Apartheid Remains is a publication arising from several years of research conducted by the author in adjoining residential areas of two historically oppressed communities in Durban, South Africa. Wentworth is a residential area that was established to house so-called “coloured” people and Merebank to house Indian people during the apartheid era. “Coloureds” living in Durban constitute a very small proportion of the “coloured” population of South Africa and the population of Durban, while Durban Indians constitute the largest concentration of Indians in the country and the second largest population group in the city.
As the title indicates, the book draws attention to several key features of apartheid that persist thirty years after its demise in 1994. In the prelude, Chari uses photographs—a method he uses throughout the book—to place emphasis on several aspects of what persists from the apartheid era, in particular, an oil refinery that borders both communities. The key issues highlighted here are the impact of the refineries on the health of residents of both communities and the persisting salience of “race” in postapartheid South Africa.
In the Introduction, Chari describes the two communities in terms of their proximity to polluting industries and the impact of these industries on the health of residents, the environmental justice organizations that emerged in both communities, their current populations and the economic situation of their members, and the local activism of residents during the democratic era. He draws some of this description from discussions and interviews he conducted with residents.
The ultimate objective in the book is to reveal what “remains behind” after the various “conjunctures of power and protest” (10) that mark the history of the two communities. The first part of the book, titled “Racial Palimpsest,” focuses on capitalism’s “spatial and racial fix” (10) in apartheid South Africa, which involved interventions aimed at regulating the lives of the country’s citizens (“biopolitics”), and sets the basis to illustrate how, despite significant changes since 1994, traces of what existed before can still be found in postapartheid Wentworth and Merebank.
This is done by providing a description of the South African War between 1899 and 1902, the conditions in the British concentration camps as a precursor of what was to come for oppressed South Africans, and the historical role that both Wentworth and Merebank served as sites for concentration camps during the war (Chapter One), and recollections of the arrival of indentured Indian labourers and other Indian immigrants between 1860 and 1911, the settlement of Indians on land they rented, squatted on or owned in the areas now known as the Bluff, Wentworth, and Merebank in the immediate post-indenture period, and dispossession, diverse ancestries, repeated displacement, and racist oppression of members of the colored community of Wentworth (Chapter Two).
This is followed by an analysis of the rationale for, and the mechanisms the Durban municipal authorities used to acquire the land for the segregated Wentworth and Merebank residential areas to house cheap labor in a proposed industrial zone in the South Durban Basin in the period between the early 1920s and early 1950s (Chapter Three), and the process of dispossession and evictions this gave rise to and the resistance to these processes and apartheid in general, as well as the peculiar form that “biopolitical struggle” took as community health work and feminist anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles (Chapter Four). This part concludes with a description of the establishment of polluting industries within and on the borders of Wentworth and Merebank, and the implementation of, opposition to, and consequences of the Group Areas Act that gave rise to the two adjoining segregated residential areas following the Nationalist Party electoral victory in 1948 (Chapter Five).
In the second part of the book, titled “Remains of Revolution,” the author delves more deeply into the biopolitical struggles members of the two communities engaged in during both the apartheid and anti-apartheid eras. The first of these are the “theologico-political” struggles of the 1970s such as the 1972–73 Durban strikes and the struggles waged by organizations inspired by the Black Consciousness Movement, with the latter significantly impacted by “radical Christianity” (207), that still linger in the consciousness of members of the two communities (Chapter Six). This is followed by descriptions of involvement in the armed struggle and political underground (Chapter Seven), in the popular organizations and struggles of the 1980s (Chapter Eight), of Wentworth youth in anti-apartheid military actions in the 1980s, and in the struggle for environmental justice in Wentworth and Merebank in the democratic era (Chapter Nine).
What remains, according to Chari, are traces of the biopolitics and biopolitical struggles that characterized the apartheid era, most notably, the “coerced estrangement” found “in the return of xenophobic phallocentric authoritarianism” (342), and the “suspicions and intrigues of struggle lineages” (342) and “civic organizations and struggles for medical, gender, sexual, labor, environmental, and housing justice” (343).
The various analyses and arguments in the book are underpinned by a wide range of theoretical perspectives, most notably the Black Marxist perspective and Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, that are relevant and appropriate. Indeed, besides an insightful analysis of the nature, experiences, and responses to their social domination of two historically oppressed communities, one of the most appealing aspects of Apartheid Remains is the way in which the author masterfully blends numerous theoretical perspectives, analyses of key historical processes, and primary—in particular, photographs, maps, posters, pamphlets, flyers, music, film, official and unofficial documents, and personal stories—and an extensive body of secondary sources to produce what is a thought-provoking, informative, and pleasant read.
However, the title of the book is a bit deceptive. While the book draws attention to the persisting salience of race and “bio-political” struggle in postapartheid South Africa in numerous ways, there is no discussion of several other aspects of the apartheid era that persist in the democratic era. The most significant of these are white privilege and the economic inequalities between the population groups (what were previously known as “race groups”). Some attention could have been given to white dominance of the economy and economic inequality during the apartheid era and the way these continued to impact the situation most South Africans found themselves in close to thirty years after the advent of democracy. In particular, attention could have been given to the fact that white South Africans continued to hold a significantly disproportionate share of the high-paying jobs and national income. In consequence, the burden of poverty continued to be found overwhelmingly in many black African, colored and Indian communities, who have become increasingly dependent on the state for survival. The author could have drawn attention to how this dependency, such as the 40 percent of South Africans who rely on state-funded social grants, 3–4 million households who have received a state subsidized house, 70–82 percent of South Africans who rely on state-funded health care, and 800,000 students who rely on state-funded bursaries annually, among other things, impacted the capacity of the state. This would go a long way to explaining why the state is unable to meet the needs of many citizens and why some communities still engage in “bio-political” struggles “over housing, services, land, health care, livelihoods, and public higher education” (17).
Nevertheless, the book, while drawing much-needed attention to two communities belonging to the country’s minority population groups, is also a welcome distraction from the significant body of scholarly work on postapartheid South Africa that focuses on the failures of the black-led government rather than on how persisting economic inequalities due to white dominance of the economy impact the capacity of the state and the lives of many citizens.
