South Africa’s long legacy of racism and colonial exploitation continues to echo throughout the post-apartheid era. For centuries, European conquerors marshaled surveillance as a means to control people of color. This began with the requirements for passes to track and control the movements, settlements, and labor of Africans. Over time, surveillance technologies evolved alongside complex shifts in power, culture, and the political economy.

South Africa furnishes one of the most complex examples of the eclipse of Greater Britain, on account of the sheer diversity of peoples and political forces that shaped events in the post-war era. English South Africans experienced a period of prolonged disorientation as their paradigmatic status dwindled, caught between an Afrikaner majority determined to override their totems of British loyalty, and a burgeoning Black resistance calling time on the bogus liberties invested in the British Crown. In the decades after 1945, a uniquely opportune climate for humanitarian and anti-colonial claim-making was forged — not least for the empire’s First Peoples. All over the world, settler communities were confronted with insistent demands to redress the injustices flowing from the pioneering intrusions of their forebears, challenging their foundational myths and raising nagging questions about their security of tenure. For the minority of white, professedly ‘liberal’, English-speaking South Africans, bent on combatting Afrikaner political dominance, the advent of Indigenous demands rooted in universal rights would ultimately pose the more severe test to their British affinities and allegiances.

Mapping one of the “global afterlives of slavery,” this chapter thinks about how the racist technologies of control in the United States, from slavery to Jim Crow Segregation, formed templates for other racist configurations of control across the colonial world. Charting the transatlantic reach of white supremacy transmitted through ecosystems of transcolonial influence, the chapter explores what it means to think about the legacies, or “afterlives,” of the policies and ideological structures that emanated from the histories of slavery in the southern United States, and how these traveled as markers of both precedent and caution to other nations, and especially in the case of South Africa. As a transnational afterlife to the histories of slavery in the United States, apartheid can be seen to grapple with the legacies of racial control such as segregation, employing the racialized landscapes of the post-slavery American south as metrics and templates for the articulation of segregationist platform that would lead to formal apartheid by the mid-twentieth century. The chapter argues that while slavery did not create apartheid, the transcolonial circulation of technologies of racial control did mutually inform and structure the national and cultural landscapes of spaces such as the American south and South Africa.

This chapter explores the multiple imbrications of literature and politics in the context of apartheid South Africa. It considers the literary-critical debates and interventions that underpinned and connected them and offers a reading of cultural-political resistance through the lens of periodical print culture and the lively publics they convened. It addresses a wide range of critical-cultural interventions from the late 1940s until the early 1980s and identifies the continuities and shifts that mark this tradition and points to some of the historical changes that have shaped it. What emerges is a long and vigorous history of dissonant cultural debate and an understanding of the central role it played in informing the aesthetic and political priorities of the writers of the day. The chapter asserts that political struggles in South Africa were frequently articulated in cultural terms and that forms of political critique often took shape as arguments about literature and the reading of texts. What this recognition demands, it argues, is an amplified understanding of the history of political struggle as played out, in part, in aesthetic-cultural terms.

Homeless squatting on empty land is a local challenge, replicated on a world-wide scale. While some have argued that neoliberal globalization has had a homogenizing effect on domestic legal systems generally, and on states’ responses to squatting more specifically, domestic institutions retain significant capacity and capability to govern; and their resilience critically determines economic success and political stability and nation-states adapt to changing circumstances. This chapter frames our analyses of state responses to homeless squatting on empty land in the context of nation state norms and narratives: what we describe – adapting Robert Cover – as the property “nomos” of each jurisdiction. We argue that state responses to squatting are framed by the “foundational” regime goals through which the state’s role and relationships to citizens with respect to property were articulated and understood, and examine how these foundational goals with respect to private property, housing and citizenship emerged in each of the five primary jurisdictions from which we draw insights and illustrations in this book: the United States of America, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, and England and Wales. In doing so, we aim to better understand how domestic institutions, norms and narratives in each of these jurisdictions have shaped the nomos within which “the state” acts in response to homeless squatting on empty land.

