Book review: Apartheid Remains

Sharad Chari, Apartheid Remains, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2024; 496 pp.: ISBN: 978-1-4780-3041-6, US $32.95/£27.99 (pbk); ISBN: 978-1-4780-2617-4, US $119.95/£107.00 (hbk); ISBN: 978-1-4780-5945-5, US $32.99/£27.99 (eBook)

How do colonial histories matter in the world today? How might we grasp their protracted effects upon space, infrastructure and the livelihoods of people in the present who are surrounded by the debris of colonialism, racism and capitalism? These questions are at the heart of the recent book Apartheid Remains, written by Berkeley geographer Sharad Chari, in which he synthesises prior research on livelihood struggles (Chari, 2006), imperial ‘detritus’ (Chari, 2013) and struggles over space in Southern Durban, South Africa (Chari, 2010). Apartheid Remains takes the reader to Merebank and Wentworth, two townships located at the Durban bay which are ‘hemmed in by industry, including two oil refineries, a pulp and paper mill, a waste-treatment plant, the Durban International Airport, and the site of the planned Durban Dug-Out Pourt expansion of the Port of Durban’ (p. 2).

Chari’s book elucidates the intricate spatial history of Merebank and Wentworth over a period of a century (from the early 1900s to the early 2000s), examining in ethnographic detail how successive regimes of white minority rule have sought to gain control and sovereignty over both territories in an attempt to bring them in accordance with capitalist interests and fantasies of racial segregation. This is however only half of the story that Chari unfolds in Apartheid Remains. In the second part of the book the author meticulously excavates the multiple forms of struggle and subaltern space-making practices by Merebank and Wentworth residents who resisted the production of space through racial statecraft, and who until the present day continue to strive for a future in which ‘nothing of racial capitalism, nothing of apartheid, remains’ (p. xxiv).

Chari’s book begins and ends with life in contemporary Merebank and Wentworth, giving a vivid sense of the interplay of state racism and the mineral-energy complex in the production of ruinous, toxic spaces. He describes how people deal with the remains of corporate waste and a history of dispossession, carving out a life in a degradated and polluted landscape in the shadow of oil refineries and toxic waste. Apartheid Remains exposes the disastrous consequences of industrial pollution upon the lives and health of those who live in the immediate surrounding of two oil refineries and other polluting infrastructures. In Merebank child leukemia rates are 24% over the national average, and between 53.3% of students in a primary school located between the Engen and SAPREF refineries suffer from asthma and other respiratory problems (p. 5). To show the glaring health inequality and the embodied remains of corporate waste, Chari also draws on photography that documents how people live with toxic suffering. The photograph by Cedric Nunn with which Apartheid Remains opens, captures the scene of a group of Wentworth youth playing soccer, behind them the towering chimneys of the oil refineries. A second photograph by Jenny Gordon depicts an elderly Merebank resident holding her inhaler who has passed away after many years of asthma attacks (the consequence of nocturnal emissions from the refinery) (p. xx). As Chari adds, many more befell a similar fate, yet as the apartheid regime did not keep records linked to Black people’s addresses, there exist no statistics of a long history of ill health in Southern Durban.

The central argument presented in Apartheid Remains is that each historical attempt of apartheid’s ‘racial-spatial fixing’, as Chari calls it, has created ever new rounds of biopolitical struggle over the conditions of life through which the inhabitants of Merebank and Wentworth fought for their access to the means of health and vitality. Key to this argument is a dialectical understanding of the production of space and territory according to which spatial transformation and change is the result of conflicting forces, driven by attempts of spatial fixing from above that clash with subaltern forms of space-making on the ground. Chari however does not unfold this argument in the form a chronological, linear historical narrative. Rather, the book proceeds and is structured around specific spatio-temporal moments which Chari calls ‘conjunctures’ that would cohere for a period, then coming apart, and ‘leaving a trail of remains behind, well into the present’ (p. 25).

