The Remains of Segregation and Apartheid in South Africa
In Apartheid Remains, geographer and interdisciplinary scholar Sharad Chari deftly navigates the sedimented terrain of twentieth-century South African apartheid and its resonances in the early twenty-first century. The book focuses on the experiences and struggles of living with the reality and remains of apartheid for Black, Indian, and multiracial working-class South Africans in the industrial Indian Ocean City of Durban, on the east coast of South Africa. The two main topical concerns of the book are the racial capitalist regime of South African apartheid—a regime that, Chari points out, functions through biopolitics, which is a form of politics and governance grounded in shaping and controlling the life and bodies of a human population—and the diverse and intersecting traditions of struggle that South Africans have fostered and maintained in apartheid’s wake, especially in the late twentieth century. Chari came to the project through the “political hope” that such traditions of struggle gave him (5). He places Durban’s political struggles within the context of apartheid’s layered pasts, simultaneously thinking with and historicizing parts of various Black intellectual traditions.
The book’s main argument provides a useful template for historicizing regimes of racial capitalism and traditions of Black struggle in relation to each other. The racial capitalist regime of South African apartheid, according to Chari, is palimpsestic—containing tangible traces of multiple pasts—and has shaped and created new spaces and iterations of political struggle in Durban.
To view apartheid as palimpsestic requires paying close attention to how the aftereffects of racial capitalist apartheid remain relevant through space and time. Efforts at resolving the tensions of apartheid, evident in these palimpsestic remains, only fostered new political struggles among South Africans in Durban. As Chari states, “Apartheid Remains argues 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” (10). This argument assumes that attempts at creating racial space were efforts to fix the “crisis tendencies” of racial capitalism in South Africa (10). In other words, it necessarily frames Black, Indian, and multiracial subaltern peoples’ production of distinct racial spaces as attempts at fomenting structural change. This may not always be the case.
For racialized subaltern populations, the production of racial space could simply be a stopgap measure that provides better conditions of life within the existing structures of South African society. It could also be an end in and of itself for those who see no route toward the structural transformation of racial capitalism. Either way, Chari is right to point out that such efforts create new contradictions and political possibilities. The author fleshes out this argument through three lines of inquiry contained within the book’s two parts, the first of which focuses on the history and contemporary resonances of early twentieth century South African apartheid and the second of which considers political struggles in Durban in the late twentieth century. In the first line of inquiry, Chari considers how capitalism looks to find solutions to its inherent contradictions through spatial and racial differentiation, always finding it difficult to reach such solutions. Second, the author examines and considers how capital and the “racial state” employ and engage in biopolitical discourse—discourse on the connections and intersections of political governance and biological life—to fix capitalism’s contradictions, and how this effort creates limited forms of “biopolitical struggle.” Such struggle is “raced and gendered class struggle over the conditions of life.” Third, Chari considers how these inconclusive biopolitical struggles lead us to a “Black Marxist feminist politics” that embraces living in common (10).
Chapter six, for example, illustrates the author’s layered consideration of Black political struggle in South Africa and its afterlives. The sixth chapter is one of four chapters in part two of the book, which analyzes four important moments in which South Africans contested and struggled against the contradictory presence and remains of apartheid in the late twentieth century. This chapter, titled “The Theologico-Political Moment, 1970s,” considers the South African struggle in Durban during the 1970s through the prism of labor unrest, the Black Consciousness Movement, and a religious revival in churches in Wentworth, an area in Durban. Chari borrows the notion of a “theologico-political moment” from Walter Benjamin, referring to “an interconnected set of leaps of faith into the political unknown.” The chapter argues that the 1970s was one such leap in the South African struggle against apartheid (207). The chapter’s discussions of the interplay and connections between industrial strikes in Durban in 1972 and 1973, the intellectually rich and generative Black Consciousness Movement, and Wentworth’s religious revival shed new light on this political conjuncture in Durban. Highlighting the connections between these instances and currents of political struggle within his palimpsestic framework and through his notion of biopolitical struggle allows Chari to persuasively demonstrate how South Africans were struggling over their conditions of life within the context of the apartheid government’s longstanding efforts to control the lives of racialized South African subjects. Industrial unrest was about better conditions of life and the Black Consciousness Movement and religious revivals in Durban were concerned with revaluing the lives of Black, Indian, and multiracial subjects. The chapter’s discussions of the generative intellectual relationship between Steve Biko and the less well-known white South African radical Richard ‘Rick’ Turner, reminds readers of the complex intellectual terrain of South African politics in the 1970s, where proponents of Black Consciousness politics, New Left Marxism, existentialism, Africanism, Black Christian theology, and utopian Christianity all lived in tension (203).