In December 1932, in the throes of a deep recession, South Africa left the gold standard. Britain had abandoned it the previous year – and a political battle within South Africa’s government had ensured a delay that severely hurt the economy. The decision to leave had an immediate effect; instead of having the currency backed by gold, the South African pound depreciated, making South African exports more attractive to foreign buyers. It proved a huge boon to gold-mining companies. Gold prices rose rapidly and mining output expanded, increasing the demand for inputs and workers, and as a consequence government revenues increased significantly. In 1936, only three years later, the Johannesburg municipality could begin construction of the South-Western Townships, or Soweto, on the back of windfalls from the mining industry.

These mining windfalls – profits for shareholders and taxes for government – depended on one important factor: paying cheap wages.

This chapter considers the relationship between solidarity and revolution by exploring the internal and international politics of the African National Congress (ANC). In the 1960s, the ANC operated internationally but there was little consensus on how the party should wage its struggle against apartheid South Africa. Taking inspiration from Cuba, young Tricontinental radicals challenged the diplomatic strategy of ANC elders like Oliver Tambo and launched an unsuccessful invasion of nearby Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Tambo responded by appropriating parts of this message and situating the ANC as part of an anti-capitalist revolt aimed at the United States. Tambo also opened the ANC to non-Africans who supported his leadership, which increased the influence of the South African Communist Party and fought off Cuban-inspired militancy by collapsing the distinctions between revolutionary action and international solidarity. Because the Vietnamese and Portuguese revolutions confirmed the inevitability of apartheid’s demise, the ANC prioritized international collaboration over guerrilla warfare as part of a strategy that positioned the party as the legitimate alternative to the apartheid state.

This chapter gives an overview of the structure of the book, detailing how it is organized around a series of contests over the expressions of sovereignty made by these four pseudo-states. In identifying the similarities in how these contests over sovereignty played out, inside and outside Africa, this chapter lays the foundation for the argument that Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana can be usefully seen as linked parts in a larger story. In this formulation, their individual quests for diplomatic recognition and international acceptance were all in pursuit of a common ideological project, one born out of a reaction to the rapid decolonization of the African continent and the triumph of anti-colonial African nationalism. All four of them harnessed important transnational right-wing networks across Africa, Europe, and North America that were energized by the dissolution of the European empires, the rise of the Afro-Asian Bloc, postcolonial migrations, and the international civil rights movements. Each of these aspirant states ultimately failed to achieve international acceptance and faced collective nonrecognition, which reflected the larger regional and global importance of these challenges to the postcolonial African state system.

This chapter examines contemporary anti-immigrant practices around the globe. We argue that apartheid as an ideology that distributes resources and privileges according to place of birth, race, and ethnicity of immigrants, persists. We also demonstrate how, under this new global organization, immigrants are vulnerable in their own countries due to the neoliberal practices imposed by unfair relations between the Global North and the Global South. We illustrate how, as a result of unequal relations between north and south and restrictive migration policies, immigrants are highly vulnerable during their journey and when they eventually arrive at their destinations. Global apartheid promotes racial inequities and violates basic norms of justice, human rights, democracy, and racial equality. These practices create islands of wealth where only certain groups can enjoy privileges and rights. This paradigm is based on the presumption that privileges and resources can be allocated according to place of birth, race, and ethnicity.

By providing for civil/political rights alongside a plethora of social/economic rights, the 1996 Constitution signified a commitment and a bold statement to making this dream a reality. Yet, to the millions who are still confronted with endemic hunger, the constitutionally guaranteed rights remain a pipedream. This chapter observes that the state’s intervention to address poverty and food insecurity has mainly been through policy actions. Also, the state has enacted a plethora of sectorial legislations which in one way or another are merely related to food production rather than access or distribution. These interventions, even though somewhat well crafted and commendable, have been unable to adequately tackle the issue. Policies have, until recently not only been poorly operationalised and uncoordinated, but also fragmented. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of, or poor, communication between relevant government departments responsible for food security. It is against this backdrop that the chapter seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of these problems and interrogate possible remedies for addressing these burning issues.