Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City explores “the strategies of global movements confronting racial capitalism” (p. 7). Theorizing this relationship from the vantage of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) or “shack-dwellers movement” in Durban, South Africa, the book offers a fresh and grounded perspective on pressing debates in urban studies concerning the architectures of neoliberal governance, the pursuit of social-spatial justice, the transnational composition of modern racial regimes, the meaning of urban democracy, and the nature of the urban political.
The book persuasively argues that AbM—one of the largest social movements on the African continent today—offers practical and conceptual lessons for how to overturn longstanding structures of colonial state violence, racial oppression and class exploitation, and to build a living, breathing democracy rooted in the affirmation of universal dignity, equality, autonomy, and the right to the city. Indeed, for Al‑Bulushi, AbM is not just one of many anti-systematic movements that exemplify recent manifestations of urban uprising. Rather, it is uniquely positioned as a key node in global anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggles. He claims that “any attempt to grapple with the conditions of urban politics, precarity, and autonomy […] should begin with the lived experience of shack dwellers” (p. 179).
Al‑Bulushi centres this experience while also providing context that is impressive in its analytical depth and in its scope. Particularly notable is what he terms a “theoretically itinerant manner of reading and situating place-based struggle” (p. 16). Throughout, Al‑Bulushi uses a variety of tools—for example, ethnography, observation, archives, interviews, text and policy analysis—to telescope in on the details of shack-dwellers’ organizing strategies as well as daily practices of social reproduction. However, as he notes, his interests are not primarily descriptive. Rather, it is from and through these discrete material foundations that he parses how Durban’s shack-dwellers are embedded in broader urban fabrics. Al‑Bulushi’s work is thus deeply dialectical and cosmopolitan, illuminating the dynamic and multiscalar relations that constitute Durban’s politics historically and in the present. Indeed, he reads in these ineluctably place-based struggles an entire complex of world-making conditions, connections, and consequences. An overarching proposition of the book, then, is that struggles of the marginalized are important in their own right and they are significant for radical politics writ large. In his presentation, which is deeply attentive to the intellectual production of the shack-dwellers themselves, AbM is a model and a mirror, providing guiding orientations for praxis and prompting a reconsideration of taken-for-granted political concepts.
In advancing this argument, Al‑Bulushi is in conversation with an extraordinary range of interlocutors, from world systems analysis, cultural studies, urban geography, state theory, African politics, Black studies, social movement analysis, postcolonial studies, and Marxist theory, among others. Not only does he display versatility with these eclectic bodies of thought, but he is clear-eyed about their salient lines of disagreement and complementarity and about their analytical and political purchase. In this way, he is able to lucidly unpack and explain divergent disciplinary approaches and strands of critical theory and their appropriateness to his study while not losing sight of common interests grounded in the possibility of social critique and transformation.
This unique mode of exposition thus generates insights that are greater than the sum of its parts. Not only does the work deprovincialize theoretical and empirical studies of urban Africa but, in placing the AbM movement’s thinking in conversation with other related geographies, knowledge traditions, and scholars, Al‑Bulushi shows the social movement’s immense “political and theoretical ramifications” (p. 21). Such an approach invites creative ways to think and do urban politics, something that is urgently needed to adequately understand and respond to our crisis-ridden age.
Ruptures provides many provocations. I’ll highlight two perhaps most notable to urban studies. First, Ruptures centers racial capitalism and anti-Blackness in its analyses of spatial injustice and justice. A central thread in this book—which Al‑Bulushi elaborates in more detail elsewhere—is that race is not incidental to articulations of capitalist urbanization, it is integral (see, for example, Al‑Bulushi 2022). Despite a burgeoning literature on racial capitalism in geography and a growing attention to the Black radical tradition in critical urban thought, these insights remain rather marginal. Al‑Bulushi is at the forefront of an exigent conversation about the need to situate neoliberal urbanisms and their discontents within longer histories of colonialism and racial dispossession.
In Ruptures, Al‑Bulushi shows how historically “settler colonialism and racial capitalism came together to form a racial regime of spatial production called ‘apartheid’” (p. 15). He thus provides insight into what he describes as an “ongoing dialectic between exploitation, elimination, and resistance” (p. 13). Moreover, he traces a continuity in racial logics into the post-apartheid era where policies of putative “non-racialism” guide both national economic priorities and local urban development practices. The still animate remnants of apartheid’s spatial practices—seen in technocratic administration, in deep segregations of city space, in concentration of land in the hands of a white elite, in growth-first policies of economic development, and in precarity and disposability of Black life—continue to shape the experiences and lives of marginalized communities long after their formal end. Al‑Bulushi insists on the need to name and address these afterlives. In foregrounding the apartheid regime as a set of ongoing spatial processes, Al‑Bulushi thus points to the inextricability of contemporary class struggle and struggles against anti-Black racism. This logic is not confined to South Africa but imbricates capitalist urbanization globally.
Second, and from the starting point of autonomism and Black radicalism, he advocates a movement-based approach to understanding power and resistance. Ruptures explores the relationships between city building and activist politics head on, insisting that governance structures and social movements are mutually constitutive and dynamic. However, against narratives which would read subaltern social movements as mere reactions to oppressive forms of power, Al‑Bulushi prioritizes instead the agency of the shack-dwellers. Not only is this social movement responding to domination and making demands for undelivered rights bestowed from above, but they are claiming and provisioning in defiance of constituted authority. In forcing a response, state power is “shaped by the forms of movement resistance that confront it from below” (p. 137).
