Gabrielle Hecht has written a history of the present with eyes toward the future. Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures defines a distinct form of governance that has historically shaped the Witwatersrand, South Africa’s industrial core, while offering a glimpse of emerging planetary politics in the Anthropocene. Hecht argues that the racial contract which characterized successive regimes of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa was inherently technopolitical, a mode of governance where technology enacts political goals. The argument expands on her earlier work on technopolitics in France and West Africa, while drawing substantively on Charles Mills’s critique of liberal social contract theory. Residual governance refers to a “deadly trifecta” (6): the governance of waste, simplification and delay, and treating people and places as waste. The residues of mining, racial capitalism, and apartheid spatial planning have seeped into South Africa’s postapartheid present. More broadly, the fraught history of South Africa’s spatial and environmental legacies offers a warning for shared planetary governance. “In South Africa,” Hecht concludes in her Introduction, “the future is already here” (17).
Chapter One outlines the book’s central concept. “Residue” is that which is often considered waste and its accretion—smoke pollution emanating from burning coal, for example—is at the center of contemporary planetary crisis. At a local level, residual governance describes the management of mining waste on the Witwatersrand, once the world’s richest source of gold that birthed the metropolis of Johannesburg. But at a larger scale, residual governance characterizes the forms of politics at play in the Anthropocene. Its second characteristic, the use of simplification and delay, refers to authorities ignoring or eliding responses to the production of waste. Third, and most powerfully, by treating certain people and places as waste, residual governance creates surplus populations. Perpetual production of residue, sustained by mantras of self-devouring growth, reproduces the horrors of apartheid on a global scale. “Residual governance,” Hecht argues, “is rapidly becoming a default mode of rule around the world” (31).
Chapter Two narrates how the mining industry, the motor of South African industry and segregation, enacted spectacular and slow violence on the Witwatersrand’s ecology, principally focusing on water. Hecht details how activists in the early years of democratic South Africa used newly established civil liberties to document and challenge the mining industry’s perennial pollution of scarce water sources. The mines’ chemical residues seeped into the region’s water supply while the delay and diversion tactics central to residual governance created a convoluted web of responsibility.
Turning from subterranean to atmospheric residue, Chapter Three focuses on dust. The solid waste from decades of mining have been cobbled together into giant “slime dumps,” mounds of dust visible over the horizon. More than unsightly landmarks, the location of slime dumps was closely linked to apartheid spatial planning. “Dumps, dust, and discrimination became deeply entangled,” in Hecht’s alliterative terms (86). Many of apartheid’s most infamous townships were purposefully situated south of Johannesburg, downwind of the principal mining sites, while the verdant suburbs north of the debris were reserved for white citizens. Hecht examines the works of artists who observed these environmental transformations first-hand to great effect.
Some mine dumps are more toxic than others. Chapter Four foregrounds activists on the West Rand living with the residues of the Tudor Shaft mine, an area proclaimed as South Africa’s Chernobyl. For the residents of Tudor Shaft, the threat of radioactive residue is maintained by official obfuscation and compounded by insecure tenure rights. Hecht illustrates how the violence of mining hostels under apartheid is perpetuated by the betrayal of promises for housing under democracy.
Moving from local activists to city-wide researchers, think-tanks, and artists, Chapter Five explores the shifting responsibility intrinsic to residual governance. Decision-making is diluted between political elites and mining companies, complicated by the hierarchies of authority between local, provincial, and national interests, often resulting in stalemate. In a powerful Conclusion, Hecht argues that the persistence of residual governance is an indicator of the continuities between apartheid and democratic South Africa. Yet the broader resonances of the book are clear: activists’ struggles “against residual governance are fights for recognition” (206).
Few texts present their arguments so stridently. Residual Governance strives for “transparency that highlights authorial affect over academic penchants for hedging and self-positioning” (8). The book is interspersed with striking photographs, artwork, and poems, lending an additional archive of artistic expression. Hecht’s use of sources is innovative and refreshingly honest about her debts to generations of South African activists.
Despite the book’s subtitle, this study is solely concerned with the environmental politics of the Witwatersrand, a relatively distinctive region in South African geography and historiography. Mining has transformed the ecology and politics of this landscape like few other South African cities. A broader approach might have included the mining belts of the neighboring North West and Mpumalanga provinces, home to some of the most carbon-intensive coal power plants in the world. The disastrous effects of residual governance may appear more viscerally in some localities than others, although its planetary effects are increasingly apparent.
Residual Governance successfully zooms out from careful consideration of local issues to position the Witwatersrand as a microcosm of residual governance writ large. Hecht offers a novel approach to the history of racial capitalism in one of its epicenters, while suggesting that African activists, artists, and scholars have much to offer in confronting the wicked problems of the Anthropocene.
