To Gabrielle Hecht, the massive mine dumps that dot the Witwatersrand region of South Africa are a microcosm of the Anthropocenic threats that await us all. The mines and their dumps are not only physical scars from the political nightmare of apartheid, she explains, but are also ongoing sources of toxicity and racialized harm. Decades after a mine shuts down, the heavy metals used in mining, including uranium, leach into already fragile water tables, or blow into the eyes and lungs of Black and Brown South Africans living downwind of the dumps due to apartheid spatial planning. The postapartheid government’s ongoing failure to address these harms is symptomatic of residual governance, Hecht’s key theoretical intervention in her latest monograph, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures.
Residual governance, according to Hecht, involves three “entangled dynamics” that stem ultimately from racism, capitalism, and the naïve siren-song of endless growth. The first is the treatment of residues: South Africa alone has more than 6,000 officially abandoned mines, requiring complex, expensive management and rehabilitation that neither the state nor slippery mining companies have been able to effectively implement in the thirty-two years that have now passed since democracy. The second is more complicated: “governance as a residual activity, typically tacking between minimalism and incrementalism, using simplification, ignorance, and delay as core tactics” (29). Faced with a virtually impossible mission—a “super-wicked problem,” in Hecht’s favored terminology—government actors fall back on a repertoire of insidious pseudo-scientific and pseudo-democratic maneuvers designed to rope-a-dope communities into docility, as if the need for governance itself were an unfortunate residue in need of mitigation and management. Finally, residual governance involves treating people and communities as residues: another example of troublesome material awaiting correction or removal.
Residual Governance is certain to appeal to readers interested in postapartheid South Africa, critiques of racial capitalism, and climate scholarship that blends the sciences and humanities. It opens by retelling the events of June 16, 1976, when students living in the shadow of Johannesburg’s myriad mine dumps rose up against educational, political, and socioeconomic systems that treated them as residues. As young urbanized Africans, the regime saw the students of the Soweto uprising like the arsenic and mercury in their water supply: as inconvenient byproducts of the mining process. Throughout the chapters of Hecht’s text we meet a number of figures involved in fighting back against this hydra of toxicity and dehumanization—the Sandton housewife-turned-activist Mariette Liefferink often turns up, as do dogged scientists such as Frank Winde and artists like Sally Gaule and Potšišo Phasha. Jeffrey Ramoruti, a grassroots activist in the West Rand township of Kagiso who had to wait three decades after democracy to receive a house promised to him by the government, exemplifies the human toll of the state’s ineptitude in delivering the South Africa promised by Nelson Mandela in 1994.
The eclectic, kaleidoscopic feel of the text is rounded out by striking graphic montages by Chaz Maviyane-Davies, and the book is lavishly illustrated. Yet while Residual Governance deftly conjures the tragedy of mining’s legacy, Hecht’s argument that “residual governance is rapidly becoming a default mode of rule around the world” (31), is not well supported by the evidence she herself presents. In fact, the stories Hecht tells about postapartheid South Africa show more continuity with apartheid and colonial exploitation than discontinuity, causing one to ask whether all post-/colonial capitalist exploitation could be described as “residual governance,” If so, what does the term actually accomplish? Hecht’s theory of residual governance emerges, according to this line of reasoning, as a reminder that the shiny J-curves of growth constitute the leading edge of an even steeper exponential curve of wastage—in ecological damage, tailings, wastes, and residues. Our default economic drives (to which Hecht refers ruefully as “growth!”) lead to ruin, and have always been leading to ruin, inspiring further questions about whether capitalist liberal democracy (as practiced in South Africa and elsewhere) is capable of providing a political solution to the global crisis we face.
Even so, in Hecht’s view, the very concept of solutions is suspect. Despite the urgency of her authorial voice, again and again she warns of the dangers of “solutionism”—a tactic of oversimplification and misdirection endemic to residual governance. “Behind the glossy smokescreens of economic boosterism and government action plans,” lies the reality that “imagined futures built on ‘living ruins’—ruins that continue to bleed and cough and seep and surge—cannot heal the wounds etched into lungs and land and lives” (197). This statement is rhetorically powerful and may well be true, but it does not reflect the spirit of the students of June 1976. By resisting the political metanarratives of their day—metanarratives like residual governance—they fought and were willing to die for the idea that a better life could really be achieved through grassroots resistance, even if the gains they achieved were partial and provisional. For Hecht, change, where it does appear, is gradual and inexorable, like the dispersal of the toxic compounds she has dedicated her career to examining.