Apartheid Remains’ methodological and theoretical framework for understanding the echoes of apartheid and constant struggles against gendered racial capitalism draws liberally on the Black intellectual tradition. Chari’s deployment of an interdisciplinary Black Marxist feminist lens reads across diverse intellectual traditions and draws on scholars and thinkers including Ruth Wilson Gilmore, David Harvey, Karl Marx, Henri Lefebvre, Cedric Robinson, Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, and Angela Davis, among others. Stuart Hall is particularly important to Chari here. He states: “The thinkers who are particularly instructive in this regard have not shied away from productive tensions across Black, anti-colonial, Marxist, and feminist radical traditions. Among them, Stuart Hall is indispensable for his practice of reading across traditions in the face of political revanchism, attentive to Black expressive forms that might shift the public conversation” (18-19). Cedric Robinson serves as another example. Robinson’s ideas on the unstable, fractious, and patchy nature of racial regimes, most explicit in his underappreciated last book Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, are integral to Chari’s argument in chapter two that the first three decades of the twentieth century saw subaltern populations produce racially segregated spaces for Indian people in Merebank, Durban and multiracial Black people in Wentworth. The creation of these spaces has meant that “memory conventions of Merebank Indians and Wentworth Coloureds diverge as people recall landscapes of the past in substantially different ways” (63). Other important Black thinkers and theorists that the author pulls from include Achille Mbembe, Katherine McKittrick, Édouard Glissant, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot.
The book’s Black Marxist feminist approach is evident in its attention to the importance of a diverse group of South African women in political struggles in Durban. In chapter four, Chari highlights the political radicalism of South African women such as Poomoney “Poo” Moodley and Phyllis Naidoo. Moodley was involved in several major political organizations in 1940s and 1950s South Africa, including the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and Natal Indian Congress (NIC). Unsurprisingly, experience was the main conduit to radicalism for Moodley. Moodley’s radicalism “emerged through a combination of worker and community struggle and also, crucially, through her professional life as a nurse.” That she was a nurse is important because it “meant she could radicalize the notion of care work, to turn very crucially to the fundamental problem of modern segregation: how to critique the racialization of biopolitical tools without giving up on the radical hope of universal access to the means of life” (143). Moodley’s political radicalism is a prime example of Chari’s insistence on the importance of biopolitical struggle in the fight against racial capitalism.
Though the book employs ethnography, oral history, and draws from South African state archives, Chari’s use of photography is perhaps the book’s greatest methodological strength.
Photographers Omar Badsha and Paul Weinberg created the South African photographers’ collective Afrapix, which was active during the 1980s and connected to the South African cultural and artistic magazine Staffrider. Photographers in Afrapix critiqued South African apartheid and their photos contain multiple, often submerged narratives and possibilities (321-324). Looking outside of the frame and its illusion of stillness, Chari argues that these and other documentary photographers’ visual critiques of South African apartheid are a part of a blues tradition attentive to multiple pasts and new futures. He ultimately argues that “it is important to read this photographic work as part of a blues tradition that links the traditions of the Black Atlantic to the submerged legacies of the Indian Ocean. On Durban’s shores, this audiovisual blues tradition points to other pasts still palpably present, other futures waiting to emerge” (29). These South African photographers “provide a corpus of evidence that helps us consider how people strive to outlive the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty and racial capitalism” (340). Scholars of Black thought would do well to learn from Chari’s meditation on what photography tells us about Black intellectual life.
Sharad Chari’s Apartheid Remains will force scholars to consider the differences and gaps between scholarly knowledge of radical political struggles and the sociohistorical practice of these struggles. The book is an effort to bridge this gap and a meditative acknowledgement of the difficulties of doing so. By being with South Africans and thinking through the meaning of their experiences and the places in which they live, Chari grapples with the political implications of studying subjection and resistance in a way that few scholars do.
*This review was originally published in Global Black Thought, the official journal of the African American Intellectual History Society. Copyright © 2025 AAIHS.
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