Using the port city of Durban as a lens, Sharad Chari’s Apartheid Remains offers an insightful account of the history of apartheid in South Africa and how South Africans continue to confront its remnants. Chari’s study provides a nuanced examination of apartheid South Africa in the twentieth century and apartheid’s enduring effects in the twenty-first century. The book’s main focus is the daily experiences and struggles of living in an apartheid setting and the legacies of these experiences for two communities of colour in Durban. Importantly, Chari’s focus is on two specific neighbourhoods, Wentworth and Merebank, each with its own unique historical experience.

Using a combination of historical and ethnographic methods, this study examines over a century of apartheid history and its legacies. It particularly investigates how Indian and Coloured communities in Durban navigated life during this period and negotiated apartheid’s enduring social and spatial legacies. Chari’s use of images, capturing Durban’s industrial setting, provides a lens into the daily lives and experiences of these two marginalized groups and the complexity of their everyday lives. It also evinces how community struggles and inequality coincided with elements of resistance and solidarity between the two communities during segregation and apartheid. The study takes a Black Marxist feminist approach and examines the significance of South African women to political resistance in Durban. It demonstrates how women played significant roles in both communities and have historically resisted the complex racial and diverse dynamics in the city of Durban. The book offers an examination of the legacies of segregation and apartheid, including its devastating effects and contradictions and the complex forms of life of these marginalized people.

The book’s main argument is that ‘across the twentieth century, attempts at fixing the crisis tendencies of South African racial capitalism through the production of racial space, also by biopolitical means, only sowed new contradictions and forms of struggle, the limits and possibilities of which are powerfully discernible through Black Marxist feminist critique’ (p. 10). The book is divided into two parts: Part I, ‘Racial palimpsest’, which covers the first five chapters, ‘diagnoses layered conjunctures in South Africa’s twentieth century as seen through transformations in South Durban, where various people occupied and transformed a marshy commons just beyond municipal control’ (p. 25). It examines these transformations from the turn of the twentieth century until the 1970s. The thread that binds the chapters in Part I of the book is how an ever expanding city in the first half of the twentieth century was drawn into the segregationist urban controls of the city authorities. Such controls, aimed at carving out an image of a white city, underestimated the realities in Durban, and ‘instead fomented waves of struggles over race and space’ (p. 26).

Part II, which comprises the last four chapters of the book, covers a period from the 1970s to the 2000s. In the context of the liberation struggle in South Africa, Chari looks at how the various communities in Durban resisted the racial politics impacting Merebank and Wentworth. In essence, the chapters in Part II of the book examine how ‘residents from Wentworth and Merebank participated in trying to shatter the racial palimpsest that was the apartheid city’ (p. 27). While emphasizing the various impacts the racial palimpsest had in shaping unique spatial histories in the two areas, the book also shows how it shaped struggle in different ways. The resistance emerging in these neighbourhoods also provides a window into anti-apartheid struggles during the period.

Chari rightfully notes that colonial structures continue to exist post-1994. Just as in the reality under the previous dispensation, where the realities on the ground instigated political struggle and solidarity in places like Merebank and Wentworth, new struggles have emerged in the post-1994 period to address new challenges. While Chari’s work focuses on the two neighbourhoods, their experiences reflect broader patterns across many regions of South Africa during apartheid and in the post-apartheid era.

The book would have benefited from establishing stronger connections between the experiences of individuals in Merebank and Wentworth in Durban and the experiences of other communities across South Africa. Despite this, the book is well researched and makes an important contribution to scholarship on the history of apartheid and its legacies. Its analysis is vital for understanding how marginalized communities such as Merebank and Wentworth in Durban experienced apartheid and how its legacies persist in the post-1994 period.