy

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assigned to local government was intended to represent a shift away from a supply-driven approach where the private sector fills a market gap in low-income housing with a demand-driven approach where municipal governments actively plan the spatial layout of housing initiatives while paying attention to the qualitative nature of housing requirements in their specific locales. The emphasis upon in situ upgrading entailed “the recognition and permanent incorporation of informally developed neighborhoods into the city.”81 In situ upgrading has long been a central demand of many social movements organized around housing issues. Longtime Abahlali leader and spokesperson S’bu Zikode rearticulated this demand in an address to the Department of Human Settlements national meeting on upgrading informal settlements in Cape Town in 2013. “There are some cases when residents of a shack settlement might choose relocation to a nearby and well-located site chosen with and not for the residents,” admitted Zikode. “This might happen if, for example, people are living on a dangerous site such as a riverbank or a site with which they are not comfortable, such as a graveyard. However in most cases people prefer in situ upgrading to relocation.”82 Yet, the fact that BNG incorporated movement demands for a marginalization of the profit-motive and a recognition of the need for in situ upgrading in its new policy has born little practical fruit in the actual implementation of housing developments throughout the country. This is best encapsulated in the city of Durban through the municipality’s flagship housing development for the poor, Cornubia.

4.7 The Evolution of Post-Apartheid Housing: The “Promised Land” of Cornubia Cornubia is located in northern Durban, just beyond the city’s old pre1994 boundaries. This is the corporate heartland of sugar cane production in South Africa, so this land is former sugar plantation land. Globally, the sugar industry played a central role in the violent rise of capitalism. As Cedric Robinson and others have argued, sugar cane cultivation grew symbiotically with slave labor, first in the islands to the southwest of Portugal and off the western coast of Africa: Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Azores.83 In the Americas, together with tobacco and cotton, sugar formed a triumvirate of crucial commodities that were cultivated by enslaved Indigenous people and then primarily by enslaved African workers and their descendants. In his definitive global study of sugar,

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Sweetness and Power, Sindey Mintz explained that “by no later than 1800, sugar had become a necessity—albeit a costly and rare one—in the diet of every English person; by 1900, it was supplying nearly one-fifth of the calories in the English diet.”84 In the early-to-mid 1800s in Natal, however, white settlers were exporting meat and ivory, and had to import their sugar.85 But the sugar industry began to take root in the region in the 1850s and 1860s, really taking off in the 1890s after Cuba and Brazil became the last countries to abolish slavery in the Americas in 1886 and 1888, respectively. Thereafter, sugar fundamentally changed the landscape, demographics, and political economy of the province. Thus, as Peter Hall and Glen Robins pointed out in 2002: “It is no accident that Tongaat-Hulett, a sugar company, is the major owner of land to the north and west of the city and that future expansion of the city will take place on former sugar-cane land.”86 This means that a long history of land grabs and indentured labor used to generate tremendous profits for the sugar industry is not at all interrupted by contemporary developmental plans. To the contrary, these same sugar companies now stand to continue profiting by engaging in public–private partnerships with the state geared toward property development. The area where Cornubia sits is now firmly within the post-2001 expanded Unicity, the eThekwini Metropolitan Area. It lies approximately three kilometers inland from the coast and is wedged just north of where the N2 and R-102 highways intersect. The roads serve as natural barriers between Umhlanga, a predominantly white middle- and upperclass community to the south-east, Mount Edgecombe, a golf course and gated community to the south, and the historically Indian township of Phoenix and the Indian community of Verulam to the West and North. Located at the intersection of these historically segregated communities, the development was initially pitched as an integrated neighborhood across class and race. By resettling some of the city’s poorest black African residents there, planners promised Cornubia would contribute to the national goal of desegregating South Africa’s cities. As part of this effort, the importance of the expansion of municipal boundaries to include Umhlanga cannot be overstated. As I argued earlier, this allows the municipality to capture the tax base of an otherwise runaway white community, while harnessing the location of Umhlanga—the largest shopping mall in the entire city is situated here—as part of a broader economic growth pole to provide nearby economic opportunities for future residents of Cornubia.

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When Mayor Mlaba first announced plans for the housing development in late 2005, he proclaimed that the land required for housing would be obtained based on a mutual understanding with the landowner, Tongaat Hulett, the largest sugar cane company and property developer in the area. Initial press reports and statements by employees of Tongaat made it appear as though there was already a comfortable agreement between the ANC-dominated municipality and the property arm of Tongaat that controlled the land, known as Moreland until 2010. A 2005 article in the local newspaper The Mercury proclaimed: “The land is owned by Moreland Developments, part of the Tongaat-Hulett Group. Moreland is in full support of the project and recognises the land is ‘uniquely positioned to make a key strategic contribution to the consolidation and integration’ of the area.”87 Yet, it is clear that the relationship between the government and the private landowner remained far from cordial as the project progressed. The main governmental group articulating opposition from the start was the Democratic Alliance (DA), the largest opposition party in both local and national politics. “The DA’s Lyn Ploos van Amstel said she was “outraged” at the plan because it had not been put to council. ‘The mayor has bypassed the council and he has to know that this plan is going to be controversial as it is going to affect property prices in bordering areas,’ she said.”88 The base of the DA is rooted historically in white liberal communities who supported the Democratic Party, operating uncomfortably from within the apartheid government but against the ruling National Party. In 2000, however, the Democratic Party became the Democratic Alliance after it merged briefly with the New National Party, a reconfiguration of the old apartheid stalwart. Since 2000, it has worked tirelessly to dispel the image that it is a predominantly white party, representing the interests of a minority group clinging to the vestiges of apartheid-era privileges. It has been most successful, however, in carving out support from colored and Indian constituencies nationally, dividing the coalition around a broadly defined “blackness” that dated to Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement.89 The Western Cape has been its strongest support base, the very province that contains the least number of black (“African”) residents. The DA has grown largely through a discourse of individual responsibility and the necessity to downsize the supposed nanny state the ANC has created. The DA is even more supportive of neoliberal policies than the ANC. The DA also uses the accusations of corruption against many ANC members to claim that it would fight for a clean and transparent

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government. The reality of their support base, however, means that the DA is an even stronger supporter of white capital in the country than the ANC, although both go to lengths to avoid endangering the interests of the many white dominated businesses throughout the country. Many of the most prominent white firms departed South Africa after the end of apartheid, moving their headquarters to the London stock exchange and in the process gutting the country of a massive source of tax income. Those that remained did so on the condition that the ANC would not adopt radical policies geared at nationalizing industries and redistributing land and wealth, particularly across race lines. The ANC has therefore been caught in a bind between cracking down on the legacy of apartheid acquired wealth and the continued necessity to rely upon white capital as a tax base and as a powerful constituency that tolerates their rule even while it denounces them in public. Tongaat Hulett is precisely one of those firms that acquired its wealth and power in the colonial and apartheid eras, and that the DA defends. So, although initial reports on Cornubia stated that an agreement had been reached between the company and the municipal government led by the ANC, the reality was vastly different. Public statements proclaimed Tongaat Hulett’s support for the project, but in private its board members were panicking. On August 20, 2008, the front page of The Mercury newspaper read “City threatens big land grab,” and began an article with the following statement: “The eThekwini Municipality yesterday threatened to expropriate 1,200 ha of Tongaat-Hulett Developmentsowned sugar cane fields to fast-track a massive low-income integrated housing development near Umhlanga.”90 The issue of land expropriation was already in the public eye, in part because of the unresolved nature of the issue in the country, but more prominently because of the ongoing land reform taking place in Zimbabwe, reported on in the South African and western press as essentially an attack on white people.91 But Tongaat intransigence had apparently led the city to threaten expropriation. “It emerged from a report presented to the municipality’s executive committee, and elaborated upon at a subsequent ANC press conference, that councilors are frustrated by the pace of negotiations over the giant development.”92 The precise reasons for the lack of progress were revealing; Tongaat was worried by the number of low-income homes the city hoped to place adjacent to the middle- and upper-income neighborhoods they had already put so much effort into developing. “According to sources close

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to the negotiations, one of the biggest areas of contention was the municipality’s insistence on having 15 000 low-cost houses. Tongaat-Hulett was insisting on a fully integrated development comprising many different land uses, and to do this effectively it was necessary to decide on the number of low-cost houses as the development was planned in greater detail.”93 The language of “integrated development” is particularly interesting here, because it appears to operate as code for supposed racial and class “diversity,” meaning that space in Cornubia would be created for middleand upper-income homeowners, rather than just low-income people. On the one hand, this is part of a larger global trend in public housing to create integrated communities as an ethical project. Inspired by a New Urbanist ideology, the Hope VI public housing plan in the United States operated explicitly under this model, with the problematic justification that poor families would benefit from being exposed to the supposed work ethic and general high morality of middle-class families. On the other hand, from a property developers’ perspective, the insistence upon limiting the number of low-income homes is part of a broader profitdriven strategy to not drive general home prices down and to create more room in the overall project of Cornubia for off-shoot profit-seeking ventures that Tongaat would clearly benefit from. Karen Petersen, who served as project manager of Cornubia for Tongaat Hulett between 2006 and 2012, made it clear to me that the municipal government and Tongaat were at loggerheads in the early years of the initiative. “There were expropriation threats. They [municipal government] said, we’re keeping all the best land, you got it through bad means, it’s the people’s land.”94 Petersen acknowledges the historical backdrop to the conversation, and the sense that Tongaat acquired its land at a time when it was extremely difficult for anyone not classified as white, and impossible for Africans living outside Bantustans, to own land. The reference to the “people’s land” harkens back to the Freedom Charter adopted by the ANC at the Congress of the People in 1955, and which declared triumphantly: “The land shall be shared among those who work it! Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger.” The charter even included a provision on land rights acquired through occupation, proclaiming “all shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose.” The ANC is thus able to periodically draw upon

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this unfulfilled agenda of the anti-apartheid struggle, although it is one they have been equally complicit in abandoning. Tongaat employee Petersen explained why the firm was so worried about losing their land. “Remember, they were going to expropriate. This would have been over a billion Rand. Even the agriculture and the sugar cane is worth millions sitting in the middle of the city. Our benchmark is 1 million rand a hectare, un-serviced, un-zoned.”95 The open reference to the full market value of the land should not surprise us. The number one concern of Tongaat was clearly the profit potential of the land they owned, not the project to provide poor South Africans with formal housing. And therefore, in order to avoid losing the land to expropriation, Tongaat eventually came to the table with an alternative offer. As Petersen summarizes: So they started in 2008. We decided, look, we can’t go through the expropriation, negative publicity, damage to the brand, you know the whole thing…Let’s see if we can meet them half-way, we know we want to get rid of some land, we know we want to do mixed use and mixed income…So we decided to sell it off, the first time we’ve ever done something so big…It’s now the single largest real estate transaction in the country.96

The open reference to the desire to off-load land together with the expressed concern about negative PR effects that could result as a byproduct of forced expropriation represents the fact that Tongaat is almost embarrassed to own so much land because the land was acquired by a white firm first under colonial South Africa and later under an institutionally racist apartheid government. Tongaat’s ongoing agenda includes property development as one way to off-load some of the land they own so as not to highlight the extreme contradiction between the ongoing concentrated wealth held by apartheid-era firms on the one hand, and landlessness among Africans on the other hand. While it certainly is a large transaction—totaling 659 hectares—the fact that it remains the largest sale of land in the country is representative of the incredibly slow pace of land changing hands from the historical beneficiaries of apartheid to its historical victims. The expressed interest in working on a “mixed-use”—commercial, industrial, residential—development is somewhat complicated, given that this could also be interpreted as a strategy by Tongaat to generate even more revenue by selling off land to powerful commercial and industrial

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firms that would pay a higher rate for properly zoned land than residential developers. Nonetheless, this is also a central aspect of the Cornubia vision, and for good reason. Cornubia represents an overall shift in the national housing strategy following the Breaking New Ground policy of 2004. Under BNG, “for the first time, housing policy enabled a municipality…to quantify its cost and to apply for the relevant amount of funding for land purchase, land rehabilitation, introduction of services and provision of basic social and economic facilities.”97 This represented a shift away from the compartmentalized approach to plopping down public housing in the urban peripheries as a supposed solution to homelessness and informal settlements. Instead, the new policy was intended to address the fact that human settlements required an integrated approach that took into consideration the fact that people chose to live in particular areas because of access to services and income opportunities. Cornubia’s mixed-use approach would represent one attempt to provide a number of services and employment opportunities on-site and should therefore be seen as a positive step in the evolution of a national housing policy that understands the developmental concerns of economic growth as socially and spatially intertwined with quality-of-life issues regarding formal housing. As Fedaya Ebrahim, a consultant for the Durban municipality’s housing department, told me, previously the poorest in the poor were dumped in any land that they could find. More often than not it was land that was out of the CBD [Central Business District] or away from housing, away from economical opportunities, so it created hardship for people. Besides just having a housing project, there was no social facilities, no schools, no sports facilities, no retail opportunities, things like that. So Cornubia seeks to address all of that.98

But Tongaat’s representatives within the Cornubia project were not shy about admitting where their own interests lay with regard to their informal partnership with the municipality. Not only was it clear from Petersen’s remarks that the profit-motive remained the firm’s primary objective, but other issues also emerged in our conversation that painted an even more problematic picture of the organization playing a central role in one of South Africa’s flagship public housing initiatives. Because Cornubia is an unofficial partnership between the firm and the municipal government, roughly half the land remains under Tongaat’s ownership,

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which they will prepare for sale to industrial and commercial buyers, as well as for middle or upper-income residential developments. Pointing to the half of Cornubia land that was sold to the city, Petersen commented, “This land here isn’t the greatest. So, it started off, so we got willing buyer, willing seller…So this land went for 725,000 Rand per hectare. It’s not the best, it’s shitty land.” Petersen was frank in her admission that Tongaat had pushed the worst land into the city’s hands, and that they received their value’s worth at full market rate for the sub-par land intended to be the site of low-income houses for shack dwellers. “Willing buyer, willing seller” is the term the ANC adopted for the land reform plan that was never really land reform. It amounted to a policy based entirely on free market principles. If someone wanted to sell land, and they found a willing buyer, then land could exchange hands. Such a policy of land reform is effectively absent any genuine reform. Or, as abolitionists have argued in other contexts, it is a perfect example of reform as the changing same. Despite the origins of the Cornubia development in a massive marketrate transfer of wealth from the government to a private firm in exchange for “shitty land,” the project’s sheer scale and ambitious plan still attracted national admiration. Cornubia is the “largest greenfield, mixeduse, mixed-income project in, we say in the country, but probably in the province…It’s a presidential lead project now, and it won the best priority project in KwaZulu-Natal.” The focus on Cornubia results not only from its attempts “to address the legacy of apartheid planning,” as Petersen claimed. It has garnered attention first and foremost because it seeks to address the plight of shack dwellers on a massive and all-encompassing scale. The years of Cornubia’s birth corresponded with national attention given to shack settlements in part because South Africa was preparing to host the 2010 World Cup and the government became self-conscious about tourists viewing slums as a blight on an otherwise pristine landscape. The discourse on slum eradication was adopted by the provincial government, and Cornubia was initially intended to form a part of that initiative. As Petersen elaborated, “eThekwini has informal settlements, like any other city. So where were we going to move people? Cornubia can form part of the slum clearance program. It’s part of the whole eradication of slums. 2005–2009. They’ve sort of lost focus now, it’s not really the aim anymore.”99 “Slum eradication” is itself an extremely problematic discourse that has been taken up by governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

