Apartheid’s Leviathan : Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence

Authors

Faeeza Ballim

Files

Series

New African Histories

Description

A fascinating study that shows how the intersection of technology and politics has shaped South African history since the 1960s.

This book details the development of an interconnected technological system of a coal mine and of the Matimba and Medupi power stations in the Waterberg, a rural region of South Africa near the country’s border with Botswana. South Africa’s state steel manufacturing corporation, Iscor, which has since been privatized, developed a coal mine in the region in the 1970s. This set the stage for the national electricity provider, Eskom, to build coal-fueled power stations in the Waterberg.

Faeeza Ballim follows the development of these technological systems from the late 1960s, a period of heightened repression as the apartheid government attempted to realize its vision of racial segregation, to the deeply fraught construction of the Medupi power station in postapartheid South Africa. The Medupi power station was planned toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century as a measure to alleviate the country’s electricity shortage, but the continued delay of its completion and the escalation of its costs meant that it failed to realize those ambitions while public frustration and electricity outages grew.

By tracing this story, this book highlights the importance of technology to our understanding of South African history. This characterization challenges the idea that the technological state corporations were proxies for the apartheid government and highlights that their activities in the Waterberg did not necessarily accord with the government’s strategic purposes. While a part of the broader national modernization project under apartheid, they also set the stage for worker solidarity and trade union organization in the Waterberg and elsewhere in the country. This book also argues that the state corporations, their technology, and their engineers enjoyed ambivalent relationships with the governments of their time, relationships that can be characterized as both autonomous and immersive. In the era of democracy, while Eskom has been caught up in government corruption—a major scourge to the fortunes of South Africa—it has also retained a degree of organizational autonomy and offered a degree of resistance to those who sought to further corruption.

The examination of the workings of these technological systems, and the state corporations responsible for them, complicates conventional understandings of the transition from the authoritarian rule of apartheid to democratic South Africa, which coincided with the transition from state-led development to neoliberalism. This book is an indispensable case study on the workings of industrial and political power in Africa and beyond.

Copyright Statement

Apartheid's Leviathan © 2023 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821447963

Publication Date

4-25-2023

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Eskom, Technology, South Africa, Electricity, Democracy, Iscor, Coal, Modernization, Neoliberalism, Infrastructure

Disciplines

African History | African Studies | Energy Policy | Infrastructure

Comments

Funding made possible by Path to Open. 

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Ballim, Faeeza, "Apartheid’s Leviathan : Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence" (2023). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 108.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/108