The discovery of diamonds and gold and the emergence of industrial mining in the late 19th century has typically been understood by Marxist historians and sociologists through the lens of racial capitalism and the analytic categories of race and class. Influential South African Marxist scholars such as Harold Wolpe, Neville Alexander, Martin Legassick and David Hemson drew on the framework of racial capitalism to analyse apartheid as a system of labour control and exploitation of the Black working class. From this perspective, mining capital influenced state policies in ways that reinforced the availability of cheap labour by maintaining the former ‘homelands’ or Bantustans as labour reservoirs. These Marxist analyses were widely taught at liberal universities in South Africa when I was a student in the early 1980s.
Gabrielle Hecht's ethnography, ‘Residual Governance’, provides an additional dimension to this Marxist analysis. Drawing on the concept of racial capitalism, Hecht argues that the racial contract in South Africa is technopolitical in the sense that white supremacy is purposefully built into technologies and infrastructures that reinforce racial inequality. She writes that ‘some of the most powerful expressions of the racial contract in South Africa are the colossal wastes – social and sedimentary – created by its mining industry’ (p. 5). It is these histories of waste that are at the centre of her monograph. Hecht also adds an additional layer to Marxist analysis by connecting concerns over economic justice to questions of infrastructural and spatial justice. What she also does is thread together the specific story of the formation of racial capitalism in the context of South African mining with the planetary predicament of Anthropocene futures.
Her book is organised around the following chapters: ‘Introduction: The Racial Contract is Technopolitical’ provides the conceptual framework for engaging with ‘residual governance’ by drawing on theories of racial capitalism developed by Cedric Robinson and South African Marxist scholars. Chapter 1, ‘You Can See Apartheid From Space’, provides a macro-scale perspective by describing the ecological and social conditions of the West Rand and by arguing that the ecocides and slow racial violence in South Africa/Gauteng Province become the viewpoint from which to view the Anthropocene. As she puts it, ‘Gauteng is both a microcosm and a motor of the Anthropocene’ (p. 28). Chapter 2, ‘The Hollow Rand’, focuses on drainage of acid mine waste in the Gauteng region's water sources, particularly in Johannesburg. Chapter 3, ‘The Inside-Out Rand’, follows the responses to vast quantities of (often radio-active) dust and sand produced by mining. Chapter 4, ‘South Africa's Chernobyl?’, focuses on Kagiso township and the informal settlements at Tudor Shaft to examine how a particular community has responded to this contaminated waste. Chapter 5, ‘Land Mines’, explores the wider metropolitan region to highlight how the scale of these residues has constrained possibilities for spatially just urban planning. The conclusion, ‘Living in a Future Way Ahead of Our Time’, draws attention to the theme of planetary futures in the time of the Anthropocene.
By focusing on social and sedimentary forms of waste, Hecht goes beyond earlier Marxist studies of South Africa's ‘mineral revolution’ and the emergence of the mineral-industrial complex. Rather than simply focusing on the intersections of race and class in the making of modern capitalist South Africa, Hecht extends these analyses of racial capitalism to include waste, which has always been an intrinsic part of mining. She focuses on both the massive mine dumps that surround Johannesburg as well as the many ways in which Black South Africans in the City of Gold (Egoli or Johannesburg) have themselves been treated as human waste during the colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid periods.
The book is the outcome of a lengthy historical and ethnographic research and provides fine-grained descriptions of the compromised health and foreclosed futures of those who have lived, and continue to live, in the toxic shadows of the mine dumps that are so much part of the landscape of Johannesburg and the West Rand. The study shows how mining capital, often with the collusion of the state bureaucracy, has sought to evade responsibility for the toxicities of waste through what Hecht refers to as residual governance. This form of governance, which is discussed in the Introduction as a primary instrument of modern racial capitalism and a major accelerant of the Anthropocene, is also a response to the growing public awareness of the role of mining in the acidification of water as a result of exposure to metalloids and heavy metals, including well-known poisons such as arsenic, mercury and lead.
The study tracks the various actors and institutions involved in establishing, reproducing or contesting these processes of residual governance – including activists, ordinary citizens, journalists, community leaders, scientists, urban planners, artists, public health practitioners, lawyers, policymakers, mining company officials and state bureaucrats. Residual governance is used here to explore the following three aspects of mining: firstly, the governance of waste and discards; secondly, minimalist governance that draws on simplification, manufactured ignorance and bureaucratic and legal delay as tactics; and thirdly, governance that regards people and places as waste and wastelands. Hecht tracks how these tactics are deployed by mining companies and their consultants to cast doubt on scientific and public health findings that establish the link between illness and the toxic effects of mining residue. Likewise, residual governance comes into focus when the embodied illness experiences and local knowledges of those who live adjacent to the mine dumps and toxic waste are thrown into doubt and questioned by those seeking to evade responsibility for these consequences.
‘Residual Governance’ contributes to a burgeoning body of literature that addresses the politics of scientific knowledge, environmental activism and how global industries such as mining, tobacco and energy have sought to cast doubt on scientifically based claims of environmental and health damage (Nixon Reference Nixon2011; Oreskes & Conway Reference Oreskes and Conway2011; Ahmann Reference Ahmann2024). Hecht shows how the mining industry in particular has used scientific uncertainty and legal and bureaucratic tactics of delay to deflect criticism and evade responsibility for remediation. Hecht draws attention to the challenges that this presents for health and environmental activism in South Africa and beyond.
What Hecht adds to the existing literature is her recognition that scientific knowledge of harm is insufficient in itself to produce change, and what is also needed are aesthetically and affectively charged forms of communication and civic activism that can express the ‘traumas of living with toxic chemicals’. This leads Hecht to take seriously the work of artists, activists, scientists and journalists who have sought to use ‘visual vocabularies’ to convey the image of suffering in ways that call upon the viewer to respond. Rob Nixon (Reference Nixon2011: 4) addresses similar concerns in his analysis of ‘slow violence’, a concept that highlights the representational challenges that activists, artists and writers confront when violence is not conceived as an immediate and spectacular event, but is instead incremental and accretive, playing out across a range of temporal scales. Hecht's study of toxic residues in Johannesburg and the West Rand adds to the studies of the politics of waste and toxicities in Bhopal, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Louisiana's ‘Cancer Alley’ and Flint, Michigan. In this sense, the story of residual governance in South Africa makes a timely and novel contribution to a growing literature on slow violence, toxic waste, environmental racism and precarious planetary futures in the time of the Anthropocene.
