Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid

by Antina Von Schnitzler

In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape.

Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa’s transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world.

Democracy’s Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa’s political transformation.

Genres: Politics, Sociology, Political Science, History, Africa, Anthropology

256 pages, Paperback

Published November 8, 2016

About the author

Antina von Schnitzler is an anthropologist and assistant professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written with absolute clarity, Democracy's Infrastructure gives a uniquely insightful picture of post-apartheid township political life as played out through access to infrastructure (focusing, in this case, on prepaid water meters, but also other relevant infrastructure). The book reveals how infrastructure has been a site of struggle, both during apartheid and post-apartheid; as such the author identifies distinctive elements of South African struggle that have been little explored in other literature, especially post-apartheid literature. Through infrastructure, the book examines how the poor contest power in South Africa. Importantly for my research, she also explores the shifting language the ANC uses to talk about resistance-through-infrastructure during apartheid and part-apartheid: non-payment first as a liberatory activity, then becoming a criminal activity.

The book is absolutely a MUST READ for anyone going to understand the idiosyncrasies of power in South African urban life.

[Anna Mackay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting! Great outline of the process of removing political rights/admission into the public, causing political action to take place in the private sphere, and then attempts at the depoliticization of the private in response.