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Apartheid’s Leviathan
A fascinating study that shows how the intersection of technology and politics has shaped South African history since the 1960s. This book details the development of an interconnected technological system of a coal mine and of the Matimba and Medupi power stations in the Waterberg, a rural region of South Africa near the country’s border with Botswana. South Africa’s state steel manufacturing corporation, Iscor, which has since been privatized, developed a coal mine in the region in the 1970s. This set the stage for the national electricity provider, Eskom, to build coal-fueled power stations in the Waterberg. Faeeza Ballim follows the development of these technological systems from the ...
Eskom
"The book highlights the importance of technology to our understanding of South African history and challenges the idea that the technological state corporations were proxies for the apartheid government. While a part of the broader national modernization project under apartheid, these corporations also set the stage for worker solidarity and trade union organization in the Waterberg and elsewhere in the country. Faeeza Ballim argues that the state corporations, their technology, and their engineers enjoyed ambivalent relationships with the governments of their time. And in the democratic era, while Eskom has been caught up in the scourge of government corruption, it has retained a degree of organizational autonomy and offered a degree of resistance to those who were attempting further corrupt practices."--Publisher's description.
Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins
This edited collection looks at ruins and vacant buildings as part of South Africa’s oppressive history of colonialism and apartheid and ways in which the past persists into the present
Translating Technology in Africa. Volume 1: Metrics
Translating Technology in Africa brings together authors from different disciplines who engage with Science and Technology Studies (STS) to stimulate curiosity about the diversity of sociotechnical assemblages on the African continent. The contributions provide detailed praxeographic examinations of technologies at work in postcolonial contexts. The series of 5 volumes aims to catalyse the development of a field of research that is still in its infancy in Africa and promises to offer novel insights into past, present, and future challenges and opportunities facing the continent. The first volume, on "Metrics", explores practices of quantification and digitisation. The chapters examine how numbers are aggregated and how the resulting metrics shape new realities. Contributors include Kevin. P. Donovan, Véra Ehrenstein, Jonathan Klaaren, Emma Park, Helen Robertson, René Umlauf and Helen Verran
Common Ground
Common Ground explores the shifting relationship between human society and the landscapes that bear it. Examining the changing understandings of the natural world and its management and exploitation, environmental activist Mark Everard presents solutions in the nature of ecosystem services. Notwithstanding our total dependence on the Earth's natural resources, the relationship between humanity and the land has shifted significantly and frequently throughout our tenure, brief as it is relative to the evolution of planetary life. Appropriating increasing proportions of nature's resources to meet our shifting and growing demands, we have been degrading the quality and extent of ecosystems, nearly destroying their capacities to meet the needs of a burgeoning population. The book offers a fresh and vital whole-system approach to the key under-pinning the issue of sustainability. Everard looks ahead to what is required to live sustainably, respecting the central role of landscapes in supporting human wellbeing into the long-term future.
Limpopo's Legacy
Argues that the historical primacy of youth politics in Limpopo, South Africa has influenced the production of generations of nationally prominent youth and student activists - among them Julius Malema, Onkgopotse Tiro, Cyril Ramaphosa, Frank Chikane, and Peter Mokaba.
A Dam for Africa
Since its construction in the early 1960s, the hydroelectric Akosombo Dam across the Volta River has exemplified the possibilities and challenges of development in Ghana. Drawing upon a wealth of sources, A Dam for Africa investigates contrasting stories about how this dam has transformed a West African nation, while providing a model for other African countries. The massive Akosombo Dam is the keystone of the Volta River Project that includes a large manmade lake 250 miles long, the VALCO aluminum smelter, new cities and towns, a deep-sea harbor, and an electrical grid. On the local level, Akosombo has meant access to electricity for people in urban and industrial areas across southern Ghan...
Acholi Intellectuals
Patrick William Otim argues that the Acholi people of northern Uganda, who helped Europeans spread colonial rule and Christianity, were far more politically savvy than previously understood.
Naturalizing Inequality
The book discusses the reproduction and legitimization of racial inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. Michela Marcatelli unravels this inequality paradox through an ethnography of water in a rural region of the country. She documents how calls to save nature have only deepened and naturalized inequality.
Ekurhuleni
The first academic work to provide an historical account and explanation of the development of this extended region to the east of Johannesburg since its origins at the end of the nineteenth century. From the time of the discovery of gold and coal until the turn of the twenty-first century, the region comprised a number of distinctive towns, all with their own histories. In 2000, these towns were amalgamated into a single metropolitan area, but, unlike its counterparts across the country, it does not cohere around a single identity. Drawing on a significant body of academic work as well as original research by the authors, the book traces and examines some of the salient historical strands that constituted what was formerly known as the East Rand and suggests that, notwithstanding important differences between towns and the racial fragmentation generated by apartheid, the region’s history contains significant common features. Arguably, its centrality as a major mining area and then as the country’s engineering heartland gave Ekurhuleni an overarching distinctive economic character.