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Its problems lie in the profound ambiguity of the term “eradication”: is the goal simply to remove “slums” from the urban landscape to the benefit of middle-class residents and privileged tourists, or is the aim to actually improve the lives of shack dwellers by providing them with improved housing? While the UN deployed the phrase with the latter goal in mind, its use of this term has led to a slippage in meaning and an appropriation of the project by anti-poor legislators. Representing this slippage in the discourse, the provincial government of KwaZulu-Natal aimed to pass an “Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act” in 2007 as the country prepared to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The bill contained a range of frightening mandates, including: requiring landowners to take a proactive role in militarizing their relationship to squatters in order to prevent new slum growth; promising to shift slum dwellers to temporary transit camps for indefinite time periods, reminiscent of apartheid relocation schemes; and ensuring that municipalities would play an active role in meeting national rates of slum evictions, without necessarily building proper housing for the slum residents being evicted.100 Abahlali decided to launch an all-out discursive and legal attack on this proposed legislation beginning in 2006. The provincial government ignored Abahlali’s interventions at every step of the process, and eventually passed the bill in June 2007. The government failed to respond to a written critique submitted by the International Labor Research and Information Group in Cape Town on behalf of community members living in informal settlements in Cape Town, and it ignored an Abahlali delegation sent to the parliament to testify on the bill’s problems. The Premier of KwaZulu-Natal took the decision to enact the bill in August 2007, despite additional appeals from Abahlali and a variety of organizations they had mobilized around the issue. Abahlali took its case to the constitutional court, building on the strength of a coalition of other shack dweller organizations and NGOs from around the country. The court’s decision in late 2009, more than two years later, represented a landmark victory for Abahlali and shack dwellers all over South Africa. In pointing out internal contradictions in the bill, as well as inconsistencies with regard to existing constitutional rights around housing and evictions, the decision essentially gutted the core components of the bill, disabling it in the hands of KwaZuluNatal administrators as well as other provincial officials hoping to enact similar legislation. The decision was a tremendous triumph for Abahlali

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and represented one of the few successful models for grassroots-led mobilization of middle-class expertise while ensuring that those most affected by the legislation remained in ultimate control of the battle with the state. Cornubia was thus initially framed in this important context, around the most ameliorative components of slum eradication. But as Petersen remarks, even though Cornubia was intended to be a rare example of actual housing provision for the displaced, this initial intention has “lost focus now.” Within the larger context of my conversation with Ms. Petersen, it became clear that this statement reflected the fact that Cornubia was slowly becoming a project geared toward economic growth for the region as a whole, part of a 50-year plan to stretch the development northwards all the way up to the new King Shaka airport and beyond.101 Pointing out the town of Ballito toward the north, 30 km north of Umhlanga and a full 45 km north of downtown Durban, Petersen projected that the Cornubia development would serve simply as a pilot project of a strategically planned economic zone that would “grow all along this corridor, very likely you know in the next 50 to 100 years.” This broader initiative would be clearly geared toward the imperative of business, without any clear application to the needs of the roughly 200,000 families in Durban confined to informal settlements. And since Cornubia only promised to build approximately 12,500 homes for this most vulnerable sector of the city, at best it will make a small dent in the overall problem. Finally, the way the new homes at Cornubia would be allocated swiftly became a matter of disgruntlement. In early 2013, the municipality was forced to admit that no housing list had ever been made. Housing lists are claimed to be the most common method of public home allocation in the country, because they can be presented as relatively fair because priority is allocated according to the date your name was added to the list. Even where housing lists do exist, the process of allocation has been rife with accusations of corruption, something Abahlali has long insisted. Petersen acknowledged the problem in responding to my query about how the homes at Cornubia were going to be allocated. According to her, the supposed criteria for receiving a home were convoluted: “You’ve got to be an informal settler where there’s a bit of danger and slides or fire or whatever, number one. And you have to earn under 3,500R. I think women, there’s certain criteria, women, the widowed, there’s pensions, a whole lot of stuff.” The announcement that the housing list didn’t even exist, and that a more ambiguous emphasis upon extreme precarity

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and environmental risk would steer allocation priorities generated great resentment among shack dwellers in the city. Worse yet, the potential for ongoing corruption and clientelism was openly acknowledged even by the project directors. Mused Petersen, “And obviously it’s politically driven, you know? ANC says this, IFP says this, DA says this, it’s pathetic really. But the ruling party will win, for sure…I wouldn’t be surprised if those informal settlements are all sitting in ANC wards.”102

4.8 Social Movements and the Developmental State The mobilizing strategies that movements adopt in South Africa are clearly far more complex than those proposed by anarchists or socialists, which typically revolve around pro- or anti-statist positions. The situation is arguably not as simple as some movements in Latin America sometimes present it: “non-domination” remains a vague and perhaps inadequate goal, at least in the South African context, while socialism from above remains infused with a multiplicity of problems such as corruption, authoritarianism, and delivery of development as the quintessential modernizing imperative. Similarly, the progressive project cannot be summarized as a battle against the adoption of neoliberalism as the primary enemy. The ANC is arguably an organization that is thoroughly infused with neoliberal logic. And yet its adoption of a developmental state platform in discourse and (limited) practice is perhaps better represented as a form of “variegated neoliberalization”103 where the project touches down in specific contexts and is altered significantly, sometimes running firmly against the grain of its most dominant ideologies. In this case, while the West has been dismantling housing, South Africa has built around 4 million public homes. The evolution of national housing policy has been a positive thing, and it has included groups like Abahlali sporadically, inviting them to the table at forums to discuss their own vision of public housing in the country. The developmental state project in South Africa has emerged in the wake of the resurgence of movements from below over the past twenty years, most commonly termed “new social movements”104 and a “massive rebellion of the poor,” two distinct formations discussed earlier.105 Cornubia should therefore be understood as the government’s response to movements like Abahlali who have demanded dignified living conditions. The project has successfully incorporated some of the key critiques

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and suggestions of both movements and progressive policy advocates over the past two decades. And yet, one of the central dimensions of BNG policy—that public housing should now be constructed based on the principle of in situ upgrading—is completely absent in Cornubia. The claim that the project will be a crucial part of the attempt to desegregate the old apartheid city is therefore somewhat dubious. Rather, as a result of the combined processes of quiet encroachment and explicit collective mobilization, the existing shack communities that have been penetrating the forbidden quarters of the historically white city are perhaps best suited to the challenge of dismantling apartheid’s sticky urban geographies. The form of state power in South Africa is therefore not simply one that movements merely respond to and are shaped by, as Mahmood Mamdani argued in the context of anti-colonial and post-colonial movements throughout the continent.106 Rather, state power can also be shaped by the forms of movement resistance that confront it from below. It is doubtful whether the ANC would have felt such a strong need to construct a developmental state absent the consistent pressure of movements like Abahlali. This is especially true considering that the ANC’s most serious electoral contender, the Democratic Alliance, consistently promotes a neoliberal discourse, denouncing any attempts by the ruling party to roll out social programs intended to alleviate poverty. Public housing, in the discourse of the DA, operates similarly to the critique issued by Karen Petersen of Tongaat Hulett, who claimed that Cornubia’s housing model for the poor is not a project that can endure over the long term. “BNG is good, [it] gives people home ownership. But it’s unsustainable, it encourages a culture of entitlement—you know “give me,”—because nowhere in any of the other countries do we have this model.” The developmental state in South Africa might also be understood as a response to a global crisis of capitalism. The parallels between 1929 and 2008 prove to be particularly apt in this case. This is a geopolitical crisis, in part representing the decline of US hegemony. But it is also potentially a structural crisis, regarding the limits of extending credit indefinitely in order to ensure capital’s incessant need for 3% compound growth. One key shift, both pre-2008 but especially since then, has been the rise of the state capitalist countries. The rise of BRICS represents both of these tendencies: the geopolitical crisis whereby the United States is losing its unilateral hegemony over global capital, and the response by a variety of actors to the general crisis of capital, taking the form of

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rebuilding a strong state—with certain social redistributive programs—as a vehicle for ensuring the stability of capitalist growth rates over the long term. Whether this state capitalist, developmental model will be sustainable remains under question.107 Cornubia is a project that is just now starting to deliver houses. While it represents a progressive shift in terms of overall housing policy in the country, the way in which the project advanced proves that the ANC’s approach to housing and the redistributive components of the developmental state is still plagued by a number of shortcomings, some of which reproduce the very problem they are intended to resolve. None of this should stop us from recognizing that Cornubia can partially be viewed as a victory of movements like Abahlali who placed the issue of housing and land at the center of the national agenda and has continuously forced the ANC to develop programs geared toward meeting the needs of the poorest in the country.

4.9

Which Developmental State?

Exactly what developmental model South Africa is adopting is open for debate. The Asian Tiger countries—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore—were historically the most prominent reference point for development experts, usually because of their export-led growth. In more recent discussions, China is commonly seen as the new model for a developmental state in South Africa and beyond, despite its own problems with regard to undemocratic institutions, exploitative industries, environmental destruction, and rising inequality. The agrarian basis for the Asian developmental states—where serious land reform preceded the developmental takeoff—is arguably the most neglected feature of a developmental discourse in South Africa. As Gillian Hart explains, Small-scale Taiwanese industrialists are a direct product of redistributive land reforms in the late 1940s and early 1950s that broke the power of the landlord class, transformed agrarian relations, and helped to create the conditions for rapid rural industrialization. The same is true of Mainland China, where spectacular industrial growth since the mid-1980s has taken place largely in villages and small towns. In short, redistribution of land and other resources—driven originally by Mao Tse-tung’s mobilization of the Chinese peasantry in the first half of the 20th century—underpinned the massive mobilization of low-wage labor in Taiwan and China, operating in effect as a social wage. By the same token, they represent what

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appear as distinctively ‘non-Western’ trajectories of industrial accumulation without dispossession of peasant-workers from the land—trajectories that have, since the 1970s, fundamentally defined the conditions of global competition.108

The African experience is even more marginal as a source for comparative developmental trajectories, despite the examples discussed above of both colonial and post-colonial developmental states.109 Most important for our discussion, questions of social policy are finally rising to the fore of debates regarding the developmental state, as education, gender, healthcare, equality, redistribution, reproductive labor, and democracy all emerge as crucial components in rethinking the developmental state model.110 Adequate housing, planned in tandem with broader questions of livelihood, spatial justice, and participatory processes, can clearly become a central feature of any strong developmental state. Absent a parallel discussion of land reform, however, the entire discussion threatens to reproduce the very problems it seeks to solve. The example of Cornubia, planned informally together with the largest landowner in the area, Tongaat Hulett, risks exacerbating this problem. If the project is guided by and enriches the very constituency that genuine land reform might force to cede power—landed white capital—does it not risk reproducing the very problem it seeks to alleviate in landless and precarious black living conditions? Further, the broader model of a developmental state must be rethought with greater attention to historical and geographical specificities. Examples from the Asian or European past cannot be seamlessly cut and pasted into an African future, as Hein Marais argues: The social welfare states of the twentieth century shared three definitive features: machine-based industrial development, which generated powerful, concentrated social forces (chiefly workers’ movements and organization of capital) and efficient, relatively predictable state bureaucracies. In combination, these made possible the social compacts that would anchor social-welfare states. These same features eventually characterized the most eye-catching developmental states of the twentieth century. But it is highly doubtful whether they remain a viable basis today. Stereotypes of economic development in the south (especially in Asia but also in South Africa) highlight the manufacturing sector as an engine of growth and source of

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mass employment. But the proportion of overall jobs created in manufacturing is shrinking—in both the industrialized north and the industrializing south.111

Most concerning is the fact that the discourse around a developmental state in South Africa seems to have adopted the premise of a Development project as a necessary political platform without ever gesturing toward the crucial critiques of Development that emerged in the 1990s and that eventually adopted a post-developmentalist position.112 Ben Turok, a long-time ANC stalwart and former Member of Parliament who also participated in the drafting of the Freedom Charter in 1955, makes no reference to this important body of literature in his 2012 overview of the topic, Development in a Divided Country. Perhaps the most significant nuances in Turok’s study, as well as within the overall adoption of a developmentalist discourse in post-apartheid South Africa, concerns the recognition of the challenge of constructing a developmental state in a democratic context, and the necessity to give more autonomy to local government in the elaboration of specific developmental projects. While the former is an important recognition of the differences between the more authoritarian East Asian model of a developmental state and the contemporary South African context, the latter adoption of localism probably represents globalization’s fracturing of national scales more than it does a “post-developmental” effort to give primacy to the local as a site of community autonomy.113 Arguing that the developmental state needs to be entirely reconfigured in twenty-first-century South Africa, Marais puts forward the models of Kerala and Porto Alegre as the most appropriate parallels to be drawn from. The local focus is intriguing and corresponds to the ANC’s emphasis upon local governmental autonomy over municipal development programs. The democratic and participatory basis of both models also serves as an inspiring parallel to Abahlali’s own aim of “bringing the state closer to the people.” And the focus on social justice and autonomy within each model creates space to broaden the discussion beyond the imperative of economic growth rates toward quality-of-life issues such as housing. Most important for our purposes, “social movements in Kerala and Porto Alegre retained their autonomy from the state (without yielding their influence) and were able to help shape and drive processes of democratic decentralization.”114 Abahlali has clearly operated with a very similar agenda: insisting upon maintaining its organizational autonomy,

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while refusing to ignore the importance of the state and its corresponding developmental initiatives. But while the actions of the group have clearly been influential in the elaboration of initiatives such as Cornubia, their direct participation, and inclusion in the process, especially in the crucial and controversial step of allocating actual homes, has been a neglected feature of the South African experience so far. But perhaps there are also broader questions to be asked of the resurgence of the developmental discourse in post-apartheid South Africa. A more rigorous theorization of the state itself, and the possibilities for intervention in the state apparatuses, is largely lacking from the discussion. Here, attention should be given to historical critiques that identified the Soviet Union not as an oppositional socialist model, but rather as the general form of state capitalism, and a model for the developmental state broadly conceived.115 In the 1968 preface to the third edition of State Capitalism and World Revolution, CLR James notes: What is most often overlooked by those who accept entirely or in part the conception that the Soviet Union and its related states are fundamentally capitalist is that this analysis is an analysis of capitalist society, not Russian society. The conclusions flowing from this analysis have the greatest relevance in understanding the United States as well as the Soviet Union, Great Britain as well as Poland, France as well as China, and, of course, the working class of all these countries.116

Antonio Negri, writing in the same conjuncture of 1960s global revolt followed by 1970s capitalist revanchism, outlined a critique of this model of a “Planner State,” Keynes’s brilliant method for simultaneously harnessing and containing working class revolt as a constitutive part of the State-Capital relation. This then, is how we can sum up the spirit of the theory of effective demand: it assumes class struggle, and sets out to resolve it, on a day-today basis, in ways that are favorable to capitalist development. If we now take a closer look at the problem at hand, that is, how the experience of 1929 led to changes in the structure of the State, we can see how radical was Keynes’ contribution. The transformation of the capitalist State lay not only in the way its capacity for intervention was extended throughout the whole of society, but also in the way that its structures had to reflect the impact of the working class.117

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Building on this work in the contemporary moment, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nielson remind us that the emergence of what Negri terms the Planner State coincided with “the age of the ‘developmental state’… ‘Planning’ ceased to be only a ‘socialist’ concept. It became a magical word of the Cold War decades.”118 Today, a key question facing the South African resurgence of a developmental state concerns the capability of the state to guide from above—even if through a decentered model based in specific localities— the process of economic growth together with the social redistribution of wealth. What is emerging in the contemporary moment are policies that are best cast as redevelopmental, because they are seeking to redeploy the developmental logic of a bygone age in a fundamentally changed context. Emerging as they do in the wake of decades of neoliberal policies, the redevelopmental state is a simultaneous recognition of the intractable contradictions and shortcomings of neoliberal policy and a refusal to entirely give up on the neoliberal imperative of economic growth at all costs. As such, redevelopmental policies offer a window into alter-globalization from above—how developing states throughout the global south are seeking to chart an alternative model of globalization that merely reforms rather than boldly abandons neoliberalism. As Doshi cogently puts it, Whereas Northern theories of urban redevelopment governance are less attentive to the specificities of post-colonial cities and developmental state scholarship has not traditionally focused on urban space, the lens of redevelopment—in the dual sense of repeating and remaking post-colonial development—offers an alternative and dynamic spatial theory of rule for the contemporary era.119

What will be the continued impact of those forms of resistance from below that Keynes sought to both harness and contain through an abandonment of strict laissez faire theory? If formal housing projects such as Cornubia are part of one state strategy to placate and contain working class resistance, then how do we explain the periodic repressive responses by the state to oppositional movements like Abahlali? In attempting to answer this question, we reveal a theoretical impasse between the logics of incorporative inclusion through Development and state planning on the one hand, and the exclusionary impulse of violent repression on the other hand. This debate takes us explicitly beyond the boundaries of state

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strategies at movement containment and co-optation toward a state that proclaims sole authority over the terrain of the political and the exceptional right to exert force. This is the issue I turn to in the following chapter.

