At the heart of Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City is Yousuf Al‑Bulushi’s claim 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 grapples with such conditions—and thinks with that lived experience—throughout the book, never patronizing those he learns from in Abahlali baseMjondolo, and never condescending those he encounters with a sense of scholarly privilege. Ruptures is a book driven by a genuine need to make sense of the possibilities, the conditions, the metaphysics, and the motivations for the politics developing in Durban’s neighborhoods of Kennedy Road and Cato Crest, a politics now inspiring those living far, far beyond South Africa. But it’s also a book that confronts the precarity, the mortal dangers, and the losses amassed alongside those gains. In addition, Ruptures is a brilliantly crafted book, with a structure that reflects the globalectics of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as well as the various moments shaping the politics and histories of Durban.
The introduction to the book lays out a theoretical framework that: traverses urban racial regimes; engages with the Black Radical Tradition (which Al‑Bulushi (2022) has traced out in further detail in a piece on Cedric Robinson’s World System); and dialogues with work in Black geographies, with theorists of race, and with the anticolonial writings of Frantz Fanon in order to consider how a universal humanity might emerge from the zone of (non-)being and the practices of Abahlali. From the opening scene, in which Al‑Bulushi takes us on a walk along Durban’s beachfront, to the discussions of the sugarcane multinational company Tongaat Hulett’s influence on the city, the book provides readers with a deep sense of the sedimented histories through which Durban’s relations to the wider world have transformed processes within the city, and vice versa. The nuanced ways in which Al‑Bulushi considers the frustrated transition(s) of apartheid South Africa demonstrate the carefully constructed theoretical approach. Challenging Patrick Bond’s notion of elite transition, Al‑Bulushi turns to Franco Barchiesi’s autonomist interpretation of how worker struggles have expanded the range of tactics through which contestation is taking place. Michael Neocosmos’s work is then considered, before Al‑Bulushi turns to Abahlali’s own form of autogestion, read in relation to Henri Lefebvre’s writings.
A chapter on development situates South Africa within what Sapana Doshi (2019) refers to as the redevelopmental state, and here Al‑Bulushi ventures into debates around state capitalism, while also considering the ways in which this redevelopmentalist turn is a response to the pressures exerted by Abahlali. Here he turns to an utterly intriguing discussion of the “promised land of Cornubia,” a bizarre public–private partnership between one of Durban’s largest landowners and the local municipality. The interviews with Tongaat Hulett’s Cornubia project manager, Karen Petersen, are almost like a parody, as Petersen openly describes the offloading of “shitty land” onto the municipality. Following soon after this chapter is the most in‑depth discussion of Abahlali, which combines careful analysis with a series of deeply sobering reflections on the build-up to the deaths of several activists—almost played out in real time within Al‑Bulushi’s own research. The book concludes (p. 191) with a thoughtful discussion of “the search for a path out of the horrors of our present conjuncture” and a suggestion that:
[T]he ruptures produced by the pursuit and enactment of dignity might be able to plant seeds capable of rhizomatically articulating with other parallel traditions of struggle, and in so doing offer us all a collective vision of another world emerging in the here and now.
Ruptures is an outstanding work of politically engaged scholarship, so what follows is less a form of criticism and more a form of comradely engagement. Most often, my comments are a case of wanting more, as with the discussion of Cornubia. The latter, as already mentioned, is a brilliant and incisive take on the redevelopmental state, how this manifests at a local level, and how it is both a product of the actions of Abahlali and an initiative that needs to be positioned within the broader projects of big- and little-D development; however, I found myself wondering if Al‑Bulushi might expand further on the urban processes unfolding around the project. Tongaat Hulett’s turn from sugar to land is clearly part of a broader shift that some might refer to as assetization or financialization. It is one in which apparently (although I would argue only apparently) the primary locus of profit-making has shifted from the production of real commodities like sugar to speculating on phenomenal forms of value found in both land rent and interest-bearing capital. As a former part of the much larger Anglo-American conglomerate, I want to know how and why these decisions were made by Tongaat Hulett, and how and why any fair redistribution of land runs up against these vested interests in South Africa. Maybe the story remains a simple one of how corporate power—and its relationship to the state—prevents any more radical forms of redistribution. But if there are conditions of possibility more or less favorable to Abahlali within this shifting terrain, I’d like to know what those conditions might be.
