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partheid, a system of state-enforced racism based on colonial land dispossession, mass displacement of native populations, and spatial segregation, lives on in the world—well beyond South Africa’s formal decolonization in 1994 and well beyond South Africa. We need careful analyses of apartheid’s afterlives, how its logics continue to animate postcolonial state relations with the urban poor and how, in the face of perpetual subordination, the poor organizes itself to demand standing and recognition from the state, however provisionally.
Zachary Levenson’s Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City provides a stunning ethnography and meticulous theorizing of housing politics in contemporary Cape Town. His core argument is as elegant as it is powerful: if the apartheid state delivered housing to Black South Africans at the far-flung outskirts of the city to justify their dispossession from prime land in the urban core, then the post-apartheid state flips this logic. It dispossesses poor occupiers of land allegedly to advance its constitutionally promised project of formal housing delivery. Despite strides made in postcolonial South Africa over the last three decades, however, housing delivery still falls far short of need. The net result is a permanently precarious urban subaltern population, left to make demands on an unreliable and politically opportunistic state. But this is not an undifferentiated urban subaltern. Engaging Gramscian ideas of contestation, the terrain of the conjunctural, and the state’s relations to civil and political society, Levenson gives us a surprising finding. It is a political strategy of antagonism vis-à-vis the state, rather than docility and compromise, that enables land occupiers to resist eviction. This is the story of the settlement of Siqalo, which united to hold their ground in the face of displacement threats by the state, at least temporarily. By contrast the settlement of Kapteinsklip, which Levenson characterizes as a “social non-movement,” was all too accommodating of liberal and individualized property possession pushed by the state, resulting in fractured loyalties and, ultimately, an inability to withstand eviction.
Three leading scholars on housing politics, the postcolony, and racial geographies in South Africa weigh in on Levenson’s remarkable book. Ananya Roy argues that we must understand South African housing precarity much like we understand the politics of housing-as-carcerality in the U.S. By inserting the poor into endless bureaucratic mazes of waiting, punishment, and supervision, housing serves as a liberal “ruse,” a form of subjection that is forever disciplining the poor. She also sees the South African case as an example of the global “judicialization” of housing governance, where much like in cities like Delhi, India, the courts have an overbearing influence on not just eviction orders, but also the language of resistance itself. Yousuf Al-Bulushi focuses on the relationship between party politics and land occupations in Levenson’s book, reminding us that too often urban scholars skirt the realm of organized party politics to focus on the “everyday” modes of survival and atomized “encroachment” adopted by the poor. Against the dichotomization of organized versus unorganized politics, Al-Bulushi finds that Levenson puts forth a compelling relational understanding of how grassroots movements are not permanent fixtures either sitting in proximity or distanced from the state, but can wax and wane, aligning themselves with political parties and state apparatuses in non-linear and inconsistent ways. Finally, Nandita Sharma, too, delves into Levenson’s understanding of the “political,” asking, rather provocatively, whether Levenson’s work forecloses the “possibility (and practice) of being political outside of the terrain occupied by the state.” To Sharma, the ideal types of civil and political society deployed by Levenson do not leave room for understanding the urban poor as agents working collectively against the nationalist state. In his response, Levenson counters that his research evinces “the lesson is that all collective organization will necessarily be read by the state,” regardless of whether said collectivities want to be read by the state. This is food for thought, as it raises crucial empirical and theoretical questions about the very shape of the ostensibly democratic postcolonial state—questions that Levenson’s brilliant book goes a long way in answering.
Malini Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University and a political ecologist and geographer by training. She is the co-author of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell UP, 2023) and is a member of the Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank.