Notes 1. 2012 Development in a Divided Country, 30–31. 2. 2014 “Worlding the South: Toward a Post-Colonial Urban Theory”, 14. 3. 2012 Territories in Resistance, 191. 4. Pithouse 2006. 5. Verwey 2005. 6. Michael Neocosmos 2007 “Development, Social Citizenship and Human Rights: Re-thinking the Political Core of an Emancipatory Project in Africa.” 7. Sapana Doshi 2019 “The Redevelopmental State: Governing Surplus Life and Land in the Urban Age,” 700. 8. See Richard Ballard 2017, “Prefix as Policy: Megaprojects as South Africa’s Big Idea for Human Settlements,” and Catherine Sutherland, Vicky Sim, Dianne Scott 2015, “Contested Discourses of a mixed-use mega-project: Cornubia, Durban”. 9. See Theresa Enright 2017 “The Political Topology of Urban Uprisings” for an extremely useful account of the relationship between uprisings and changing urban governance. 10. See Zachary Levinson’s 2022 excellent theorization of Delivery as Dispossession for a sense of how the delivery of basic needs such as houses under the newly proclaimed “developmental state” can produce dispossession rather than alleviate it. 11. Gillian Hart has emphasized this point repeatedly and brilliantly. 12. Clyde Woods and Ruth Wilson Gilmore both situate “devolution” in the longer arcs of revanchist racial capitalism and organized abandonment. In his posthumously published 2017 Development Drowned and Reborn, Woods says this of “supply side economics”: “Although this social philosophy has been characterized as devolution, privatization, and neoliberalism, its true origins lie in the 1870s and the effort to eviscerate Radical Reconstruction in favor of the restoration of destitution, dependency,

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and African Americans’ bondage,” 262. In her essay “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” Gilmore argues that “Devolution is partition, sometimes provisional, sometimes more secure,” and that “Racism both connects and differentiates how these categories cohere in both radical and reformist policy prescription,” 479. And in another essay with Craig Gilmore, “Beyond Bratton,” they explore the relationship between the devolution of development is the devolution of the repressive apparatus. “In 2011, the administration of California’s Democratic governor Jerry Brown rolled out a ‘Realignment’ program for the adult criminal justice system. Realignment follows the letter devolution’s underlying principles, and in California’ case, it recapitulates an earlier round that involved care (and sometimes custody) of persons with mental health problems. The vast criminal justice project shifts authority for control and custody of people with particular conviction profiles from Sacramento the state’s fifty-eight counties, accompanied by a rhetoric of ‘closer to home’ that seems amenable to something like more democracy. But as we have seen, the anti-state state is forcefully organized by centralization—ranging from strengthened and technocrat-heavy executive branches to mandatory minimums, through strong central command of police departments of normal life due to criminal records….Ideologically, which is to say both in thought and everyday culture, the experience and normalization of the twin processes, devolution and centralization—patterned as they are by the sensibility of permanent crisis—shape structures of feeling and therefore to a great extent determine the apparent range of socially as well as politically available options. That dynamic, in turn, sheds light on why certain tendencies in scholarship and advocacy have risen to prominence in the dense context of many kinds of analysis and many varieties of advocacy,” 312–313. This is a theme we will turn to in Chapter 4, when we connect the dots between the failed developmental devolution to a combination of local government and private land holders explored in Chapter 3 in the form of Cornubia, with the existential precarity confronting shack dwellers who dare to challenge the failed development projects from below. When poor people challenge this failed development, they often face a devolved repressive apparatus in the form of a combination of local state

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13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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police and privatized hitmen working on behalf of local ANC who deploy them to silence critics when they are accused of corruption. Hart 2009; Chari and Verdery 2009; Sachs 1992. Escobar 1995 Encountering Development, Ferguson 1994 The Anti-Politics Machine. Foucault 2008. Roy, Schrader, and Crane 2015 “‘The Anti-Poverty Hoax’: Development, Pacification, and the Making of community in the global 1960s,” 144, my emphasis. For a parallel analysis of the planner state emerging prior to World War II, see Antonio Negri’s 1967 essay, “Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State,” pp. 23–52 in (1994) Labor of Dionysus, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In this essay, Negri argues that the Keynesian revolution which led to the mid-century welfare state had to be contextualized as the proper response by capital to the 1917 October Revolution and the 1929 global crisis perpetuated by worker struggles from below. Thus, the Planner State in Negri’s work might be read as another theory of the Development project, but one that reverses the relationship between capital and labor by pointing to Development as a project that sought to harness working class autonomy towards the development of capital, rather than allowing it to continue along its threatening path of destruction. For another similar take applied to socialist states, see CLR James’s (1986) State Capitalism and World Revolution, where he argues that the Soviet Union under Stalin had developed a form of “state capitalism” that sought precisely to make a similar intervention as Keynes’ Planner State. Here the aim was to contain rather than support forms of working-class resistance such as the powerful council movement of the Soviets. CLR James 1995 A History of Pan-African Revolt. Cooper 2002 Africa Since 1940. Ibid., 36–37. Neocosmos 2010b, 535. As an important contrast, Neocosmos reminds us that not all states adopted a developmental platform. “The states which were mere extensions of imperialism from an early state (e.g., Zaire, Gabon) were never developmental,” p. 536.

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22. Ibid., 536. 23. Cooper 2002: 53–58. 24. See Siba Grovogui’s 1995 Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law for a useful elaboration of the concept of quasi-sovereignty in the context of apartheid South Africa’s occupation of Namibia. 25. Bill Freund 2013. For a sympathetic yet critical engagement of the work of Bill Freund, and a wonderful account of the power of life histories in Durban, see Sharad Chari 2006 “Life Histories of Race and Space in the Making of Wentworth and Merebank, South Durban.” 26. Freund 2007, Padayachee and Freund 2002. 27. Cameron 2004. 28. Freund 2007, 191. 29. Freund and Padayachee 2002, 186. Sharad Chari points out that early on in Durban’s twentieth century planning efforts, “private interests resisted land-use regulation, let alone planning.” He then goes on to point out how planning eventually nonetheless won out under the cover of biopolitical imperatives. See Chari 2010 “State Racism and Biopolitical Struggle: The Evasive Commons in Twentieth-Century Durban, South Africa” 78. 30. Freund 2013. In a way, Freund’s 2013 argument that the modern developmental state in South Africa is being built on the ruins of the 1940s developmental state initiated by the apartheid government problematizes my central claim in this chapter: that the developmental state in contemporary South Africa should be read as a response to the new social movements which have emerged in the country since 1999. However, I don’t see the two arguments as contradictory for two reasons: first, one can accept my argument in this chapter about the developmental state emerging as a response to contemporary movements using at least two different sets of theories: the primacy of resistance (Hardt and Negri) or the double movement (Polanyi). I am not particularly concerned about which of these two theoretical framings one uses to interpret the findings I present in this chapter. While the primacy of resistance makes the claim that working class resistance simultaneously precedes and calls into being new forms of capitalist exploitation and its corresponding structures of state power, the double movement is a claim for cyclical periods of state

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

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redistribution and relative calm, followed by a period of greater emphasis upon the free market, which generates greater degrees of inequality and in turn greater numbers of social protest. John Pickles first raised some of these issues on the relationship between Polanyi and Negri at a panel examining Polanyi’s work at the 2012 AAG conference in New York. No one in the audience of geographers was able to engage in this important intervention, and it remains clear that more work should be done in this area, perhaps using South African or other case studies as empirical examples to flush out the theoretical stakes. Pithouse 2009. Crush 1995. Makhulu 2010, Marais 2011, Bond 2000. Bond 2000, Desai 2002, Klein 2007. Neocosmos 2010, 538. Within this conjuncture, it is important to note that James Ferguson has engaged in an unstated re-examination of his earlier rigorous critique of development. See his 2015 Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Sahle 2010. Fine 2010. Fine 2010, 108. Padayachee and Freund 2002. Padayachee and Freund 2002, 3. Wooldridge 2012. See Jean-Marie Guehenno 1995 for a classic version of this claim, and Matthew Sparke’s 2005 brilliant rejoinder to such arguments, In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the NationState. 2012 The Economist “Going abroad, the World in their hands: State Capitalism looks outward as well as inward.”. For a wonderful example of what new global relations come to light when Euro-American experiences and theories are decentered, see the excellent collection edited by Elena FiddianQasmiyeh and Patricia Daley 2018 Routledge Handbook of SouthSouth Relations. Cowen and Smith 2009. 2013 BRICS from Below, 14. Ibid., 69.

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49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

Wallerstein The Essential Wallerstein 2000, 99. Wallerstein 2013 “Whose Interests are Served by the BRICS?” Commonwealth 2009, 205. In my reading of Hardt and Negri, the call to examine empire’s world of non-polarity does not operate with quite the same relative erasure of the nation-state that is often leveled at them as a critique, especially from geographers. Even this reference has been misread by geographers, however. Deleuze’s concept of smooth space should be read not as absent differentiation, but as horizontally heterogeneous power against the state’s own vertical homogeneous power. A geographical elaboration of the relationship between deterritorializing smooth space and reterritorializing state spaces remains to be flushed out fully. David Harvey attempts to capture something like this in his distinction, drawing from Giovanni Arrighi, between the “territorial” and the “capitalist” logics of power (2003: 27). Stuart Elden (2005 & 2006) also tries to begin such a conversation. But both Harvey’s and Elden’s analyses are ultimately found wanting, leaving us with the need to provide further examination of the relationship between geography and Empire, and a more rigorous theoretical engagement with Hardt and Negri’s overarching project. Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari speak of both smooth space and striated space together in their analysis of the war machine and the state apparatus, implying that a nonpolar world will not at all be borderless or frictionless. In other words, uneven geographies continue to proliferate, but now along many more borders besides (but still including) those between nation-states. Commonwealth 2009, 223. Ibid. See, for example, Arnold and Pickles 2011, 1618. McDonald 2008. Importantly, this is not always a permanent move, and many migrants unsettle the neat divide between urban and rural positioning by keeping ties to their rural villages and continuing to return there for holidays, births, funerals, and even sometimes for retirement. Urban shack settlements certainly predate this era, but it was in the 1980s that they really started to grow in size as the

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60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

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apartheid spatial divisions came under increasing pressure. As Marie Huchzermeyer has noted in her 2011 Cities with “Slums,” while primarily formally planned, segregated township communities such as Sophiatown, Cato Manor, and District Six are most remembered today as emblematic of urban displacement and destruction, informal settlements also existed in apartheid cities and were also systematically targeted and destroyed. But they are not remembered as part of the narrative of apartheid displacement. Speaking of Cato Manor, Sophiatown, and District Six, Huchzermeyer notes: “Each of these removals generated a rich body of literature, music, and dramatic works that reflected on the political and personal resonances of these ‘clearances’. Each has its museum and is much celebrated today. Less commemorated are the many informal settlement or shanty-town removals that took place under apartheid,” 8. Pithouse 2009, 33. Ibid. Miraftab 2009. Bayat 1997. Ballard 2015, 8. Gigaba and Maharaj 1996. Bayat 1997, 55. S’bu Zikode 2013a “Despite the state’s violence, our fight to escape the mud and fire of South Africa’s slums will continue,” The Guardian, 11 November. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2013/nov/11/south-africa-fight-decent-hou sing-assassination. Quoted in Richard Ballard 2015, “Geographies of Development III: Militancy, Insurgency, Encroachment and Development by the Poor,” Progress in Human Geography. 39(2): 214–224. Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject (1996) remains the central point of reference for this formulation. It requires extensive ongoing engagement, with an eye to how the situation in South Africa may have changed since the book’s release. In this work, I seek to extend rather than merely replicate his insights. Tissington 2011 A Resource Guide to Housing in South Africa: 1994–2010, 59. Charlton and Kihato, quoted in Tissington, 61. On finance and land more generally, with particular attention to agriculture in

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71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89.

90.

New Zealand and Tanzania, see Stefan Ouma 2020 Farming as Financial Asset. Tissington, 62. These homes are commonly referred to as “RDP houses,” named after the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme. Fedaya Ebrahim, Interview, August 2013. Tissington, 61. Alexander 2010 “Rebellion of the Poor”. Tissington 2011, 64. Tissington 2011, 66. 2017 “Social Justice and Neo-Apartheid Constitutionalism.” “Nomzamo Zondo: Executive Director Message” https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=hjNnTa2Ia7g, my emphasis. Huchzermeyer 2011, 23–46. Huchzermeyer 2011, 69. Zikode 2013b. Robinson 2000 Black Marxism, 110. 1985, 6. Keegan 1996 Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order, 206. As Keegan elaborates on the importance of Natal: “It was in Natal, for the first time, that white rule was deliberately imposed on a large population of Africans living in a homestead economy. Here the essential instruments of coercion and control, which would later be elaborated elsewhere in southern Africa, were first developed. And it was here too, earlier than elsewhere, that there first developed that parasitic relationship between a colonial society and its black supplies of peasant produce, and between white absentee landowners and rent-paying African homesteads,” 207. “Economic Development for a New Era,” 48. Verwey, 1. Ibid. For an early prescient account of post-apartheid anti-blackness among the colored population, see Grant Farred 2000 “Better the Devil You Know?” For more on the politics of the colored and Indian communities in Durban, see Sharad Chari 2013 “Detritus in Durban.” Savides, 1.

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91. Sam Moyo’s extensive work on land reform in Zimbabwe is the most reliable source. It also stands at cross purposes with the way South African and Western discourses around Zimbabwe’s land reform process came to function as a proxy for the persistence of global anti-blackness and the threat of race. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Interview with Karen Petersen, July 2013. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. Huchzermeyer 2011, 116. 98. Interview with Fedaya Ebrahim August 2013. 99. Interview with Karen Petersen July 2013. 100. Huchzermeyer 204–205. 101. For more on this growth corridor, see Todes 2017 “Shaping Peripheral Growth?” and Todes and Houghton 2021 “Economies and Employment in Growing and Declining Urban Peripheries in South Africa.” 102. Interview with Karen Petersen July 2013. 103. Brenner, Peck, Theodore 2010. 104. Gibson 2006, Ballard et al. 2006. 105. Alexander 2012. 106. 1996 Citizen and Subject. 107. Alongside this problematic return of the “developmental state,” other important discursive reference points grappling with the supposed possibilities contained in resurgent forms of capitalist development in Africa in the current conjuncture include “Africa rising” and “Africapitalism.” For the latter, see Stefan Ouma’s 2019 “Africapitalism: A Critical Genealogy and Assessment” for a rigorous dismantling of this discourse. 108. 2002, 10-11. 109. Marais 2011, 340–342. 110. Marais 2011, 342–343. 111. Marais 2011, 344. 112. Escobar 1992. 113. Escobar 2001. 114. Marais 2011, 355. 115. CLR James 1986. 116. CLR James 1986, xxiv.

