In 2007, South Africa faced the reality of the country's electricity shortage with the introduction of ‘load-shedding’, a term used to describe scheduled blackouts that affect both households and businesses. In response, Eskom embarked on the construction of two new power stations, Medupi in Limpopo province and Kusile in Mpumalanga, although more than ten years later, these have yet to be completed. The Medupi Power Station is the subject of this chapter. Once complete, it is expected to be the largest power station of its kind in the world. It was built at a time when the growing consensus around climate change had made clear the unsustainability of fossil fuel-based energy. The power station is situated in an arid, bushveld region, near to the South African border with Botswana, on the outskirts of the small town of Lephalale. Medupi is situated about twenty kilometres away from another power station called Matimba, which the electricity public utility Eskom built in the 1980s. To the north of these power stations lies the Grootgeluk coal mine, built by South Africa's former state-run steel corporation Iscor in the late 1970s. The mine produced coking coal, commonly used to manufacture steel, as well as the bituminous coal that Eskom burnt in its power stations. The Lephalale region has thus for decades been the site of state-driven, sophisticated engineering projects, rooted in the tail end of the apartheid government's period of high modernism and brutal social engineering.

The construction of the Medupi Power Station began in 2008, and its completion date has been regularly postponed. In 2015, community members resident in the township of Marapong, adjacent to Lephalale, complained that the Medupi construction site contained graves that had not been exhumed and were likely destroyed during the construction period. They claimed that the angry spirits were responsible for disruptions at Medupi. The chairperson of one of the organisations representing community members, the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities (CRL Rights Commission), Thoko Mkhwanazi, said: ‘It's the bones underneath and in the vicinity. Some of the graves were destroyed there. The belief systems of some people will tell you that this Medupi dream of yours will never happen.