The first part of the book, entitled Racial Palimpsest, consists of five chapters that analyse how the racist state, in alliance with capitalist interests, sought to transform the South Durban area into geographies of racial exclusion and capitalist accumulation, where polluting industries could settle without regard for the people who actually live there, the Coloured and especially Indian residents who had a long presence as peasant-workers in South Durban before the dawn of (petrochemical) industrialisation. Across these chapters, Chari shows how racial statecraft in repeated attempts and by various means – such as through the establishment of numerous state commissions, racial zoning maps and the brute force of dispossession sought to bring the area of South Durban in line with its vision of industrial development and imagery of racial segregation. The strength of Chari’s analysis in the first part of the book is that he reads every intervention by the state to transform the urban fabric as an attempt rather than an accomplished fact. As Charis convincingly shows, the biopolitical efforts by the state often lacked basic knowledge about the spatial realities on the ground, and in contrast to city officials’ phantasy of total territorial mastery, even in apartheid’s heyday, the state could never make Durban conform to its racial-spatial fictions (p. 160).

The second part of the book, Remains of Revolution, moves away from the spatial interventions of the racist state and instead turns to the various forms of livelihood struggles and periodic resistance that emerged in Merebank and Wentworth in response to the state’s efforts of violent subordination. In a series of four chapters, Chari provides a disaggregated account of the anti-apartheid revolution from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. At various moments, the people of Merebank and Wentworth refused to submit to the deadening certainties of apartheid, and with most of the liberation movement’s leadership imprisoned and exiled, and African townships intensely policed and wracked by proxy violence, it was among Indian and Coloured neighbourhoods where political creativity and multiple forms of resistance developed (p. 200). This resistance included labour strikes (such as the Durban workers strike of 1972–1973), and a renewal of community struggles in workplaces and communities around high rents, transportation costs, inadequate housing, the price of food and continued forced removals (p. 257). But it also included violent forms of resistance, such as acts of infrastructural sabotage, and as in one case mentioned by Chari, a car bombing of two beachfront bars in 1986 by a self-organised anti-apartheid unit with links to Wentworth. Moreover, in the face of state neglect, residents repeatedly tried to repurpose the tools of public health and environmentalism as instruments of biopolitical struggle, with a network of organisations trying to build community expertise and surveying residents’ experience of atmospheric air pollution and respiratory ill health, and in this way documenting the effects of long-term exposure to toxic pollutants (p. 337).

Apartheid Remains is a moving and eloquently written ethnography that explores how people handle, but also challenge the long-standing vestiges of racial segregation and industrial capitalism. The book’s publication coincides with a pivotal moment in South African history: the sixth round of democratic elections since the country gained independence in 1994. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the multifaceted legacies of apartheid and its enduring influence on the present, such as the afterlife of apartheid’s infrastructures and the protracted embodied and spatial effects of colonial violence.

The relevance of Apartheid Remains however extends beyond a South African readership. As Charis himself notes, the toxic landscape of South Durban can be read as a ‘microcosm of our poisoned-soaked industrial planet’ (p. 26). The challenges faced by residents of Merebank and Wentworth thus point to global struggles against extractive and polluting industries which destroy the conditions of life on this planet (such as in the Niger Delta region or in several Amazonian countries), also resonating with George Floyd’s ‘I can’t breathe’ in the context of US racism.

While the title Apartheid Remains may suggest a certain melancholy, the book does not leave the reader in a state of apathy or political resignation. Instead, it illuminates moments of revolutionary potential within the ongoing livelihood struggles in Merebank and Wentworth that gesture towards a future beyond the confines of apartheid and the supporting structures of racial capitalism.

References

Chari S (2006) Post-apartheid livelihood struggles in Wentworth, South Durban. In: Padayachee V (ed.) The Development Decade? Economic and Social Change in South Africa, 1994–2004. Cape Town: HSRC Press, pp. 427–443. Google Scholar

Chari S (2010) State racism and biopolitical struggle: Struggles over space in Durban, South Africa, 1900–1970s. Radical History Review 108: 73–90. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Chari S (2013) Detritus in Durban: Polluted environs and the biopolitics of refusal. In: Stoler AL (ed.) Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 131–161. Crossref; Google Scholar

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