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117. Hardt & Negri 1994 Labor of Dionysus, 45. 118. Mezzadra and Neilson Border as Method, 2013, 46. In this regard, see also the recent and extensive collaborative work of Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon on “The New State Capitalism.” 119. Sapana Doshi 2019 “The Redevelopmental State,” 680.

CHAPTER 5

Precarity and Autonomy: Life and Death in the Shacks

The mass of propertyless workers—the utterly precarious position of labor—power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life—presupposes the world market through competition. Karl Marx1 When I first arrived in South Africa in 1989, I was a Marxist. Toward the end of 1996, two and half years after Nelson Mandela came to power, I left not knowing what I was. Frank Wilderson2 Why are we so focused only on our Black lives? Why aren’t we thinking of the Black lives across the globe? Patrisse Cullors3

This chapter is an expanded and revised version of a chapter that originally appeared as “Precarity, Surplus, and the Urban Political: Shack Life in South Africa,” 189–208 in the edited volume by Theresa Enright and Ugo Rossi 2017 The Urban Political: Ambivalent Spaces of Neoliberalism. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City, Contemporary African Political Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42433-5_5

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How then do we think and write and share as decolonial scholars and foster a commitment to acknowledging violence and undoing its persistent frame, rather than simply analytically reprising violence? Katherine McKittrick4

In August 2012, the South African police force massacred thirtyfour striking platinum miners in the town of Marikana. The majority of demonstrators were shot in the back. The massacre immediately drew comparison with the Sharpeville attacks of 1960, when apartheid police had opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators, killing 69 people. The Sharpeville killings had come amid a burgeoning anti-apartheid mobilization that began with the 1955 Congress of the People in Kliptown and the 1956 Women’s March in Pretoria against the pass laws. Such initiatives quickly mobilized a global anti-apartheid struggle while also leading the white nationalist state to attempt to quell dissent by rounding up leaders and declaring a number of the most prominent anti-apartheid organizations illegal. Fifty-plus years later, the post-apartheid state found itself in a similar situation of declining legitimacy amid mass unrest. In the wake of the 2012 Marikana massacre, a wave of anti-African National Congress (ANC) sentiment dealt a blow to the government’s tripartite alliance between the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU). One year later, after Nelson Mandela’s death on December 5, 2013, the largest union in the country, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), announced its decision to formally withdraw its support from the ANC and the SACP, calling for an independent worker’s movement.5 This split within and against the ruling government is indicative of a broader shift to a “second transition” of struggle underway in the country, one seeking to build upon and extend the gains of formal political equality for all South Africans that had been won after a first transition from apartheid to a liberal democracy in 1994. In this second transition, new lines of antagonism have been drawn between ordinary South Africans and their “liberation” government, as the focus of struggle has shifted to securing unrealized economic rights and a broader social justice agenda. And yet, as the 2012 massacre suggests, the one consistency throughout South African history, whether it was in the colonial period, the apartheid era, or the first and second transitions beyond apartheid, appears to be the disposability of poor black lives.

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This continuity in antiblack violence is further highlighted in the assassinations of Abahlali leaders. This chapter chronicles one example of these assassinations that occurred in mid-2013, when much of the country began to increasingly question the viability of ANC rule, and as a new black nationalist opposition party was launched. Through telling the story of assassinated leader Nkululeko Gwala and his shack community in Cato Crest, this chapter argues that the shack settlement has become a paradigmatic site of antiblack necropolitics in contemporary South Africa.6 The argument elaborated here is that these assassinations and the struggles for survival they embody demand that we retheorize Northern ideas of economic precarity centered around the workplace as existential precarity centered around the basic conditions of reproductive life. Yet, at the same time, Abahlali’s struggles for survival have not been wholly overdetermined by necropolitical violence. Abahlali’s survival and organized resistance in the face of a necropolitical order that has sought to eliminate both affirmative visions and life itself challenges notions of South Africa and the African continent more broadly as solely a site of gratuitous violence. These largely urban formations of the political demand that we push back against the predominant focus on Africa as simply a site of structural underdevelopment and ethnic conflict. Instead, we might ask: what insights can we take from the experience of these movements for programs of struggle in other parts of the continent and the world-at-large?7 This chapter explores the activities of the shack dwellers who make up the organization Abahlali baseMjondolo, paying attention to the lines of antagonism they are drawing on the basis of demands for equality, autonomy, and dignity. In their inventive redefinition of the political, Abahlali has built upon the broader alter-globalization movement to arrive at unique ideas about autonomy that resist simplistic classifications as either statist or anti-statist. The chapter chronicles a series of meetings that Abahlali held between its membership and various political parties in the lead up to the 2014 national election. In particular, it examines the interactions between Abahlali and the Economic Freedom Fighters, a black nationalist political party established in 2013 with the aim of challenging the ANC from the radical left. The stories of organized radical politics among the urban poor recounted here demonstrate the need for greater attention to racialized precarity alongside a flexible and situated approach to the question of how movement powers relate to state powers, offering potential lessons for struggles in other parts of the world.

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5.1

A Tale of Two Deaths

Months after the Marikana massacre in 2012, a coalition of shack dwellers in the Cato Crest area of Durban took over unoccupied and still half constructed rental houses as a protest against their own lack of housing. Like many other shack communities, Cato Crest’s proximity to the city center enables greater economic opportunities, especially for those without jobs who are forced to eke out a living in the informal economy. After being displaced, the group squatted on nearby land and erected their own shacks. Police were sent in but refused to take direct action against the community and instead called for Durban Mayor James Nxumalo to intervene as a political mediator between force and occupation. In the wake of the Marikana massacre, the police were likely hesitant to insert themselves into such tense disputes for fear that their involvement could lead to yet another moment of violent state repression, bolstering the salience of anti-government sentiment. Mayor Nxumalo therefore arrived to engage the shack dwellers directly, and in March began relying upon the mediation of a long-time local community leader named Thembinkosi Qumbelo. Qumbelo had been active over the years with a variety of different political parties and NGOs, including the ANC, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the SACP, and the National Democratic Convention (NADECO).8 His political promiscuity is perhaps illustrative of the fact that traditional political organizations in South Africa and elsewhere still struggle with the task of relating to the existential conditions of shack life, where formal work is not always available and the purported rights of citizenship are always in question. But the political as seen from the vantage point of urban shack dwellers—who have migrated from the countryside and are then repeatedly displaced from their new metropolitan homes—is a condition that is perhaps more paradigmatic than we might otherwise imagine. As Paolo Virno argues, the age of neoliberalism has been characterized by a condition of “uprooting–the more intense and uninterrupted, the more lacking in authentic ‘roots’—[which] constitutes the substance of our contingency and precariousness.”9 Neoliberal precarity forms a “degree zero” according to Virno, where work no longer constitutes the center of social life for disposable subjects whose life is presented simultaneously as unvalued, wasteful, and available to be moved.

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Confronting this existential precarity, community members in Cato Crest decided to occupy the local ward councilor’s office and soon thereafter chased him out of his home and the neighborhood. In the wake of these actions, Qumbelo was shot dead while watching soccer at a local bar in the area. It was unclear whether his death represented a feeling of betrayal from the shack dwellers occupying land, or an impatience with his mediation coming from the ANC itself. But his death made clear what is already known in both the upper echelons of the ANC—where violent in-fighting is rampant—and among the almost half a million shack dwellers in the city of Durban fighting for a better life: politics and death often work in tandem in South Africa’s cities to form a necropolitical symbiosis.10 This symbiosis manifests not only in targeted assassinations of Abahlali leadership, but also in routine and quotidian ways. This is evidenced by the unsanitary conditions Abahlali members are forced to live in, the forms of state violence they face, and the general territorial stigmatization shack dwellers confront in a popular discourse which portrays their neighborhoods as dangerous, filthy, and unlawful. The shack settlement therefore represents a paradigmatic site of what Frantz Fanon called the “zone of non-being,” where people struggle to assert their right to have rights, and where routine premature death in the form of shack fires, disease, and state violence go largely unheeded by the broader public.11 In the months following Qumbelo’s assassination, the Cato Crest shack community re-organized and soon emerged with a new grassroots leader in Nkululeko Gwala. Gwala had been a lifelong member of the ANC, once vowing that the only way he would leave the Party would be if he died. But his commitment to the poor led him to denounce the pervasive corruption he witnessed throughout the organization, especially at the local level. This did not sit well with his superiors, and soon he was formally kicked out of his own ANC chapter. In response, he approached Abahlali baseMjondolo. This was appropriate given that Abahlali is an extra-parliamentary organization of shack dwellers seeking to address the specificities of urban precarity12 and the failures of ANC rule after apartheid.13 Having been kicked out of the ANC for denouncing its corruption, Gwala and others requested Abahlali’s assistance in mobilizing shack dwellers around the right to land and housing in Cato Crest. On June 9 of 2013 a traditional round of songs inaugurated an open-air community meeting between approximately one hundred Cato

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Crest shack dwellers and Abahlali’s central leadership (see Fig. 5.1). Gwala opened the meeting, introducing the theme of the day—how Abahlali might assist their struggle for houses—and welcoming the visitors who comprised Abahlali’s leadership. Abahlali leader S’bu Zikode spoke next, introducing the organization by explaining that it was not an NGO or a political party, but an independent social movement run by and for shack dwellers. TJ Ngongoma followed by speaking about the meaning of South African citizenship and the new constitution that was approved during the first transition. Ngongoma emphasized that much of what Cato Crest shack dwellers were fighting for was actually enshrined as rights in the constitution, but remained unrealized in practice. He then explained the procedure for forming a branch of Abahlali, and the inaugural event of hosting a branch launch in a newly affiliated community. Mnikelo Ndabankulu then addressed the crowd on the theme of Abahlali’s “living politics,” a key organizational concept that distinguishes the group from any other political entity. Living politics, he said, entailed being engaged directly in the struggle rather than waiting for intermediaries to solve problems on your behalf, be they politicians, academics, or development “experts”.14 Ndabankulu went on to explain Freedom Day, a national holiday intended to celebrate the end of apartheid, but which Abahlali annually recognizes as “Unfreedom Day” by organizing a counter-rally with thousands of its own members from throughout the city. He emphasized the importance of what Ngongoma had said about the constitution, claiming that the ward councilor representing the ANC probably did not even know the material in the constitution. He spoke of a similar gathering at another nearby shack community where Lindela Figlan, a former president of Abahlali, had challenged the local councilor on the constitution’s contents, revealing the politician’s total ignorance of the document and provoking laughter from the assembled crowd. As a recruiting strategy, Abahlali often uses the South African constitution to explain to shack communities how many of the rights they fought for in the anti-apartheid struggle have in theory been won but are largely unrealized or ignored by the ANC in practice. In this way, Abahlali insists upon a dynamic self-enactment of rights rather than their passive delivery from on high, while also establishing a continuity in struggle from anti-apartheid to post-apartheid movements. Rather than simply saying that the anti-apartheid movement amounted to nothing— which might lead to despair or depoliticization—the group emphasizes

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Fig. 5.1 Cato Crest shack dwellers meet Abahlali to discuss joining the movement (Photo by author)

the economic, social, and political rights that they did win, enshrined in the constitution. This tends to give people hope that those rights might still be realized in practice by working with Abahlali’s constituent process to pressure the government to uphold them while simultaneously mobilizing the community members to organize themselves autonomously from the dominant organs of political power. After additional speeches by Abahlali’s General Secretary Bandile Mdlalose and President Mzwake Mdlalose, the floor was opened for community members to speak their mind and ask questions. After three people made statements affirming much of the Abahlali speeches, and expressing strong enthusiasm about joining the organization, Nkululeko Gwala took the floor. He spoke about how shack dwellers did not respect themselves. Too often, people wanted to keep multiple political options open and therefore would hold membership in competing political parties at the same time. Alternatively, they would join a protest against the ANC

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in the street, and the next day, attend a rally in favor of the ANC in an upcoming election. Gwala demonstrated this equivocation by standing with his feet spread far apart, with one foot metaphorically planted in the camp of the ruling ANC, and another foot placed within the space of an oppositional movement or political party. As he continued to emphasize the irreconcilable nature of these two positions, his stance became wider and wider, until he was essentially paralyzed in a quasi-splits position, unable to go lower, but unable to stand up properly without assistance. This was supposed to represent the immobility that results from the inadequacy of a community alliance that refuses to take the unequivocal stance of an openly antagonistic opposition. As such, Gwala’s embodied expression represents a broader condition of ambivalence with regards to the post-political moment, where the old politics are dying and the new has not yet been born.15 Abandoning, or more appropriately, sidestepping the traditional electoral politics of the ANC in favor of the virtual promise of Abahlali’s principles of self-organization and dignity required taking a decision grounded in antagonism toward the ruling party, and a complete openness to alternative political experimentation. Gwala warned attendees that fighting against the ruling party wasn’t easy, and that despite their united enthusiasm in the meeting, they should each make the decision carefully. Once taken, no equivocation would be tolerated. They would have to be willing to oppose the ANC unambiguously until they won the right to housing and a dignified life. More than anything else, Gwala explained, what he had taken away from his numerous exchanges with Abahlali organizers was that the group stood for the idea that the poor needed to reclaim their dignity. Dignity was a concept that went beyond the delivery of material goods, although these too were clearly needed. Dignity entailed recognizing and acting upon the ability of the poor to think for themselves, to determine their own destiny, and to engage in a process of grassroots urban planning.16 Abahlali’s central leadership would therefore not take initiative on the community’s behalf. Their role would be merely advisory. The organizational principle of community autonomy meant that each specific local struggle had to take initiative over the precise course of action appropriate to their circumstances. Only then could they claim to have begun the journey of reclaiming their dignity. As a closing thought, Gwala reminded people that no one would be forced to join the new branch of Abahlali. Rather, he insisted, this choice should be made with the utmost level of autonomy and commitment to the struggle, something not to be taken

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lightly. The community members present then voted unanimously to join Abahlali and insisted upon setting a date to launch their branch. In the meantime, they announced that they would again occupy vacant land as a sign of how seriously they took their struggle, with or without the support of a recognized group like Abahlali (Fig. 5.2). Two weeks later, Gwala led the group in a protest against the corrupt allocation of public housing. They accused the local ward councilor, Zanele Ndzoyiya, of having won office through illegitimate means according to the ANC’s own internal appointment process rather than the community voice. The group’s protest along with these two accusations were widely reported in the local press, prompting Mayor Nxumalo and the regional head of the ANC, Sibongiseni Dhlomo, to call a community meeting at Cato Crest to counter the narrative. Over two thousand community members attended the meeting on June 26, and the mayor led the crowd in songs that denounced Nkululeko Gwala as a traitor,

Fig. 5.2 Nkululeko Gwala addresses Cato Crest shack dwellers (Photo by author)