Ruptures thus refines questions around sovereignty and authority. Al‑Bulushi’s elaboration of the local “redevelopmental state” is particularly generative in this respect. Borrowing the term from Sapana Doshi (2019), Al‑Bulushi tracks the state’s readoption of development rhetoric in order to balance the competing imperatives of ongoing liberalization and market-based growth with the pressing need of poor, often restive, populations (p. 105). The rollout of large-scale social welfare programs—in this case illustrated in the Cornubia housing megaproject—signals, on the one hand, the rescaling of these state functions to local as opposed to central administrations and, on the other hand, the state’s attempt to meet limited constitutional obligations while shying away from land reform and more radical assertions such as those in the African National Congress’s (ANC) 1995 Freedom Charter that “all have a right to occupy land wherever they choose.” Al‑Bulushi highlights how these strategies of the local planner state are salient for BRICS countries, but his analysis might equally apply in the Global North, where multiple levels of state power frequently coalesce in delivering projects of social welfare, but in ways consistent with a continuation of market logics that entrench the very spatial inequalities they are meant to address.
Overall, Al‑Bulushi uses these insights on racial regimes and movement-based housing struggles to interrogate Durban’s political formations and the very nature of the urban political as such. There is now a growing conversation in urban studies on the city as a site and stage for radical politics (a timely topic indeed given waves of urban revolt from 2011 onward). Yet the answer to the question “How and where do we find, articulate, and strengthen the political in cities today?” is not at all obvious. In Ruptures, Al‑Bulushi probes strategies that might be leveraged from the tensions within apartheid’s afterlives to what he terms an “inventive redefinition of the political” (p. 155). Leaving us with the idea that urban politics is living and lived in experiments around the world, Al‑Bulushi presents a hopeful account of “another world emerging in the here and now” (p. 191).
In such a rich text, there are many possible extensions and elaborations. I have three main questions to pull out some of the threads of the analysis further.
First is the title concept of the book: “ruptures.” Throughout the book, ruptures are defined and described by a range of interlocutors, including Achille Mbembe, Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan, Alan Badiou, Christina Sharpe, and Joshua Clover. Yet they are not directly engaged by Al‑Bulushi. In a cloud of meanings, ruptures are temporal and spatial; they are spectacular and mundane; momentary and durable; reactive and constructive; violent and care‑ful. So what are we to make of these swirling definitions? And what orientation do ruptures bring to AbM’s vision (or Al‑Bulushi’s) of radical politics? Given that AbM has been operating for 20 years, and the shack communities out of which it emerged have been engaged in place-based struggle for even longer, is there a point at which ruptures become something else, something beyond mere cracks in hegemonic systems?
The second question concerns the role of the local state. The later chapters of Ruptures focus on AbM’s interactions with the local government. They illuminate how AbM refuses to accept the state as the sole or primary arbiter of politics and denies the delegation of citizenship to legal authorities. While autogestion and self-determination across all areas of life are underlying principles, Al‑Bulushi deliberately pauses on the complexities of these principles in action. AbM does not adhere to a purist rejection of the state but, rather, tactically uses legal and administrative mechanisms as levers of change and will, for example, communicate and collaborate on their own terms and to their own benefit in order to “bring the state closer to the people.” These moments of tension are instructive for drawing out statist and non-statist articulations of the political. Yet they also leave underexplored some of the urban governance dimensions shaping these dynamics. What institutions at what level of government are the most salient points of action for AbM? How are these multiscalar governance arrangements shifting in response to social movements? And how might the lessons of AbM compare and be put in conversation with other kinds of experiments with direct democracy in local state form, such as community councils, new municipalism, citizen assemblies, or public commons partnerships?
The third question is also about the lessons urbanists are to draw from AbM and the scope of their application in solidarity movements worldwide. In the final paragraph of Ruptures, Al‑Bulushi voices an aspiration that the shack-dwellers movement might be “rhizomatically articulating with parallel traditions of struggle” globally (p. 191). This wish echoes one of the motivating questions of the text: “what insights can we take from the experience of these movements for programs of struggle in other parts of the continent and the world-at-large?” (p. 155). To be a bit more programmatic, how are the lessons of AbM to be taken up and translated to other heterogeneous contexts? How can this be done avoiding the perils of South African exceptionalism as well as those of one-size-fits-all solutionism? How much leverage, for example, do apartheid and anti-apartheid framings provide to other places, other contentions? And in particular, given the longstanding history of solidarity that Al‑Bulushi notes, how might the lessons of apartheid’s afterlives in Durban be resonant or not with struggles of Palestinian liberation, where apartheid frameworks risk diverting attention from more fundamental logics of settler colonialism?
Articles in this series:
- 1. Introduction, by Christopher Courtheyn & Joseph Palis
- 2. Urban Racial Regimes, Development, and the Black Radical Tradition in South Africa, by Alex Loftus
- 3. Settler Colonialism, Black Radicalism, and the Urban Political, by Theresa Enright
- 4. Rethinking Capitalism, the State, and Black Politics from the Global South, by Camilla A. Hawthorne
- 5. Author response | Thinking with Abahlali: The Local State, Solidarity, and Research, by Yousuf Al‑Bulushi
Bibliography
- Al‑Bulushi, Y. 2022. “Thinking racial capitalism and black radicalism from Africa: An intellectual geography of Cedric Robinson’s world-system”, Geoforum, no. 132, pp. 252–262.
- Al‑Bulushi, Y. 2024. Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Doshi, S. 2019. “The redevelopmental state: Governing surplus life and land in the ‘urban age’”, Development and Change, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 679–706.
