AMBIVALENCE:  What does the history of South Africa’s power utility, Eskom, tell us about the apartheid and post-apartheid state?

By Faeeza Ballim

My book, Apartheid’s Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence (Ohio University Press, 2023), follows the development of infrastructure projects in an arid, border region of South Africa from the 1970s.

Iscor, South Africa’s former steel manufacturing corporation, started a coal mine and Eskom, South Africa’s national electricity provider, built two power stations in the region.

Construction on the second power station, named Medupi, began in 2007, and the delay in its completion exacerbated the electricity shortage, the effects of which South Africans first felt in that same year. The country’s electricity shortage only worsened over the years and has reached crisis proportions in the contemporary period.

I was drawn to the study of infrastructure from a discomfort with the conception of African politics as “neopatrimonialism,” which emphasized the systematic dysfunction within African political systems. Thandeka Mkandawire’s critique of the concept, published in 2013, critiqued the embedded assumption that “it is impossible for an African state to play a developmental role.”

Preoccupied with the maintenance of their neopatrimonial systems, African governments lacked the long-term vision necessary for the delivery of public goods. While Mkandawire was chiefly concerned with economic policy and economic growth, the question of long-term planning is also applicable to infrastructure development, which is the subject of my book.

A growing body of literature began to look at the new development programs that some African governments adopted from the late 2000s, and that contained a vision of modernization through infrastructure development. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira’s Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War in particular detailed the limited nature of this modernization under the presidency of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, where infrastructure development was concentrated in elite pockets of Luanda.

In scholarship about South Africa’s economic development, Ben Fine and Zavareh Rustomjee’s influential book, The Political Economy Of South Africa: From Minerals-Energy Complex To Industrialisation, in South Africa, looms large. They demonstrate the historic and continuing dominance of the mines and by extension, the extractive economy, in South Africa’s economy, to the extent that industry failed to develop an autonomous momentum outside of it.

Nancy Clark’s book, Manufacturing Apartheid: State Corporations in South Africa, published two years before Fine and Rustomjee’s book inspired the conceptual context for the state corporations of Iscor and Eskom. This book illuminates the multi-faceted role of the state corporations.

They not only provided the auxiliary infrastructure for the mines, but also functioned to improve the socioeconomic mobility of whites, a project that animated the governing rationale of successive South African governments in the 20th century. Iscor and the South African Railways and Harbours were important avenues of employment for whites in the twentieth century.

Over time my conception of “politics” shifted, as did my belief that there is a discernible difference between a realm of “politics” and a realm of “technology.” In my research, I found that even though the leading engineers, government officials, unionists, and workers belonged to different organizations, they were imbricated in unexpected ways and at the different spatial regions of their operation.

Scholars writing in Science and Technology Studies provided the conceptual tools to deal with this complexity. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour’s chapter, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan,” inside of a collection with a seemingly innocuous title, Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, edited by Karin Knorr Cetina, was particularly influential. Importantly, Callon and Latour describe the black-boxing of techniques that go into the creation of “irreversible alliances.”

Gabrielle Hecht’s Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II, considers the construction of nuclear power stations in France after World War II.

This book, which focuses on state corporations responsible for nuclear development in France, describes the different “technopolitical regimes” through which their operations passed and decenters the conception of politics from its oft-encountered position within the seat of government.

Radiance of France was a helpful starting point for me in understanding the relationship between the monolithic technological state corporations in South Africa and their relationship with the governments of the 20th century.

Finally, Antina von Schnitzler’s Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid, a book centered on the device of the prepaid electricity and water meter in South Africa. This book provides a novel analysis of the way neoliberalism as a form of governmentality filtered into the apartheid reform project in South Africa in the aftermath of the Soweto Uprising of 1976.

It details South Africa’s political and economic liberalization from the 1990s, as well as the way in which the prepaid meters have functioned as an arena for protest politics in post-Apartheid South Africa.