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calling for his removal from the area. Dhlomo, the regional head of the ANC, is reported to have told the 2,000-strong meeting that Gwala was not wanted in the area and that he “either leaves the area or the community leaves. He must go. He is not wanted here.” In a heated 25-minute speech, which was recorded by a community activist and handed to the local Tribune newspaper, Dhlomo said that Gwala should be banished and he should “scrub his heels because he is leaving today.”17 Dhlomo then addressed the mayor, who hailed from the same hometown as Gwala about an hour outside Durban, telling him to take Gwala back home as soon as possible. Within five hours of these officials’ public denunciation of Gwala, his body was littered with twelve bullets. Journalist Faith ka-Manzi summarized the symbolism of yet another Cato Crest assassination: “In recent days, as Nelson Mandela continued to struggle for his life and as Zuma entertained Obama, a microcosm of the ANC’s degeneration played out here.”18 More than simply highlighting the “degeneration” of a liberation movement, however, the events in Cato Crest also represented the more fundamental existential precarity of black life. Always open to injury, the condition of blackness in South Africa—from pre-apartheid colonial rule to post-apartheid democracy—has consistently been defined by “the mundanacity of violence.”19 While the shack dwellers of Cato Crest would continue their struggle, occupying land multiple times throughout the remainder of 2013—and significantly naming their new squatter settlements “Marikana” in an effort to link national struggles—Gwala’s murder, like Qumbelo’s before him and the death of a 17-year-old girl named Nqobile Nzuzua who was shot by the police in an Abahlali-led Cato Crest protest on September 30, 2013, would go largely unheeded in the national media and political scene. These deaths therefore leave us with a number of serious questions. What is the relationship between forms of political struggle, on the one hand, and a population’s disposability? At what moment are shack dwellers rendered superfluous or eliminable? Was Gwala sacrificed in an effort to save another portion of the South African population,20 or was he part of a broader process whereby populations racialized as black are too commonly subject to an extra-economic violence?21 How to understand the political subjects active in shack settlements in South Africa with respect to the theoretical framing of surplus, on the one hand, and precarity on the other? Achille Mbembe offered an initial conceptualization of this problem, stating, “If there is anything the history of the

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metropolitan form in Africa brings to the critique of modern urbanism, it is that the metropolis is neither a finite nor a static form. In fact, it is almost always a site of excess, of hysteria, and exclusions ”.22 And at the center of these urban exclusions, Mbmebe reminds us, lies antiblack racism. “For blacks, especially, making oneself at home in the city takes on a peculiar urgency, if only because it has been the dominant site of their exclusion from modernity.”23

5.2

A Precarious Liberation

One of the key terms in the global neoliberal lexicon has become “precarity.”24 In these formulations, neoliberalism has brought with it more precarious working condition, whereby the status quo of the mid-century Fordist compromise between labor and capital—relatively steady jobs with guaranteed benefits such as health insurance and retirement plans—have been undercut by the rise of lower-paid work, often temporary, with few or no accompanying benefits. This shift has required a greater “flexibility” among workers who need to constantly adapt to new jobs and skills if they want to remain employable.25 A further characteristic of this precarious condition is the corresponding rise in emphasis upon “entrepreneurship.” Media, businesses, and universities increasingly laud the importance of creating your own job, whether it be through emphasizing the supposed benefits of the flexible “gig” economy in the richer global north, or through celebrations of the “ingenuity” of poor shack dwellers who make a living in the informal economy throughout the global south. South Africa has proved no exception to this global trend, but it also highlights the longer-term nature of this condition of precarity for black populations and requires us to extend our analysis beyond the factory. The dramatic increase in South Africa’s urban shack dwelling population,26 coupled with consistently high rates of unemployment, would seem to indicate that a large section of the working class has been permanently excluded from the realm of formal production and occupies a precarious position in relation to not only the workplace but also to living conditions and life in general. While Northern theorists are only now returning to Marx’s theories of surplus populations,27 debates about surplus populations in South Africa are not new. In the apartheid era the Surplus People Project took the issue as central to their study of the forced relocations of primarily African communities throughout the country, particularly once the economy entered a period of decline in the late 1970s and

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early 1980s. Writing in 1983, the authors of a collaborative report on forced relocations and surplus people in the province of Natal (current day KwaZulu-Natal, where the city of Durban is located) proclaim: As a result of increased capitalization of industry, agriculture and mining relatively fewer unskilled workers are demanded by the economy. The changing nature of capitalist development in South Africa has resulted in an increased demand for skilled workers, hence an attempt on the part of the ruling class to consolidate an urban Black population with a stake in the system, and the determination to rid white South Africa of the unproductive, unemployed, disabled and youth. From surveys and field work it has become clear that there are thousands of people who will never gain access to employment in urban areas and unless they are prepared to work for R1,00 per day on white owned farms, where there may still be some work, they have been made redundant permanently. These surplus people will never enter the wage labor market under the present economic system.28

Indeed, the official unemployment rate has increased steadily in the decades since that report was issued, hovering between 25 and 30%. Given this historical precedent and the constantly high rate of the past three decades, such numbers do indeed seem to confirm the Surplus People’s Project contention that these groups are no longer best thought of simply as comprising a reserve army of labor.29 Such a labor reserve is traditionally conceived as capable of being rapidly mobilized—either against striking workers or when economic booms take place and additional labor power is needed to meet output goals. Instead, as contemporary surplus population theorists tell us,30 these numbers point to a de-industrializing trend whereby a large percentage of the population has been permanently excluded from capital’s circuits, forced to rely upon their own ingenuity or the welfare state in order to survive in an informal economy. In this context, we might use the term precarity to define the overarching condition of a supposedly liberated society in contemporary South Africa.31 In doing so, we should be careful not to sweep away the differences that define the particularities of flexible accumulation in an African context. As Franco Barchiesi argues, “African post-Fordism is more about “out of luck” than “just-in-time” as the future uncertainties of informal entrepreneurship are grounded in present assets that depend on social networks, chiefly the family, undermined by the same global dynamics that make waged work redundant in the first place”.32 Understanding the profoundly precarious conditions facing post-apartheid South African

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workers reveals the limits of the country’s “wage-citizenship nexus,”33 whereby the benefits of citizenship are attached to the venerated space of work. A common coupling throughout the world, South Africa venerates work all the more so given the strong history of unions in the anti-apartheid movement and the post-apartheid formal alliance between the country’s Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) with the ruling ANC. The contemporary South African state, following the emphasis of the liberation movement before it, therefore aligns its conception of the citizen—someone who is entitled to rights and services—with the normative idea of the worker. The South African state and society brings together a veneration of the worker from socialist countries with a celebration of productivity and the protestant ethic in capitalist nations. The “work-citizenship nexus” advances the prerequisite of demonstrating economic productivity before one can be seen as a worthy recipient of the benefits of citizenship. Those who lie beyond the realm of formal work—certainly most of the shack residents in Durban and other major cities in South Africa—are therefore not treated as complete citizens. Reciprocally, supposedly only by entering into the pact of wage labor can an individual fully realize his or her potential as a citizen in a liberated society. Labor union politics and worker imaginations are both constrained by the work-citizenship nexus and the idea that a job will provide fulfillment of the most central human needs and desires. Radical intellectuals are often equally complicit in limiting their studies of work to the spatial bounds of the factory. As Barchiesi explains, “Analyses centered on production dynamics are always at risk of essentializing and naturalizing the workplace as the obviously primary social locale where workers express and enact desire.”34 Marxism’s dominant history has venerated work and too often denigrated the so-called lumpen classes, urban residents who either resisted factory employment or were unable to find it and had to survive in the illicit economy or by relying upon welfare and charity. But currents such as Autonomist Marxism35 and the Black Radical Tradition36 have consistently pointed out the need to refuse work and to valorize people and movements who insisted upon a more radical emancipatory struggle that centers around the expansion of human desires beyond the workplace. The Autonomist Marxist conception of the social factory is useful in this regard, as it highlights how the productive capacities of workers extend beyond the factory walls into the urban spaces of everyday life.

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Such a formulation presents the paradigmatic condition of production and survival today as metropolitan, necessarily demanding a politics attuned to the precarious challenges of what Paolo Virno calls a “metropolis intertwining itself in sequences of fleeting opportunities” where “urban training” is intended to instill in us a biopolitical “habituation to uninterrupted and nonteleological change.”37 As such, “the political problem arises here when the poor, the precarious, and the exploited want to reappropriate the time and space of the metropolis.”38 The re-positioning of producers beyond the bounds of the factory, in the social factory of metropolitan/urban space more broadly, therefore captures the extent to which the centrality of the work-citizenship nexus must be deconstructed, especially when grappling with the apparent superfluity of shack life. In South Africa, while the potentially oppositional force of a strong labor movement has certainly not disappeared—witness the importance of the Marikana massacre in setting the anti-ANC agenda among dissident labor unions like the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA)—it is certainly true that since 1999 a new oppositional force has emerged from beyond the bounds of the factory in the form of new movements. Abahlali base Mjondolo developed within the community setting of shack settlements, rather than from the traditional realm of workplace organization. The dynamics of precarity in the community setting of the shack settlement pose a new set of questions that move beyond workplace dynamics and toward the question of the simultaneous production of urban space and surplus populations. It is at this juncture between precarious inclusion, permanent exclusion, and revolutionary possibility that a renewed debate about the relevance of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon is taking place in South Africa.39 The ideas of Fanon and Freire have been salient for post-apartheid movements operating within the “zones of non-being” typified in shack settlements. Abahlali has drawn upon some of these insights, contributing their own ideas based on an “affirmation of the politics of the poor.”40 Knowing that explicitly racial discourses represent a potential minefield of forms of cynical co-optation and division in the country, they have tended to avoid explicit discussions of blackness, even though it surfaces in meetings periodically in rank and file membership’s proclamations of the suffering experienced by people who are black and poor. Their more common emphasis on the broad category of the poor is intended to include all marginalized groups, at times successfully working across African-Indian divisions in Durban, and often working to support the

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struggles of non-South African migrant workers who have come under repeated attack in periodic pogroms.41 In addition, their position is one that straddles the urban and the rural, as many shack dwellers are recent migrants to the city from rural areas.42 While they attempt to penetrate the heart of the forbidden post-apartheid city—Cato Crest comes closest to the central business district—they are most often still relegated to the urban peripheries that Fanon identifies in his analysis as the home of the lumpen classes under colonialism.43 Finally, Abahlali has adhered to Fanon’s stinging critique of intellectuals and political parties as vanguards, instead affirming its group’s autonomous capacity to think and act democratically. Members demand recognition for their own “University of Abahlali baseMjondolo,” even as they claim that the only classrooms of this “university” can be found in the everyday spaces of shack settlements themselves. They insist upon their own ability to articulate profound ideas, relevant to contemporary struggles for social justice, and upon grounding those ideas not exclusively in written texts but also in the living politics of their own everyday struggles for survival in shack communities. Bandile Mdlalose explains: “Normally it is seen that the poor are poor in mind and that everything needs to be thought for us. But poverty is not stupidity; it is a lack of money. And we always remind people that the same system that made the rich rich has mad the poor poor. We are still fighting to insist that there should be nothing for us without us. No one has a right to make decisions for us while we still have a mouth and mind to use.”44 And as S’bu Zikode told me, “Autonomy means Abahlali maintaining its own philosophy that is Abahlali’s, that is the living politics that is opposed to other politics and other forces.”45 And yet, Abahlali members do not understand autonomy as a withdrawal from society in order to form an exclusive shack dwelling commune.46 Like Fanon, they recognize the importance of an encounter with “professional” intellectuals and militants, in addition to groups struggling in other areas and in other contexts. But for Abahlali the encounter with such individuals and organizations must take place on an equal ground whereby the autonomy of their organization is respected as a vehicle for moving from “non-being” to “the new.”47 While this movement toward the new certainly appears to start in a place overdetermined by the logic of superfluous exclusion, on the one hand, and precarious inclusion on the other, it clearly does not end up in either place.

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5.3

State and Movement Powers

New Left notions of autonomy gained salience in the wake of the global rebellions of 1968, when new subjects of struggle asserted their rights as the colonized, queer communities, women, and people of color to organize autonomously from dominant movements and political parties. At its core, autonomy became a way to extend the notion of democracy by de-centering the liberal state as the preeminent position from which democracy could be enacted. In addition to advancing notions of autonomy and radical democracy, social movement theorist George Katsiaficas argues that both the 1968 movements and the recent 2011 uprisings have been defined by “spontaneously generated forms of dual power.”48 The notion of dual power has a long history going back to the Soviet revolution when the power of the parliament existed alongside a second power in the organized bodies of Soviet workers councils. But some advocates of an autonomous anti-state power have since argued for sidestepping the state entirely, abandoning any notion of a struggle on two fronts that was central to the notion of dual power. While supporters of dual power argue for a two-pronged strategy for social change that insists on working both within and outside of the halls of state power, this notion has also opened the door to those who advocate the purely autonomous power of movements while giving up on the possibility of changing the world through taking state power entirely. Many Latin American alter-globalization struggles, for example, followed the path of the Zapatista movement in a notion of autonomy devoid of dual power.49 These movements chose to focus on developing political alternatives that would be entirely independent from the structure of state power and the narrow electoralism of political parties. In both Latin American and Euro-American movement debates, a deep divide has emerged between traditional state socialists advocating for the importance of centralized struggles, political parties, and contesting for state power through elections on the one hand, and pure “horizontalists”50 who believe in the “dispersed power”51 of direct democracy in movement assemblies and refute any engagement with the state as a compromise with sovereignty, on the other hand.52 Important theorizations of black subjectivity and black radicalism— putting aside for a moment other intramural debates—also have in common an understanding of the black experience as “the figure of the non-sovereign”53 engaged in an “antipolitical”54 struggle. As Fred

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Moten and Stefano Harney put it in their first person embodiment of the black radical tradition: “We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicize, every imposition of selfgovernance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home, sweet home.”55 The recent emphasis within black studies upon historical and contemporary forms of marronage— understood as geographical flight from constituted power—captures this understanding of the black experience as predicated upon non-sovereign forms of struggle.56 Abahlali has self-consciously built on these important legacies and debates within black radicalism and alter-globalization movements, while also positioning themselves carefully in between the two extremes of statist and anti-statist approaches to political change. Historically, the organization’s relationship with the state and its various political parties had proven to be tumultuous, to say the least, especially given the willingness of the municipal government to meet protest and urban encroachment with violent repression. Indeed, this was evidenced long before the assassination of Abahlali leaders detailed in this chapter. Perhaps most dramatically, in 2009, supporters of the ANC attacked the movement’s stronghold at Kennedy Road, which had served as the epicenter of the broader movement from 2005 to 2009.57 Many leaders had their own shacks there, and they had slowly succeeded in establishing territorial control over the area, delegitimizing the state structures of representation and the local ANC ward councilor. Instead of running for office or supporting an oppositional party, the movement put in place their own structures of decision-making and community service programs. These autonomous community programs fell apart when Abahlali members at Kennedy Road were attacked in September of 2009, their movement headquarters and their shacks looted and destroyed. Following these attacks Abahlali leadership was forced into exile, fleeing the settlement for fear of losing their lives. Long-standing examples of state repression such as these repeatedly raised a question among Abahlali members about the efficacy of their strong stance against aligning with any political party. Traditionally, the movement’s official position had been abstention from elections as an organization, best encapsulated in their most prominent protest slogan, “No Land! No House! No Vote!” In this regard, they were following in the footsteps of alter-global movements like the Zapatistas of Chiapas who refused to endorse any political parties, whether left or right, foreign

