Abstract
The title and subtitle of Gabrielle Hecht’s excellent new book, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures, point to three major themes that run through her bracing analysis. A clever and complex play on words, “residual governance” refers, first, to a physical manifestation, namely, the drab and toxic hillocks of byproducts and mining detritus that dot the gold–bearing regions of Gauteng Province. Second, “residual governance” also refers to a “deadly trifecta” of callous threats: indifferent policies that expose South Africans to the dangerous byproducts of gold mining; official reliance on dangerously misleading and false information that protects gold mining profits and hollows out Blacks’ freedom; and an ingrained administrative approach that “treats people and places as waste and wastelands.”
Firmly grounded in local spaces, these two themes focus on the historical distinctiveness and legacies of gold mining in South Africa, laying bare a host of attendant environmental disasters that cripple the health and lives of Black South Africans in particular. In contrast, the third theme that inspires Hecht’s passionate analysis is global. Hecht sees in South Africa’s profoundly damaged ecosystems and vulnerable Black communities the life–canceling perils that residual governance poses to the planet. South Africa is a canary in a goldmine, and the future is bleak.
Central to Hecht’s analysis is philosopher Charles Mills’s theory of the “racial contract,” summarized by Hecht as “the political, moral, and epistemological power relations that constitute global white supremacy” (pp. 15–16). Hecht builds on two key arguments in Mills’s theory. First, powerholders are generally inured to the comprehensive damage they cause, touting abstract theories (about free markets, economic growth, etc.) in defiance of abundant material evidence of their complicity in generating and entrenching human misery. Skipping over earlier debates about the “relative autonomy” of the state in South Africa, Hecht demonstrates that a “purposeful design” that is sometimes hidden and sometimes explicit propels systemic collusion between state officials and corporate elites. Hecht therefore builds on a second theme in Mills’s work: because the tentacles of the racial contract thoroughly saturate all social relations, emancipation from regimes of residual governance requires an equally comprehensive politics from below that transcends narrowly conceived concerns about individual dangers such as toxic waste, health, government corruption, or environmental degradation. (Hecht disparages this approach as “solutionism.”) Only an uncompromising “liberation struggle” can substitute the technocratic machine with humanist alternatives that “respect the full personhood of ordinary people (their voices, their bodies, their aspirations)” and ensure their recognition over time.
Hecht’s analysis unfolds with vivifying passion. Scholars who prefer qualified, data–constrained analysis, as well as activists who reconcile themselves to partial successes in lieu of full–scale assaults on residual governance, are likely to view the book as polemical. This would be regrettable, for the fierce tone of the book is appropriate to the Anthropocene, the precarious contemporary age in which humans continue to undermine the very conditions of existence. Aligning herself firmly with the central claim of radical historiography in South Africa, Hecht argues that racialized immiseration and environmental degradation are so inseparably enmeshed in South Africa’s extractivist society that their extirpation demands nothing less than a revolutionary assault on residual governance. A striking and pleasing aspect of Residual Governance is the central role that aesthetics and artists play in community–based resistance, the work of poets, journalists, painters, and photographers sharing center stage with scholars, technicians, and planners. An enigmatic photograph presages each chapter. An orthogonal reference to the infrastructural violence of residual governance, these Sphinx-like images compel the reader to ponder their meaning.
The first chapter of this fast–paced book provides a sweeping view of Gauteng’s gold mining region, deftly combining an array of disciplinary fields that cover the geological, technological, and human context of the brutal racial contract that would earn South Africa infamy in the twentieth century. Chapter Two focuses on the spoiling of water. It illuminates how the “manufactured ignorance” of mine owners culminated in the acidification of water resources in an already water–stressed region, poisoning human bodies and destroying communities that had been proficient in husbanding the precious commodity in precolonial times.
Gold mining also unleashed deadly aerial threats, the subject of Chapter Three. In obeisance to the racial contract, swirls of toxic dust rise from the crevices and peaks of mining tailings to follow wind paths and river streams that spare whites and menace Black communities. Despite periodic highfalutin environmental impact reports, every official effort to repurpose these discarded mounds of ore, whether by re–mining or “re-vegetating” them, has failed to erode the essential asymmetry of the racial contract. Chapter Four illuminates the radioactive threat in South Africa’s gold–producing region by cogently comparing it to the Chernobyl disaster. A close analysis of the town of Kagiso illuminates how a brew of vices—corporate mendacity, intentional obfuscation, bureaucratic sloppiness, and sheer heartlessness—sustains residual governance in the post-Apartheid era. Galvanized communities and activists today are rebuffed with duplicitous “solutions” and callous nonsense (“As far as possible, children must avoid swallowing sand when playing outside”), amplifying the fear that Kagiso’s inhabitants are “Living in South Africa’s own Chernobyl.”
Chapter Five explores the tangled issue of land reform in a landscape still pockmarked by the historical legacies of residual governance. Attempts to undo “spatial injustice” have not fared well. The hopeful blueprints that Gauteng’s planners draw up to redress the shortage of housing without destabilizing the capitalist economy invariably bog down in impenetrable legal and technical prose, impeding community leaders and activists while shielding mining magnates and administrators from virtually all culpability. In the end, plans to reclaim and purify land, water, and air in the New South Africa peter out, and hope follows suit. Only the alliance of capitalists and politicians flourishes amid the poisoned ecosystems in which Black communities remain trapped.
Residual Governance is a remarkable fusion of scientific knowledge about the production of deadly mining waste and the political and cultural resistance of Black communities. The book is complex but well written, studded with flying prose, arresting metaphors, and reminders that residual governance is a global threat. Chapter titles such as “You Can See Apartheid from Space” (Chapter 1) and “South Africa’s Chernobyl?” (Chapter 4) reliably foreshadow the arguments to come. Other titles—“The Hollow Rand” (Chapter 2), “The Inside-Out Rand” (Chapter 3), and “Land Mines” (Chapter 5)—feel uncomfortably witty and provocative only after the degradations of residual governance have been dissected and revealed. Hecht’s excellent analysis ends with a Conclusion, “Living in a Future Way Ahead of Our Time,” that underscores her central claim: the entire planet sits in the crosshairs of residual governance, and the future is grim.