In his new book, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City (Palgrave Macmillan), UCI global & international studies associate professor Yousuf Al-Bulushi examines the dynamics between the municipal government in Durban, South Africa and a social movement of residents who live in shacks. Drawing on interviews and extensive interdisciplinary research, Al-Bulushi frames the initiatives of the South African community in a way that facilitates new understandings of the overlapping crises faced by people within and beyond the country’s many different geographies. Below, he shares what motivated this work and explains what the shack dweller movement contributes to our understanding of the global struggle against racial capitalism.

Q: What inspired you to write Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City?

A: Ruptures was inspired by the largest and most enduring social movement to have emerged in post-apartheid South Africa, a group of residents living in shacks, known colloquially as “the shack dwellers,” and in isiZulu as Abahlali baseMjondolo. I was struck by the disconnect between the narratives circulating about South Africa after the end of juridical apartheid in the early 1990s, and what appeared to be the reality on the ground. In the 1990s and 2000s, South Africa was still celebrated as a multi-racial democracy, a country that had successfully transitioned from the violence of apartheid to a “rainbow nation” where all people supposedly belonged. This first image of the country was personified in the figure of Nelson Mandela, its first democratically elected president, and institutionalized in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was held up in international law circles as a paragon of progressive transitional justice. However, as I learned more about the struggles of the shack dwellers, and other parallel movements like them across the country, it became clear that this first narrative was far from accurate. A second, more enduring reality began to crystalize, one where most South Africans were still struggling for a dignified life in a country that had the highest rate of inequality in the world. This was a world where the race and class matrix of apartheid had not exactly been transcended so much as transformed under the new conditions of neoliberal globalization.

In this context, I was eager to tell the story of the shack dweller movement as a specifically African reference point for the alter-globalization struggles in other parts of the world, movements that usually had a Latin American center of gravity. Africa, in contrast, was often represented through narratives of civil war, ethnic conflict, corrupt officials, and hunger crises. I wanted to tell the story of an affirmative political project, initiated not by popular celebrities but by everyday people who were developing their own internationalist geographical imagination. This was a struggle that seemed to offer important lessons for other movements around the world, and to push back against the prevailing views of Africa in much of the existing social science literature.

Q: Your book spotlights the relationship between shack dwellers and the municipal government in South Africa. Can you share some of the most striking examples of how this dynamic plays out in the context of apartheid’s lingering influence?

A: The shack dwellers first emerged in the city of Durban, the third most prominent city in South Africa, after Johannesburg and Cape Town. After almost two decades of organizing, they now have a national presence in many other parts of the country. But everywhere they emerge, their most immediate antagonists tend to be at the urban scale, in the form of local municipal governments and neighborhood ward councilors. This is because the responsibility for meeting people’s needs in South Africa often lies with this branch of government: from basic services like water, electricity, infrastructure, and sanitation, to the state provision of housing, it is usually the municipal government that residents interact with and have to leverage in order to access the bare necessities of life.

For people living in what is referred to as “informal communities”—where housing is self-constructed out of necessity, and land is squatted upon rather than officially registered with a title deed—accessing these basic needs can often be the difference between life and death.

And yet, one of the difficulties that the shack dwellers have encountered in their interactions with the municipal government is that government officials, at best, continue to treat them in much the same manner as international development agencies or charity organizations do—as materially and mentally impoverished people who can only be “saved” by people and institutions operating outside their communities. And in the worst cases, these officials treat them with outright disdain, as a blight on the urban landscape, as illegitimate occupiers of land belonging to others, and as social refuse demanding violent displacement or elimination. Worst of all for Abahlali, government officials refuse to recognize the dignity of the poor, which for them means first and foremost their capacity to think. Service delivery is not their central struggle objective. It is instead self-determination through the construction of affirmative projects based on the preeminent principle of dignity.

South African municipal government agencies have also been at the center of interventions to desegregate urban space in order to dismantle the apartheid geographies of white city centers, suburban townships for urbanized people of color, and rural Bantustans for African people. In an effort to tackle what in the US we called “white flight” in the wake of desegregation, the South African government under the African National Congress redrew the maps of all municipalities to capture both newly emergent edge cities of white and upper class residents, and sometimes to incorporate nearby surrounding rural areas that had previously been zoned “traditional homelands” subject to the rule of ethnically defined “tribal chiefs”—a notion that was primarily the product of colonialism rather than its precursor. The redrawing of the maps by the ANC was a progressive move, in geographical terms. And yet, some of these same municipal officials who I spoke to, and who were directly appointed by Nelson Mandela and tasked with desegregating the legacy of apartheid urbanization, also treated groups like the shack dwellers, who dared to criticize the post-apartheid government, with utter disdain and disrespect. In the worst cases, organizations like Abahlali have faced outright violence and political assassinations at the hands of municipal bodies and their paramilitary forces. To date, twenty-four Abahlali comrades have been killed. Two of these victims in particular—Nkululeko Gwala and Thuli Ndlovu—were people I met during my research and came to admire for their brilliant organizing skills and their steadfast political commitments. Nkululeko Gwala and Thuli Ndlovu, presente! Say their name!

So, in sum, the relationship between the municipal government and Abahlali is one defined by a contradictory sense of the potential promises of political representation and development on the one hand, and an enduring reality of top-down clientelist service provision or outright violent political repression on the other hand.

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from your book, especially in terms of understanding the ongoing impact of apartheid and the broader global struggle against racial capitalism?

A: While juridical apartheid was overthrown, socio-spatial divides persist into the present in South Africa. This is emblematic of a broader principle that geographers call “uneven development.” Our world is divided into haves and have-nots, and these divisions almost always take on spatial form. But the struggle to rupture such spatial divides is also as ubiquitous as uneven development itself. Furthermore, while technical experts and planners no doubt have a role to play in these desegregating projects designed to realize a right to the city for all, some of the best ‘policies’ enacting land reform and a radical reorganization of space are produced from below in the form of activism and land occupations. The land question in South Africa, dating back to the colonial era starting with dispossessions in 1652, is not exclusively a rural question. It is also an urban question, and the shack dwellers help us identify the most promising attempt to redistribute urban land in the country today—squatting upon and then defending that land through principled and democratic political organizations led by the poor themselves.

Just as apartheid has an afterlife, so too have the structures of racial capitalism not been overthrown in South Africa. Rather, the racial regimes have simply evolved and shifted over time, as Cedric Robinson explained to us brilliantly. But it’s for this reason that I argue we can also detect, in a Black-majority country, under a primarily Black-led government, the persistence of an internationalist Black radical tradition in the purportedly post-apartheid present. Listening carefully to these struggles emerging from below, while resisting the urge to subsume them into ready-made political ideologies such as Trotskyism, Stalinism, Black Nationalism, or liberalism, is a central proposition of the book and one I hope readers will continue to debate and grapple with. It is a proposition that resonates across oceans, generating a new internationalist politics that Abahlali practices with remarkable consistency. In this regard, it is a politics resonant with parallel experiences closer to home, as my colleague in anthropology at UCI, Damien Sojoyner, has argued about South Central Los Angeles in his recently published book Joy and Pain. In both Durban and Los Angeles, then, we have much to learn from what Sojoyner calls “traditions of Black life that expose the fallacy of carceral-generated myths centered in black suffering, misery, and pain.”