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or domestic.58 Periodically, however, certain members would question whether it would be more effective to endorse an oppositional party, one that might use their standing within the state to provide greater security for the movement’s activities at a grassroots level. And yet every time someone would raise this question, a larger problem was made plain in the absence of any adequate party that could be trusted to defend the interests and lives of shack dwellers. From Abahlali’s perspective, the representative structure of South Africa’s liberal democracy had broken down and provided them with no possible backing in and through the state.59 Then, in 2013, in the wake of the Marikana massacre, a new political party emerged proclaiming itself as the voice of the country’s forgotten poor. Abahlali’s grounded and flexible approach to autonomy is perhaps best evidenced by the group’s interactions with this new party, the Economic Freedom Fighters. The entry of this black leftist party onto the political scene necessitated, in the minds of some members of Abahlali, a renegotiation of the shack dweller’s position on engaging in electoral politics. The EFF was formally launched in June 2013, the same month that Cato Crest was on fire with the protests that preceded Gwala’s assassination, and the party has gone on to win 11% of the upper and lower houses of parliament. The EFF explicitly promised a second transition for the country. Political freedom had been won, they said, but the economic platform of the anti-apartheid movement—radical redistribution of resources beginning with land reform—had yet to be realized. The EFF constitution proclaimed: “The EFF takes lesson from the notation that ‘political power, without economic emancipation is meaningless.’ The EFF draws inspiration from Marxist-Leninist and Fanonian schools of thought on its analysis of the State, imperialism and class contradictions in every society.”60 While the militancy of the new party drew much energy from disaffected members of the ANC-Youth League like Julius Malema, and former Young Communist League leaders like Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, the explicit reference to Fanon worked its way into the constitution via a minority camp in the new party that had its origins in the Neo-Bikoist September National Imbizo. Combining forces under the banner of the new party, these young activists spoke against the dominant discourse on the left of a transition from “racial apartheid to class apartheid.” Instead, they were not afraid of naming the ongoing nature of specifically racialized dispossession and impoverishment in the country and contributed to the growing interest in black political formations drawing inspiration

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from the writing of Steve Biko, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, and Robert Sobukwe.61 While there was certainly cause for concern about aspects of this new political formation,62 the media circus which surrounded it largely dwelled on the “inappropriate” nature of the EFF’s explicit mobilization around race. In much of South Africa’s past, the progressive position adopted to fight racism has been proclaimed as non-racialism. While this term has a long genealogy with at times opposing meanings, its contemporary salience in popular discourse all too often resembles a form of color-blindness, adopted as the progressive way of fighting racism. In this framework, to name race is to be a racist, and to fight racism one has to overcome its saliency by denying its relevance altogether. This inability to distinguish between externally imposed forms of racism and the mobilization of affirmative racial identities in line with black consciousness led even those few Marxist critics who take race seriously to denounce the EFF as a menace to society, mirroring a longer-standing trend in scholarship on post-apartheid South Africa to sideline questions of enduring antiblack racism in favor of “class apartheid” and neoliberalism.63 These scholars thus continue to emphasize a non-racial conception of class as the unifying discourse most capable of tackling a post-apartheid situation—an argument that appeared dramatically estranged from the EFF’s organizing arguments. One is left to assume that it is the EFF’s explicitly racialized discourse that actually disturbs many Marxists and liberal centrists alike. The global resonance of the EFF’s attention to antiblackness was also obvious to their supporters, as they congealed at the same time that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was emerging in the United States. Just as the BLM platform began to circulate globally, resonating with black people fighting state violence and exclusion in societies around the world, the EFF’s electorally focused black nationalism also began to attract the interest of activists in the United States and Europe. The shack dwellers in Abahlali met the rise of the EFF with a combination of excitement and skepticism. They were also pleased to see a political party that had adopted much of their own movement’s platform: greater redistribution of wealth, more state control over the means of production, direct support for organized labor and wildcat strikes, the need for a more robust and transparent delivery of services, and most important, an explicit demand for radical land reform. Throughout 2013, Abahlali had been periodically revisiting their long-standing position refusing to endorse any political party. This rethinking was prompted by the ongoing

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violent repression of the movement. In the wake of Gwala’s assassination, the debate arose yet again with renewed urgency. Many were desperate for any kind of protection from what they still perceived to be more powerful political parties, despite their shortcomings. But Abahlali was also angered by initial media reports that local leaders in the EFF were already claiming Abahlali as party members. Abahlali took this as an open affront upon their autonomy, as no such decision had been taken. In order to smooth things over, four leaders in the KwaZulu Natal provincial leadership of the EFF requested a meeting with Abahlali’s executive leadership. The meeting was granted, and the two groups gathered on August 3, 2013, at Abahlali headquarters. After the traditional round of personal and organizational introductions, local EFF chairperson Reggie Ncobo opened the meeting by responding to a concern that Abahlali had voiced about Julius Malema and the problem of the cult of personality. He assured people that the EFF was not just about Malema but saw itself as a broad-based movement demanding similar things as Abahlali: land redistribution and a greater share of the country’s wealth. EFF delegate Hlengiwe Hlophe followed by apologizing for the way the media had reported Abahlali as already having joined the EFF, refusing to admit they had stated any such thing but still acknowledging that this was a misrepresentation that should be corrected. She assured Abahlali that the EFF was a responsible organization and that they wanted to forge a strong working relationship with groups like Abahlali. Because of the miscommunication in the media, today’s meeting was called, she said, simply as a way to issue an apology and to express a desire of working together at some future point. Abahlali leaders responded by thanking them for these statements and for trying to correct a wrong. They were impressed that the political party had asked for a meeting and had come to Abahlali turf to first apologize and to introduce themselves. Then they launched into a lecture about the difference between a political party and a social movement, insisting that the pursuit of dignity, not service delivery, was what set a social movement apart from those powers seeking to act from within the state apparatus. Abahlali had developed its own indigenous intellectuals among the poor, and it therefore rejected any logic of vanguardism, which the EFF openly embraced as a Marxist-Leninist group. Abahlali have been much more aligned with parallel struggles in the alter-globalization movement where radicalizing democracy from below takes shape through a range of movement practices that includes assemblies, facilitation tools,

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and direct action.64 These practices are all intended to replace what they see as the problematic notion of representative democracy, where elected political party officials are given carte blanche to rule on behalf of the people. Abahlali leaders nonetheless expressed their total agreement with the political platform of the EFF, pointing out that before it had been an EFF platform it was already their movement’s platform. And yet Abahlali leaders still wondered aloud about the mechanisms of accountability available to them should the EFF leaders be elected to parliament. Abahlali pointed out that the ANC had once promised many of the same things and had not only failed to deliver but now actively attacked their movement. Further, Abahlali elaborated that many political parties seek Abahlali’s support come election time, but once they are in power, they simply forget the poor and do not make themselves available to the movement, let alone follow through on their promises. Abahlali member Mnikelo seemed to capture the tenor of the room when he said to me following the meeting: “The EFF is an organization I couldn’t join, but nor would I want them to disappear. It’s great they raise the issue of land, which we support. But will they really follow through? Malema is a capitalist, so will the EFF be just about enriching individuals? And how do we make sure we won’t be like Zimbabwe? In terms of the economy, is Malema the right figure for socialism?”.65 The intricate issues raised in this meeting, like most Abahlali meetings, far surpassed the sophistication of academic conferences and symposia. The movement’s leaders had powerfully elaborated upon the relationship between movement and state powers, between constituent and constituted powers.66 As the above quote indicates, Abahlali does not fight for the elimination of constituted state power. Instead, it perceives the relation in a dialectical fashion, even as it insists upon its own organizational autonomy as a strategic choice for where their efforts are best spent. As Abahlali leader S’bu Zikode told me: Autonomy means Abahlali will speak to its members, through a collective decision, free from individuals’ influence and external forces. Autonomy means free from being molded and controlled from outside the movement, by individuals within the academia research or NGOs or even from the State…But autonomy doesn’t mean that Abahlali cannot engage with those that are seen to be their enemies. Abahlali will engage with the State.67

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When the EFF showed up to recruit new members, Abahlali was already under tremendous pressure from some of its own membership to rethink its neutral stance on elections. A series of internal debates regarding their possible role in the upcoming 2014 elections culminated with a preliminary vote at their general assembly meeting. The vote offered three choices to its members: the option of officially endorsing an existing political party for the first time; the option of forming their own political party as an electoral wing of Abahlali’s movement; or the option of maintaining the movement’s autonomy by operating at a distance from electoral politics and continuing to abstain from endorsing of any party.68 By a narrow margin, it was decided that the movement would indeed endorse a political party for the 2014 election. The next decision would require the movement to decide which party to endorse. After a long process that included branch level deliberation and an open invitation to political parties to come and address the movement at its general assembly meeting, the vote was held. By a narrow margin, the Democratic Alliance won the vote, with the EFF coming in a very close second place. How, many asked, could one of the country’s preeminent social movements of the black poor endorse an openly neoliberal political party that was most favored by South Africa’s privileged white minority? The movement responded to the barrage of questions by insisting upon their democratic process, arguing that while not all of them agreed with the final vote, it would be respected because of their commitment to represent the will of their membership. They also noted that the decision had been taken out of desperation, and in the face of an onslaught of state repression. The Democratic Alliance had promised to fight for the movement on two of their most pressing issues: government corruption (principally in the allocation of state-built houses), and violent state repression at the hands of the ruling party. Abahlali’s endorsement of the Democratic Alliance (DA), however, did not constitute a permanent bond between the two groups. Nor did it mean that Abahlali was encouraging its members to join the DA. It was simply a temporary decision encouraging its membership to vote for the DA candidates in the election in the hopes that those candidates could fight for Abahlali’s defense inside the provincial and national government. Following the election, Abahlali was once again, predictably, let down by an unaccountable DA. Since then, their position has oscillated, reserving their right to maintain a flexible position depending on the availability

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of a suitable political party alliance in any given year. In the 2016 elections Abahlali members returned to their original position by collectively deciding to abstain from endorsing any political party; but in 2019 they once again endorsed a party in the newly formed Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party. This oscillation on the question of state power is representative of Abahlali’s understanding of the most appropriate relationship between movement and state powers. In other parts of the world, this debate has led to polarizing positions, with supporters of the strategy of autonomy insisting upon changing the world without taking state power, and traditional socialists insisting upon the naiveté of such positions while countering that the only way to change the world is by taking state power. As I hope the above stories convey, Abahlali’s position is firmly rooted in the autonomous camp, but in a nuanced manner with regard to when and where state powers might be engaged as part of a broad-based strategy. As S’bu Zikode elaborated to me: The fact that we want to work with clean government in fact doesn’t take away our autonomy; it’s not giving our power back…It’s an attempt to hold the government accountable. I hold the new government accountable, but that doesn’t mean that…you want to take over the government or that you will replace the government.”69

This position points to the nuances of the relationship between movement and state powers. Much as Marx’s criticism of the organizational potential of the peasantry and the lumpen proletariat in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte might be read conjuncturally, within the specific historical and geographical context of mid-nineteenth-century France,70 so too should the debate about the appropriate relationship between movement and state powers proceed on the basis of concrete relations in specific times and places. If for the Zapatista movement in Mexico it makes less sense to engage state power, certainly communes in Bolivarianruled Venezuela and the landless MST under the workers party in Brazil have carved a more intricate path, at different times working within, alongside or against state power.71 This nuanced analysis requires that we pause for further reflection when reading Uruguayan movement theorist Raul Zibechi’s argument that “social plans [by which he means the developmental initiatives of progressive governments] and the militarization of the urban peripheries

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are two sides of the same attempt to control populations outside the reach of the state.”72 From one perspective, his point is clearly warranted. As we saw with the case of the EFF, state-oriented constituted powers often seek to subsume movements within their vanguardist orbit, and when they do this they can destroy what is most essential about a movement’s constituent power in its pursuit of dignity as the production of alternative subjectivities. But from another perspective, Zibechi’s analysis has the potential to collapse all forms of state power onto each other, gutting a movement of the ability to put forth a more nuanced analysis of when and where it is appropriate to engage the state, rather than simply ignore it or fight for its destruction. Abahlali’s recognition of an antagonistic relationship to the state that nonetheless remains in dialectical tension and debate with the state takes a cue instead from Mexican political geographer Raul Ornelas’s statement that “history will not be kind to rigid certainties.”73 Despite the fact that much of the theoretical debate about movements—which Ornelas frames along the lines of (state-centered) counterhegemony or (autonomy-centered) emancipation—has fallen along relatively polarized lines, in reality movements tend to adopt hybrid forms of struggle. While emancipatory struggles like Abahlali tend to emphasize their own autonomy as a project based on dignity, as we saw in the case of Gwala, the movement has been forced to keep the lines of communication with the state open for survival purposes. Ornelas summarizes this common experience within emancipatory movements as follows: The idea of emancipation seeks rather the construction of horizontal and transparent ties, based in affinity, and thus relations with political institutional actors become quite complicated. Despite this and on numerous occasions, the need to survive or the possibility to achieve some crucial advance leads people to enter into alliances that break with the general logic of affinity…The primary difficulty stems from the fact that these alliances of affinity can result in the isolation (and in the extreme, annihilation) of emancipatory projects, above all in conjunctures…where institutional politics offers certain opportunities for change or at least the chance to recuperate strength.74

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Wynter’s Global Geography of Jobless Archipelagoes

This chapter has grappled with both the violence, and the generative political struggles, emerging from conditions of existential precarity and surplus in the contemporary globalized world. Examining these conditions from the specific place of the paradigmatically black shack settlement forces us to shift the geography of reason in the work of Giorgio Agamben and other theorists of state violence who have hitherto emphasized the refugee detention camp or Guantanamo Bay as paradigmatic contemporary spaces of exception.75 In contrast, postulating the postapartheid shack settlement as a zone of non-being allows us to understand how something new—the properly inventive terrain of the politicalmight emerge from this space of nothingness. Racializing and spatializing the critique of precarity necessarily broadens our framework for grasping the conditions of possibility which give rise to the power to make die or let live that now articulates with and infuses contemporary biopolitical imperatives to make live or let die. Similar questions concerning the overdetermining violence of antiblack racism as well as the generative struggles led by the urban poor surfaced in 1992 in the US after another urban uprising. Sylvia Wynter, in a 1992 “Open Letter to My Colleagues” at Stanford University, written in the wake of the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King in Los Angeles, and after witnessing the corresponding “immediate riot”76 in that city that both harkened back to Watts 1965 and foreshadowed Baltimore 2015 and Minneapolis 2020, wondered aloud about the complicity of professionalized and mainstream scholars with the normalization of the disposability of black life. She said then: As is the case with the also hitherto discardable environment, its ongoing pollution, and ozone layer depletion, the reality of the throwaway lives, both at the global socio-human level, of the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the ‘favela/shanty town’ of the globe and their jobless archipelagoes, as well, at the national level, of Baldwin’s ‘captive population’ in the urban inner cities, (and on the Indian Reservations of the United States), have not been hitherto easily perceivable within the classificatory logic of our ‘inner eyes’.”77

The intellectual project Wynter put forward was designed for the field of black studies but could equally be adopted by radical scholarship across

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the disciplines. As she saw it, radical intellectuals had to marry themselves to the plight of the urban poor in intellectual tasks that would complement the street tasks undertaken in moments of revolt. As such, she paralleled the work of Cedric Robinson, who, in delineating a coherent black radical intellectual tradition, was careful to place primary emphasis upon the movements that preceded their intellectual co-conspirators. Celebrating the work of CLR James and WEB Du Bois, among others, Robinson cautioned: “we must keep in mind that their brilliance was also derivative. The truer genius was in the midst of the people of whom they wrote. There the struggle was more than words or ideas but life itself.”78 In contemporary South Africa the urban shack settlement constitutes a flashpoint for both necropolitics and social struggles. The condition of shack settlements and their more general disposability should be situated within the ongoing racist dynamics of late neoliberalism,79 whereby black populations too often continue to be confined to necropolitical zones of non-being defined by existential precarity. Abahlali’s struggle highlights both the pervasiveness of explicit and mundane forms of antiblack violence alongside the freedom drive that is often expressed in the form of quiet encroachment and what Badiou calls “immediate riots,” but which become increasingly dignified through more explicit forms of emancipatory organization. As such, the emancipatory struggle of the shack dwellers in Durban has pursued a rigorously autonomous form of political organization grounded in the pursuit of dignity as selfdetermination. But this autonomy, as it is played out in practice, does not—and perhaps cannot—adhere to any dogmatic position with regards to the state’s constituted power. Abahlali’s ability to persist in the directly and structurally violent environment of South Africa’s urban underbelly has required a flexible and adaptive form of political experimentation, one that offers lessons to other movements around the world confronting the limits of official political representation. Too few people have aligned themselves with the political stance of Abahlali and its partner movements of the poor around the world offering an alternative to the electorally focused impasse that defines our purportedly post-political condition. And even fewer willingly deploy an alternative analysis around antiblack racism that could provide us with an account of the ongoing forms of both racialized dispossession and gratuitous violence that populations confined to shacks are arguably most often exposed to. Could this be because these zones of abandonment are rarely ventured into by outsiders, who prefer to remain confined in the settler

