Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home by Anne-Maria Makhulu (review)

Anne-Maria Makhulu has written a book about 'the geography of freedom' (Makhulu, 2015: 43). She affirms the inseparability of geography and democracy as she tells a story of practical politics of those who have been disenfranchised and marginalised in South Africa. A parallel is drawn between the necessity for daily home-making in a world that wishes to dehumanise the lives of shack-dwellers and their struggle for freedom–the struggle of the forgotten ones. Throughout her book Makhulu weaves in global and local economic shifts, complexities of social reproduction, as well as racialized and gendered politics to frame the study. It is a thoughtful, sobering and provocative read for anyone interested in the recent history of South Africa's urban development on a highly political landscape. In this book Makhulu is able to map what she refers to as a 'geography of freedom'.

Making freedom is an ethnographic study that traces the precarious lives and steadily insurgent life-making of shack dwellers in Crossroads, Cape Town, from 1970 to the mid-2000s. By 1970 the country's Apartheid government regime was maturing into its third decade of existence. The Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents Act 67 of 1952, commonly referred to as 'the pass law', determined whether black Africans could legally reside within the city, close to work. It laid the foundation for the illegal rural to urban migration of millions of black Africans who were forced to reside in homelands, despite the necessity and desire to socially reproduce in cities. With the shortage of public housing in townships and the prohibition for Africans to own land in urban areas designated for white people, and the sheer lack of affordable housing for the poor, of which the majority were African, meant that newcomers had to occupy land on the urban periphery, adjacent to formal townships, illegally. They built their own homes, using any material available. These came to be known as 'shacks'.

With a panoramic and multi-scalar view of the political and economic affairs across the eras, Makhulu (2015) walks us through the demise of the National Party (NP), that instituted the apartheid regime, to the rise of the African National Party (ANC), that transitioned the country into democracy. She draws from Bayat's (1997) notion of 'quiet encroachment' to show the role that women, especially black squatter women, played in changing the political landscape of South Africa through home-making and livelihood strategies. She invokes the powerful position of 'protest politics based on singular motivations over and above higher-order imperatives' which has been and is largely dismissed by the local patrilineal and mainstream national politics that seek to centralise the 'symbolic and ideological politics of men' (Makhulu, 2015: 89).

Makhulu cleverly and methodically works through the structural economic shift toward neoliberalism and the impact of this on the provision of basic human rights, such as housing, water and electricity. The pressure on the ANC to ensure reparations materialise for previously disadvantaged South Africans, whilst structural adjustment policies insisted on fiscal austerity, have resulted in failed urban spatial transformation, record-breaking service delivery protests and deepening levels inequality. She draws attention to particular actors that continue to control and benefit from the neoliberal economy, and articulates the relevant mechanisms (e.g. state sanctioned programs) that allow them to do so.

Finally, Makhulu fleshes out what the 'trickle-down effect' of the free market system looks like in a postcolonial, new democracy that has been deindustrialised and open to the expansion of the financial sector. She uses Arendt and Foucault's theorisations around biopolitics to situate the precarious lives of marginalised masses that are forced to survive off-the-grid with skyrocketing utility prices and the absence of waged labour. She unpacks the self-austerity and entrepreneurial practices of the poor, using rapidly expanding informal market...