In the penultimate chapter of the book, Al‑Bulushi (p. 190) quotes Cedric Robinson on the Black Radical Tradition, writing that “always its focus was on the structure of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics, not the material.” The quotation captures much of the important work that Abahlali does in seeking to achieve dignity in its struggles against the abstract compulsion of economic relations and ongoing racialized dispossession; but it does make me wonder if that sets up too firm a juxtaposition. Might a deeper materialist critique not sit alongside and function with the kind of metaphysics that Robinson lauds in the Black Radical Tradition? Indeed, why can metaphysics and materialist critique not work together in seeking a response to racialized dispossession in Durban?
In the chapter before, Al‑Bulushi (p. 178) again quotes Robinson, this time on his claim—of C. L. R. James and W. E. B. DuBois—that “their brilliance was also derivative. The truer genius was in the midst of the people of whom they wrote. There the struggle was more than words or ideas but life itself.” Not only does this quote capture the humility of Robinson and those he writes of in Black Marxism, it also captures the profound authorial modesty of Al‑Bulushi in Ruptures. The book is not the outcome of an academic project in which someone is seeking to exploit a shack-dweller movement: instead, it is the work of an activist, seeking to use his academic position to learn from—and further—the dignity of those of whom he writes. Perhaps, then, mine is the knee‑jerk reaction of an academic when it comes to the decision of Abahlali to support the neoliberal Democratic Alliance (DA) party in the 2014 elections. I must admit that this tactical move still floors me somewhat. When placed in context, As Al‑Bulushi does, the decision can be understood alongside the hopes and expectations of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) that Abahlali would endorse their party in the election. Instead of a small clique of individuals making these decisions, Abahlali embarked on a democratic process to decide whether to support any party at all and, if so, which one. The outcome of that process was the paradoxical decision to support the DA. But the lack of criticism from Al‑Bulushi is only possible with a huge degree of restraint on his part. I wonder if there is also a cost to the analysis here.
When, in the early 2000s, I was also trying to make sense of a politics that “begins with the lived experience of shack-dwellers,” I found myself turning increasingly to Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis and suggested that any coherent and transformative political project must begin from the fragmented common sense rooted in the practical activity of social reproduction. I stand by that—and suspect it resonates with some of the broader insights in Al‑Bulushi’s book—even if some of the thinkers with which we engage are different. But alongside Gramsci’s reading of common sense is also a form of ideology critique, something that Jan Rehmann (2014, p. 146) argues is taken up in Stuart Hall’s notion of the “disarticulation” and “rearticulation” of ideological formations. Might there also be space for the kind of “dialectical translation” that permitted Hall to both understand but also critique working-class support for Margaret Thatcher within the fractured politics of Britain?
Understanding common sense alongside the fragmentation of multiple and sedimented knowledges is one part of Gramsci’s methodological approach to the study of subaltern social groups. The latter, for Gramsci, lie not outside but within the relationality of the integral state—their subaltern position guaranteed by the form of passive revolution that others—such as Gill Hart (2014)—have used to interpret South Africa’s frustrated transition. Every time I read about efforts to co‑opt Abahlali’s struggles while simultaneously repressing (and killing) key figures within the movement, I found myself thinking: this is passive revolution, surely? But then again, perhaps, I’ve done exactly what Al‑Bulushi resists—projected a theoretical formulation onto the movement, rather than developing concepts organic to that movement.
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.
- Hart, G. 2014. Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony, Athens (Georgia): University of Georgia Press.
- Rehmann, J. 2014. Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection, Chicago: Haymarket Press.