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quarters of the city identified with contemporary spaces of civil society and its corresponding state-protected privileges? Regardless, the struggles of the poor in these spaces are not disappearing; indeed, they continue to grow year by year. As Richard Pithouse argues, while the shack settlement does not hold a monopoly on the geography of precarious life, it has indisputably become a central flashpoint for social struggles. Of course, neither social exclusion, nor the myriad of ways in which it is resisted, can be reduced to the shack settlement. But it is here – rather than in, say, the countryside, the school, the prison or the migrant detention centre – where the refusal to accept the idea that the human should be rendered as ‘waste’ (Mbembe 2011) has produced the most intense and sustained conflict between the state and its citizens over the last eight years.80

For this reason, arguably any attempt to grapple with the conditions of urban politics, precarity and autonomy should begin with the lived experience of shack dwellers.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

The German Ideology. 2007 “Biko and the Problematic of Presence,” 95. 2016 “#BlackLivesMatter and Global Visions of Abolition,” 39. 2014 “Mathematics Black Life,” 18. The 2016 local elections continued this trend toward the fracture of the ruling alliance, with the ANC bringing in just over half of the country’s votes nationwide, its lowest results since electoral democracy was first established in 1994. Achille Mbembe 2003, 2019; Ananya Roy 2019. The work of Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly is particularly useful. Branch and Mampilly 2015 Africa Uprising. Pithouse 2013b. Paolo Virno 1996, 31. Mbembe 2003 “Necropolitics”; Mbembe 2019 Necropolitics. Fanon 2008, xii. For a wonderful discussion of the temporal dimensions of urban precarity, see Michael Ralph’s 2015 Forensics of Capital, especially

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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chapter six “Production of Capital,” pp. 117–136, and his 2008 article “Killing Time.” Abahlali’s willingness to openly criticize and denounce the ANC— not out of blind anti-government ideology but only after many years of trying to work with their local government—has provoked ire in the ruling party. ANC officials from the local to the municipal and national levels have consistently maligned and slandered the organization simply for being a thorn in their side. The nature of this tense relationship, as we will see, has frequently resulted in violent state repression of the urban poor. As such, Abahlali’s idea of “living politics” can be conceived as a synthesis of what Antonio Negri (1999) might call “constituent power” and what Jacques Ranciere terms “dissensus” (2014), as it disrupts, destabilizes and questions the representative capacity of the constituted power of the (police) state that thrives under conditions of a post-political consensus. Enright and Rossi 2018. De Souza 2006. Moore 2013. ka-Manzi 2013. Farred 2002. For a dwelling on race in the face of calls to move beyond it in South Africa and beyond, see also Grant Farred (2006) “Shooting the White Girl First: Race in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Kamari Clarke and Deborah Thomas, editors, 2006, Globalization and Race. Mitchell 2009. Sexton 2010. Mbembe 2008, 64, my emphasis. ibid: 53–54. Standing 2011. Harvey 1990. Hindson and McCarthy 1994. Harber 2011. Jameson 2011, Denning 2010. Surplus People Project 1983, xv, my emphasis. Marx 1976. Denning 2010. A Precarious Liberation 2011. Ibid., 204. Ibid.

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34. Barchiesi 2011: 199. 35. Harry Cleaver 2002 “Work is Still the Central Issue!”. 36. Cedric Robinson 2000 Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 37. Virno 1996, 14–15. 38. Hardt and Negri 2009, 246. 39. On the notion of “differential inclusion” see Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson 2013 Border as Method. For a brilliant appraisal of the competing theoretical currents of black radical thought, including genealogies that represent different interpretations of Fanon, circulating in the RMF/FMF movement, see Mupotsa 2020 “Knowing from Loss.” 40. See Zikode 2012 “The Struggle to affirm the Dignity of the Poor” and Zikode 2008 “The Greatest Threat to the Future Stability in Our Country.” 41. Naicker 2016. 42. Interview with S’bu Zikode, 2 August 2013; Interview with Siya James, 27 June 2013. 43. Al-Bulushi 2012. 44. Sacks 2013 “The Political Arrest of Bandile Mdlalose.” 45. Interview with S’bu Zikode, 2 August 2013. 46. Courtheyn 2016, 11. 47. Fanon 2008. 48. George Katsiaficas 2018 The Global Imagination of 1968, 1. 49. For more on the strengths and weaknesses of this approach in Mexico, see Hesketh 2017 Spaces of Capital, Spaces of Resistance: Mexico in the Global Political Economy. 50. See, for example, Marina Sitrin 2006 Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power from Argentina. 51. Raul Zibechi 2011 Dispersing Power. 52. For a wonderful study of these tensions in Bolivia, see Nicole Fabricant 2012 Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land, especially Chapter 6, “A Social Movement State.” 53. Jared Sexton 2014 “Tracking the figure of the non-sovereign.” 54. Cedric Robinson 2015 The Terms of Order. 55. 2013 The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, 20. 56. Neil Roberts 2015 Freedom as Marronage. Adam Bledsoe 2015 “Marronage as Past and Present Geography in the Americas.”

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57. Kerry Chance 2010 “The Work of Violence.” 58. This frustrated some members of the Mexican left who had long hoped that the indigenous Zapatista movement would reinvigorate the leftist PRD. It also necessitated a distancing of the grassroots indigenism of the Zapatistas from the state-oriented indigenous movements like Bolivia’s MAS. The Zapatistas refused to accept an invitation to attend the inauguration of Evo Morales in Bolivia. Nonetheless, despite the fact that the Zapatista movement was not focused on winning state power and instead concentrated on the elaboration of the Good Government Councils operating in “Autonomous Zapatista Territory,” their actions have still had an effect on state powers, as witnessed by their unmasking of the farcical nature of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the corresponding 2000 dislodging of PRI rule in the country for the first time in 70 years, and the eventual the election of exPRD candidate Manuel Andres Lopez Obrador to the presidency in 2018. 59. Branch & Mampilly 2015, 200–216. 60. Economic Freedom Fighters 2013 Constitution of the Economic Freedom Fighters. 61. Sahle 2014 “Intellectuals, Oppression, and Anti-Racist Movements in South Africa.” 62. Nieftagodien 2015. 63. Gillian Hart is one of the few South African Marxist theorists who continues to claim that such an analysis is inadequate to the contemporary moment, both because neoliberalism on its own cannot explain the developmental initiatives and social grants that the ANC has unfurled over at least the past decade, and because of the ongoing racialized dimensions of dispossession in the country. See Hart 2014 Rethinking the South African Crisis. 64. See, for example, Mark Purcell 2006 Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures; David Graeber 2002 “The New Anarchists;” and Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini 2014 They Can’t Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy. Matthew Sparke’s (2013b) “From Global Dispossession to Local Repossession” makes a parallel point, usefully emphasizing the global resonance of Occupy Wall Street through its production of a series of problem spaces: “By fashioning local geographies of repossession, the target spaces,

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everywhere spaces, and time-spaces of Occupy activism have created a whole new suite of shared spaces, teaching spaces, and affect spaces,” 404. For a parallel vision of this radical democracy in the economic field, see Hannah Appel 2014 “Occupy Wall St and the Economic Imagination.” Interview with Mnikelo Ndabankulu, August 3, 2013. Ciccariello-Maher 2017, 123–151. Interview with S’bu Zikode, August 2, 2013. These options are often faced by movements from their outset as well. As I try to convey in this chapter, Abahlali’s politics are not dogmatic with regards to these options, but conjunctural. There are many important examples of political projects across the African continent and world that adopt one or another of these strategies, including the formation of a traditional political party. The question that has still not been addressed for the adherents of that option is how to subvert the inherently hierarchical, vanguardist nature of such a strategy for political change, given the extensive accounts of twentieth century radical political parties that are slowly transformed into instruments against the very people they claim to be struggling on behalf of. This is in part a debate about the nature of the state itself, and goes back to Lenin’s theorization of the supposed withering away of the state, and Marx’s account of the abolition of the state in his writings on the Paris Commune. Perhaps the best contemporary example of a vanguardist political party that nonetheless takes the project of the abolition of the state seriously is the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. The extensive writings on Venezuela by George Ciccariello-Maher all dwell in one form or another on this problem and project, in an impressively nuanced fashion. See his 2013 We Created Chavez, his 2017 Building the Commune, and his 2020 article discussed above “The Commune is the Plan.” Many thanks to Willy Mutunga for pushing me to elaborate upon this point here. Mutunga has also written extensively about this problem, and actively participated in the development of radical political alternatives to mainstream capitalist politics in Kenya. For a recent articulation of his suggestion to form a struggle on many fronts, see his 2020 “Saba Saba at 30.” Ibid. This is contrasted with writers like Slavoj Zizek who sometimes read Marx’s text on the 1848 revolutions outside of the confines

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of space and time, as an analysis of revolutionary and reactionary subjects across all geographies and historical periods. Ciccariello-Maher 2016, Dangl 2010. Zibechi 2012, 191. Raul Ornelas 2012, 145. Ibid, 155. Mbembe 2003; Sexton 2010. Badiou 2012. Wynter 1994, 60. Robinson 2000(1983), 184. See Enright and Rossi’s extremely helpful theorization of the geographies of “the political” and “late neoliberalism” in the introduction to their co-edited 2017 volume The Urban Political. Pithouse 2013a, 100.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Dignity as Rupture and the “Becoming Black of the World”

Now, for the first time in human history, the term ‘Black’ has been generalized. This new fungibility, this solubility, institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet, is what I call the Becoming Black of the world. Achille Mbembe1 In the case of race, the racial in the domestic scene has so powerfully been positioned over the racial in the global scene that it has resulted in an often stilted research agenda that amasses and identifies cases of racial domination without a fully elaborated reason or purpose. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard2 Representation presupposes the absence of what must be represented. Anton Wilhelm Amo3 The power of community, in short, is an organized power. Geo Maher4

It is now commonplace to situate the founding of the (post)modern global era around 1990. This periodization coincides with the end of the Cold War, the rise of a potentially unchecked American unilateralism, and the hegemony of variegated processes of neoliberalization. The triumphalist account of the end of legalized apartheid in South Africa in that same year functioned within dominant discourses to put the liberal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City, Contemporary African Political Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42433-5_6

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emphasis on human rights back into neoliberalism. South Africa’s celebrated transition from apartheid to democracy in the 1990s under the leadership of Nelson Mandela and the ruling African National Congress therefore remains a point of identification between the persistent inequalities of globalization on the one hand and liberal notions of transitional justice and egalitarian constitutions on the other hand. At the very same time, beginning in 1994 with the indigenous Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, a series of dissident voices from below began to challenge the growing consensus of what one leading militant termed “the Fourth World War.”5 Just as the Zapatistas timed their uprising to coincide with the entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement on January 1, 1994, much of the alterglobalization movement that emerged in their wake similarly targeted the transnational architecture of power located in institutions such as the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Rather than any single nationstate serving as primary antagonist in the new global era, activists argued that the new structure of power operated in a much more diffuse and interconnected form of sovereignty, what Hardt and Negri have termed “Empire.” The 1999 protests against the WTO meeting in Seattle, the 2000 protests against the WB and IMF meetings in Prague, and the 2001 protests in Genoa against the summit of the Group of Eight (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada) all defined the new alter-globalization movement’s repertoire of confrontational direct action as well as its identification of new transnational antagonists. This first period of alter-globalization movement organized around summit-hoping arguably culminated in the 2001 World Conference against Racism organized by the General Assembly of the United Nations and held in Durban. While alter-globalist theorizations of a “fourth world war” necessarily brought increased attention to the importance of indigenous “fourth world” knowledges and struggles that had been relatively neglected during the previous Cold War struggles across first, second and third worlds, specific attention to racism had largely been eclipsed by the neoliberal-era focus on class inequality. The Durban convening therefore hoped to draw greater attention to the neoliberal threat of race by drawing attendees to South Africa, a country celebrated for having recently overcome apartheid rule.

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Instead, the gathering in Durban marked something of a turning point in both the strategies of rule from above and the competing responses by the alter-globalization movement from below. Meeting from August 31 until September 8, the convention was eclipsed by debates over whether to denounce Israel as a leading example of state racism modeled on apartheid, leading the Bush administration to withdraw its delegation that had been symbolically headed by Colin Powell, the first black Secretary of State in the United States. The conversation around the need for national and international institutions to confront head-on a persistent “threat of race” was therefore once again postponed, and soon eclipsed by current events.6 Only three days after the conference proceedings ended, the September 11 attacks struck the United States. This created an opportunity for the neoconservative movement to attempt a reassertion of American hegemony over the emerging multi-polar architecture of global power. The War on Terror, beginning with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, began to shift the energy of the global justice movements from challenging the global institutions of neoliberal power to an arguably narrower focus on the threat posed by a renewed American imperialism and the need to reverse course on its rapidly expanding transnational security state.7 It is now clear that the War on Terror initiated by the neoconservative wing of the Bush administration constituted a “failed coup d’état ” within the world-system, albeit one that has caused tremendous suffering, leaving incalculable destruction in the wake of its “shock and awe” policies.8 The 2008 global economic crisis delt a significant blow to the neoconservative dreams of unilateral American power, and soon unleashed a decade of bifurcation within the world-system. Since the Great Recession, liberal centrism has been less and less able to maintain the post-political consensus of the 1990s, and instead finds itself losing ground to new forces on both the right and the left of the ideological spectrum. On the one hand, neoliberal rule has arguably culminated in permanent crisis defined by a decidedly authoritarian turn and the rise of far-right xenophobic electoral blocs across much of the global north.9 On the other hand, the earlier round of alter-globalization struggles has given birth to renewed forms of state capitalism and top-down developmental policies in many parts of the global south.10 These policies have emerged alongside of or in response to a series of dramatic uprisings from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, and more recently, from the feminist Ni Una Menos to the Movement for Black Lives. Each of these

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movements has been necessarily internationalist in composition. At the same time, a series of locally circumscribed, place-based struggles has drawn increasing attention from activists as the earlier alter-globalization strategy of summit-hoping has been gradually eclipsed by territorial initiatives more grounded in the problems of everyday life.11 At stake in all these struggles has been the search for new political visions capable of transcending the limits of traditional models of social change. This maturation of the global justice movement over the past three decades has generated a second phase of struggle, what we might call “alter-globalization 2.0.” In this second phase the targets of activists remain the agglomeration of various global institutions and transnational corporations, but they are also increasingly articulated with local and national antagonists in a manner that highlights ever-shifting scales of struggle across the entirety of the local–global continuum.12 Abahlali baseMjondolo has been emblematic in this regard. The movement grounds itself in the spaces of everyday life, with a territorial basis in individual shack settlements that each face a specific set of challenges, often oriented around demands for adequate hygiene, water, housing, work, childcare, electricity, and safety. It successfully scales up beyond the neighborhood level through its network of branches across the city of Durban and operates through a rotating leadership council that oversees the citywide activities of the organization, connects individual settlements with each other, and functions as a mediator between shack dwellers and a range of actors including the municipal government, local NGOs, and corporate interests. While Durban remains the epicenter of the movement, it has also successfully expanded to settlements across the country and continues to push for a nation-wide alliance with other radical organizations across the country. Cognizant of the pressures placed on South Africa’s ruling party by transnational corporate interests and institutions of global governance, Abahlali has been careful to study the ever-changing architecture of global power, and to visit with movements in many different parts of the world, including Ghana, Palestine, Kenya, Haiti, Greece, the United States, and Brazil, just to name a few examples. They have attended transnational gatherings organized by the World Social Forum in Kenya and the United Nations in Mexico and are keen to strategize and share stories with parallel movements from the rural-based landless people’s movement in Brazil to the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa—the most prominent workers union to officially break ties with the ruling ANC.

