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

Research on South Africa has long taken a state-centered political economy as its backdrop. While late-apartheid era work added an important cosmological dimension to classic Marxist analysis (e.g., Comaroff 1985), recent anthropological scholarship aggregates social dependencies and material flows to portray larger systems of hierarchy and distribution (e.g., Ferguson 2013, James 2014). To this extent, South African anthropology stays true to Radcliffe-Brown’s exhortation to see a single, “composite society” and “study the whole set of relations amongst the persons involved” rather than some version of “culture contact” (1940:10). But there is more to it. Scholarship on South Africa cannot avoid formal logics of state and capital. Their reach and their influence over people’s imaginations are striking in comparison to other countries in the region. This in turn produces studies that integrate life on the ground with a relatively coherent infrastructure of public and (increasingly) private institutions. There are enormous benefits to this sensitivity—not least, an ability to keep scale in play. There are also potential pitfalls. Where terms such as “sector” and “standard of living” appear as analytical categories, they betray something of a bias to formal regulatory rhetoric (Guyer 2014). More generally, South Africa sometimes comes to appear less messy, more structurally determined, and more sharply categorized than many other places.

It is, therefore, no accident that gaps between the official categories—conceptual and spatial—and struggles over their meaning, offer important food for thought. Struggles over the margins tell us a great deal about how South Africa’s spatial regimes have been constituted. A lot has always gone below the radar and existed outside the limits of state logics, and people have not only negotiated the structures they have encountered, but to some degree shaped their significance and their effects from below.

Making Freedom, an exciting and provocative book about Cape Town’s informal settlements during and after apartheid, engages precisely with the spaces between those foregrounded by official categories. In informal settlements, contestations from below are effected through a “politics of staying put.” The central contention of the book is that squatters’ claims to land have constituted a key struggle for freedom in South Africa. In her analysis of Cape Town in general, and the settlement of Crossroads in particular, Makhulu shows that home, politics, and belonging require analysis within a single frame. Informal settlement has been the result of “molecular” (Bayat 1997) decisions and movements, conceived at the level of individuals and households. Yet, the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” (Bayat 1997) on the edge of the city has had far-reaching effects on black domestic life and the structure and government of space.

There are two strands to this. Firstly, while ideals of freedom, democracy, and an end to racialized oppression have captured headlines, a proper appreciation of these requires “an understanding of land occupation as foundational to the possibility of other kinds of claims” (24). This is a struggle for living on one’s own terms, in a setting of one’s choosing. Indeed, appreciating this offers us a way to see important continuities between the apartheid and post-apartheid eras, in struggles as experienced by poor, urban South Africans. Abstract political goals have long been anchored in such concerns as access to housing and basic services; campaigns since apartheid’s demise, focusing explicitly on “service delivery,” do not represent a radical break.

Secondly, informal settlements are revealed as settings with a particular political significance. Squatter camps on the margins, like Crossroads, challenged the logic of apartheid-era influx controls. Officially, black people were assumed to belong in rural homelands; only those with formal employment and the correct documentation were permitted to reside in regulated townships. Because of limited state surveillance, squatter camps offered new possibilities for forms of domestic life and even political mobilization. Moreover, such camps demanded recognition, by the very fact of their existence and their inhabitants’ insistence on laying down...