• Apartheid’s Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence (2023) by Faeeza Ballim is available from Ohio University Press and Jacana for R595 (paperback) and R1 500 (hard cover).

Ballim is a senior lecturer and head of the Department of History at the University of Johannesburg

THICKER THAN WATER – A Memoir

GUT-WRENCHING: Unputdownable chronicle of the life of American Hollywood actress Kerry Washington bound to evoke a plethora of emotions – from sadness, empathy to tears…

By Jacob Mawela

Picture yourself now an independent adult and your parents suddenly summoning you to return home from work, and once there, matter-of-factly informing you that one of them is not your biological parent.

And, learning this earth-shattering truth (a hitherto long-hidden secret) at the advanced age of 41?

In the case of this featured memoir’s protagonist: she is told she is the progeny of an unknown sperm donor! That the loving father she has known all her life from her birthday until the moment of the ‘shocking’ revelation – is not her dad!

“Forty-three years ago, we were having a really hard time having a child, so we used a surrogate. We used sperm from another man,” the protagonist’s mother revealed! Subsequent to the revelation, the protagonist’s efforts to trace the unknown donor amount to futility, with her, in her quest to ascertain that the dad she’d known all along wasn’t really her dad, cajoling him to undergo a DNA test to prove once-and-for-all that indeed he isn’t her biological father. That, maybe, just maybe – a mistake might had been committed. Then the test’s result are announced by a doctor: “So it says here that there is a 0.000001 percent chance that Earl Washington is your biological father.” The above gut-wrenching discovery is contained, along with others (such as undergoing an abortion while in her 20s and being sexually molested by a boy at sleepovers while in her childhood, et cetera) in the recently released tome, Thicker than Water – A Memoir, chronicling the life of American Hollywood actress, Kerry Washington.

Recognised by local television audiences as the lead character of the thriller series, The Fixer (titled thus in its South African iteration, and Scandal in its American version), Washington’s memoir is an impeccably written recollection infused with wisdom, maturity, consummation in one’s calling, love and dedication to family and an abiding love for water, amongst a plethora of ingredients!

Water, whether in a swimming pool, a lake or in the ocean, has featured as an abiding element for the woman nicknamed ‘Fish’ by the lifeguards of her Bronx, New York, neighbourhood swimming pool for her natural prowess in her pre-teen years. The book cover features a painted oil linen image depicting her submerged underwater with a tete-a-tete reflection of herself.

In one of its pages, she recalls a cameraman in scuba gear not keeping up with her burst of pace underwater while filming a scene for an episode of Scandal. A picture on the tome’s back jacket shows her tiny self smiling at the camera alongside her dad and mom, Valerie, in the swimming complex of Jamie Towers in the Bronx.

Central as water may be in her life, the actress of films such as Lakeview Terrace (in which she features opposite Samuel L. Jackson), Quinton Tarantino’s Django Unchained (in which she stars alongside Jamie Foxx) and Spike Lee’s She Hate Me, etc. also discloses the responsibility of family such as when her mom, an educationist, underwent treatment for cancer at a hospital during the COVID-19 period, and she had to wipe pee and poop from her and replace bedpans, etc.

Also named Marisa, meaning, “of the sea” (although her mom told her the name means, “princess of the sea”), in the penultimate chapter, Washington revisits an encounter with a trio of blue whales whilst kayaking pending a vacation in Maui. Involving a female, a calf and a protective male of the mammoth mammals, a tour guide explained to her: “It’s not the father. That male is the whale who wants to mate with the mother next season. He accompanies the mother and her child on their journey to prove himself worthy.”

To Washington, that display of nature was tantamount to the role her surrogate father (who she swam together with numerous times throughout her life) Earl exists for in hers and her mom, Valerie’s lives!

• Thicker than Water: A Memoir, is published by Little Brown and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers and available at leading bookstores nationwide. The trade paperback retails for R415