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As we have seen, throughout these various initiatives, across different places and times, the conceptual focus of the movement has revolved around the notion of dignity. The slogans deployed at protests have ranged over the years, but the original phrase that has also stood the test of time consistently has been: “Land, Housing, and Dignity!” In speeches by movement leaders, as well as in the organization’s published communiques, it is repeatedly the immaterial notion of dignity that is stressed most often. This emphasis distinguishes their conception of struggle from those that circulate in both mainstream media and within traditional socialist politics and which tend to read shack dweller protests through the lens of exclusively material demands for better “service delivery” by the state. As the movement is keen to point out, they do need better access to “services” like water, houses, and electricity. But they consistently argue that the “delivery” of these services from on high will not solve their problems. Drawing upon a diverse repertoire of Latin American popular education initiatives, black liberation theology, what they call a “living communism,” and a pre-colonial Africanist element along the lines of what Cabral called “a return to the source,” Abahlali repeatedly emphasizes the importance to their struggle of shifts in the register of their collective consciousness.13 Despite some early tense relationships with existing socialist and communist movements in South Africa, that are still stuck in the baggage of Trotskyist and Stalinist currents, Abahlali openly proclaims their adherence to socialism. They now sing “The Internationale” in English at many big meetings, and a Zulu song called “I’m a communist.” Unlike the prevailing Trotskyist and Stalinist currents in the country, their communism is more of an ethic, a heterodox current that foregrounds their own experiences of struggle while simultaneously insisting on a politics of the encounter and solidarity that links up with other struggles around the world, such as Palestinians tackling neoliberal apartheid, Kenyans fighting against police assassinations, landless Brazilians organizing for food sovereignty, and houseless movements in the United States struggling for a right to the city. Above all, Abahlali insists that only by taking seriously the minds of the poor—as urban planners, dreamers, theorists of social change, and as participants in their own autonomous democratic practice—will their mission be fulfilled. In this regard, the movement embodies a crucial pillar of what Cedric Robinson has argued is an autonomous black radical tradition of global struggle. As he argues

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in his genealogy of black radicalism: “always, its focus was on the structures of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material.”14 As the Movement for Black Lives has globalized in recent years, with protests occurring in dispersed contexts such as Holland, Senegal, Colombia and most recently, in Nigeria with the #EndSARS uprising, there is a growing recognition about the disproportionate and generalized disposability of black life across otherwise disparate regional and national contexts.15 While the increasingly central Anglo-American academic conversation around settler colonialism and the afterlife of slavery usually remains geographically restricted within the borders of North America, the growing salience of indigenous struggles—particularly in Latin America—and black movements in Africa and throughout the diaspora in the latest round of alter-globalization struggles indicates the globality of these important shifts, while reminding us that they are the result of the gains of concrete political struggles rather than simply intellectual fads. As movements increasingly center questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity as crucial pillars of their interventions, prevailing notions of liberal inclusion, development and precarity all require reconstruction and transgression. And as capital itself diffuses along ever more geographically dispersed pathways, the traditional geopolitical hierarchies of north–south lines of conflict are also becoming increasingly complicated. Regional powers like those gathered under the BRICS bloc and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will likely continue to assert themselves in the vacuum created by the gradual but violent decline of American hegemony. It is at this conjuncture of shifting forms of global rule and the evolving traditions of alter-globalization struggle that this book has sought to rethink questions of democratic transition, rupture, development, precarity, and autonomy by examining them through the reflective and refractive looking glass of the “living politics” of the shack dweller movement in Durban. Thinking from South Africa, where the social relations forged by settler colonialism and antiblackness have targeted not distinct groups but a single population, can prove especially productive in this regard. It also makes sense that the debate concerning the relationship between precarious inclusion and surplus exclusion might take place on the specific terrain of shack communities in the South African context.16 Simultaneously spatially incorporated into the post-modern metropolis,

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but socially excluded from many of its potential benefits, shack dwellers are forced to walk the tightrope between the fruits of urbanity and the ever-present threat of premature death that marks the “fatal coupling of power and difference.”17 As we continue the search for a path out of the horrors of our present conjuncture, this book has argued for the importance of allotting ample time and study to the political experiments and collective visions playing themselves out in the marginal spaces of shack dweller communities. Perhaps there, the ruptures produced by the pursuit and enactment of dignity, might be able to plant seeds capable of rhizomatically articulating with other parallel traditions of struggle, and in so doing offer us all a collective vision of another world emerging in the here-and-now.

Notes 1. 2017 Critique of Black Reason, 6. 2. 2015 Waste of a White Skin, 168. 3. Cited by Kwesi Wiredu 2004 “Amo’s Critique of Descartes’ Philosophy of Mind,” 201. 4. 2021 A World Without Police, 174. 5. See Subcomandante Marcos 1997 “The Fourth World War Has Begun”. 6. For a theorization of the existential “threat of race” as distinct from racial exploitation or racial curiosity, see David Theo Goldberg 2008 The Threat of Race. For a more optimistic account of the Durban convening, see Samir Amin 2001 “World Conference Against Racism: A People’s Victory.”. 7. There were also clear overlaps between the two foci, perhaps most obviously in the resistance to the privatization schemes in Iraq under Paul Bremmer’s leadership. And yet, a rift in struggle objectives was nonetheless palpable as increasingly defensive interventions pushing back against the security state slowly displaced the World Social Forum’s more expansive vision that “another world is possible.” Paul Amar offers us a brilliant analysis of the sexual politics at play in the constitution of the transnational security state in his 2013 Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism. For more on the transnational security state and the specifically Africa roots of the War on Terror, see Samar Al-Bulushi’s work, especially her 2019

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

“#SomeoneTellCNN: Cosmopolitan Militarism in the East African Warscape,” and her 2020 “Making Sense of the East African Warscape.”. For more on the failures of unilateral neo-conservatism, see Hardt and Negri 2009 Commonwealth, 203–218. Although it is important to note that these trends are not entirely confined to the global south and global north, respectively, but do in fact overlap quite often in particular countries. For studies focused primarily on the global north, see Wendy Brown 2018 “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in TwentyFirst Century ‘Democracies’,” and Nancy Fraser 2019 The Old is Dying and the New is Not Yet Born. For accounts of the authoritarian turn that pay more attention to trends across the global south, see Aijaz Ahmad 2016 “India: Liberal Democracy and the Extreme Right,” and Boffo, Saad-Filho and Fine 2019 “Neoliberal Capitalism: The Authoritarian Turn.”. See Whiteside, Alami, Dixon, & Peck 2023 “Making Space for the New State Capitalism, part I,” as well as the entire special issue in EPA that it introduces. For an account of territorial struggles in Latin American context, see Sam Halvorsen 2018 “Decolonizing Territory: Dialogues with Latin American Knowledges and Grassroots Strategies.”. See Pithouse 2013a “Conjunctural Remarks on the Political Significance of the Local” for a brilliant rumination on the question of scale in political struggle. For a lovely discussion of the politics of identity that refracts across the Atlantic from the United States to the African continent, and that deals with Guinea-Bissau and Cabral as well, see Olúf´e.mi Táíwò 2022 Elite Capture. For a recent collection of Cabral’s writings, see Cabral 2022 Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories. And for a fascinating account of Cabral’s life, see António Tomás 2021 Amilcar Cabral: The life of a Reluctant Nationalist. Robinson 1983 Black Marxism, 169. This is an argument I take up in 2020 “The Global Threat of Race and the Decomposition of Struggle.”. For representative articulations in support of differential inclusion or surplus exclusion, see, respectively, 2012 Mezzadra and Neilson “Between Inclusion and Exclusion,” and Jameson 2011 Representing Capital. Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2002 “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography.”.

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Index

A Abahlali baseMjondolo, 4, 5–7, 65–70 demographics of, 92 landlessness and, 121 organizing practices of, 88–91, 159, 188–190 relationship to political parties, 171–176 self-management politics and, 65–69 slum eradication legislation and, 133–135 state violence against, 155 Africa theorizations of, 7–10 African National Congress (ANC), 17, 39 Abahlali baseMjondolo and, 96 Freedom Charter of, 40, 130 housing policy and, 121–126 African National Congress (ANC) Youth League, 4, 92, 170 Agamben, Giorgio, 177

Amin, Samir, 46 Amo, Anton Wilhelm, 185 Antiblackness. See Blackness Apartheid, 14–17. See also Post-apartheid Assassination of Nkululeko Gwala, 162, 172 Autonomy, 168–169. See also Abahlali baseMjondolo

B Badiou, Alain, 19, 60, 96 Bantustans, 14, 15, 109 Barchiesi, Franco, 43, 44, 48–52, 62, 164, 165 Bayat, Asef, 121 Biko, Steve, ix, xvii, 1, 92, 93, 128, 171 Black Consciousness Movement, xvi, 59, 92, 94 Blackness, 17, 18. See also Race terminology, xv–xvii

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City, Contemporary African Political Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42433-5

213

214

INDEX

Bledsoe, Adam, 26 Bond, Patrick, 41, 43–48, 49, 63, 115 Brenner, Neil, 64–65 BRICS (Brazil/Russia/India/China/ South Africa), 8, 20, 112–116

C Cato Crest shack settlement, 4, 155. See also Abahlali baseMjondolo Césaire, Aimé, xvii Chatterjee, Partha, 52, 54 Colonialism, 11–15, 42, 85, 107, 114. See also Settler colonialism Cooper, Fred, 107 Cornubia, 96, 126–136 Crane, Emma, 107 Cravey, Altha, 49 Cravey, Georgia Ann, 49 Cullors, Patrisse, 153

D da Gama, Vasco, 10, 11, 16 Democracy movement communism and, 60 social movements and, 43 Depelchin, Jacques, 52 Desai, Ashwin, 41, 50 Development, 7, 103–152. See also Developmental state Developmental state history of development and, 106–108 social movements and, 136–138 theorization of, 138–143 Doshi, Sapana, 20, 105, 142 Du Bois, W.E.B., 15 Durban economy of, 3 history of, 10 urban planning and, 110–111

E Economic Freedom Fighters, 170–175 Eisenstein, Paul, v, 77 Elden, Stuart, 64–65 Escobar, Arturo, 106 F Fanon, Frantz, xvii, 17, 18, 61, 93, 95, 108, 114, 157, 166, 167, 170, 171 Farred, Grant, 18, 39, 57, 58 Farrington, Constance, 18 Ferguson, James, 106 Freund, Bill, 109 G Gibson, Nigel, 87 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, xvi, 1, 15, 16, 20, 106 Globalization. See also BRICS social movements and, 20–22 the developmental state and, 20–21 Gordon, Lewis, v Gqola, Pumla Dineo, 11 Gwala, Nkululeko, 70, 155, 157–163. See also Assassination of Nkululeko Gwala H Hall, Peter, 127 Hardt, Michael, ix, xi, 54, 69, 82, 116, 117, 186 Harney, Stefano, 169 Hart, Gillian, 61, 62, 79, 106, 138 Hartman, Saidiya, 17, 77 Harvey, David, 5, 82 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, v Holdren, Nate, 22 Holston, James, 94 Huchzermeyer, Marie, 125

INDEX

J James, C.L.R., 141 Jefferson, Thomas, 69–70

K Katsiaficas, George, 168 Kelley, Robin D.G., 1, 13, 22 Kennedy Road shack settlement, 4, 87, 104. See also Abahlali baseMjondolo

L Lefebvre, Henri, xi, 5, 63–68, 82 Lenin, Vladimir, 39, 42, 43 Levinas, Emanuel, 55 Loftus, Alex, 82

M Madlingozi, Tshepo, 125 Maharaj, Brij, 41 Maher, Geo, 185 Mamdani, Mahmood, 55–58, 137 Mandela, Nelson, 23, 39, 40, 44, 78, 84, 105, 117 Marais, Hein, 139–141 Marx, Karl, 52, 53, 153, 163, 175 Mbembe, Achille, v, xii, 7, 8, 162, 179, 185 McGowan, Todd, v, 77 McKittrick, Katherine, 18–19, 154 Mezzadra, Sandro, 7–9, 142 Mintz, Sindey, 127 Mlaba, Obed, 104, 128 Morobe, Murphy, 60–61 Moten, Fred, xi, xvi, xvii, 18, 19, 169

N Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo, 7

215

Negri, Antonio, 53, 82, 116, 117, 141, 142, 186 Neocosmos, Michael, 43, 52–54, 59–62, 108, 111 Neoliberalism, 16–21, 44–47, 83–86, 108–113, 185–188 Nielson, Brett, 142 Nkoana-Mashabane, Maite, 113–114 Nxumalo, James, 156, 161

O Ornelas, Raul, 176

P Pampallis, Karin, 42 Philcox, Richard, 17 Phillip, Rubin, 92–93 Pithouse, Richard, 120, 179 Post-apartheid labor movement and, 44–47, 48–51 theorization of, 15–17 uneven development and, 44–46 Post-colonialism, 137–143. See also Settler colonialism Precarity theorization of, 163–166

Q Qumbelo, Thembinkosi, 156–157

R Race post-apartheid and, 57–58 terminology, xv–xvii Robins, Glen, 127 Robinson, Cedric, xvii, 19, 126, 178, 189 Roy, Ananya, 103, 107 Rupture

216

INDEX

post-apartheid struggles and, 84–87 theorization of, 20, 83 S Sassen, Saskia, 116–117 Schrader, Stuart, 107 Sekyi-Otu, Ato, xvii Settler colonialism, 11–13 Sexton, Jared, 85 Shabodien, Fatima, 114 Shack dwellers. See also Abahlali baseMjondolo, Cato Crest shack settlement, Kennedy Road shack settlement migration and, 118–121 urban space and, 94–96 Sharpe, Christina, 77 Social movements, 5–8, 20–22, 40–42, 46–48, 186–191 civil society and, 52–54 South Africa history of, 10–15 Indian migration to, 12 inequality and, 41 settlement and colonization of, 11 the ‘national question’ and, 42 Swyngedouw, Erik, 78, 84–85 T Thiong’o, Ng˜ ug˜ı wa, 9

Tissington, Kate, 122–124 Tongaat Hullet, 3, 93, 110, 126–133 Touza, Sebastian, 21–22 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 54–58 Turok, Ben, 103, 140

V Virno, Paolo, 156, 166

W Wallerstein, Immanuel, 114, 115–117 Wamba dia Wamba, Ernest, 52 Webster, Eddie, 42 Wilderson, Frank, 55, 153 Willoughby-Herard, Tiffany, 185 Wilson, Japhy, 78, 84–85 Wolfe, Patrick, 11–13 Woods, Clyde, 18 Wright, Willie, 26 Wynter, Sylvia, xix, 18, 177–178

Z Zibechi, Raul, 103, 175–176 Zikode, S’bu, 121, 126, 167, 173, 175 Zondo, Nomzamo, 125 Zuma, Jacob, 83