Editorial

We are delighted to bring you Transformation #107. The issue begins with Jacklyn Cock’s timely contribution to the ongoing debates and fractious struggles over the place of coal mining in the South African political economy. The notion of a ‘just transition’ from South African dependence on coal in the context of the global climate crisis and local deindustrialization and unemployment crises was first introduced into local debate by the labour movement in 2010. Explicating the often violent contestations around the proposed establishment of a coal mine in the Mabola Protected Area, near Wakkerstroom, in Mpumalanga province, Cock demonstrates how the notion of a ‘just transition’ from coal has been appropriated by both corporate interests, and interests aligned with ‘state capture’ within the state and African National Congress, in an effort to counter community and civil society mobilisations around environmental rights and the forging of a new, more sustainable development path.

Temba Middelmann’s analysis of homelessness, or what he calls ‘public dwelling’ is a similarly urgent intervention in public debate. South African urban areas are witness to the alarming worsening of longstanding crises of homelessness and unemployment, undoubtedly accentuated by the ramifying effects of the Covid pandemic. Public spaces such as parks and cemeteries are where these crises have become most visible in our cities, and Middelmann takes us inside one such space, Pieter Roos Park, at the heart of Johannesburg inner-city. He demonstrates how public parks form part of a growing network of such spaces and ‘hard’ responses to homelessness, such as evictions, only deepen marginalization and temporarily displace the ‘public dwelling’ population across these spaces, in a futile circular pattern. In addition to blunt, coercive approaches, Middelmann fingers ‘siloed’, fragmented local governance, arguing for the importance of more integrated, non-punitive approaches to ‘public dwelling’. The broader crises in local government, and within the African National Congress, have doubtless also mitigated against more nimble and progressive practices. Readers of Transformation would be justified in asking what wider, structural changes in the regional political economy might address the underlying causes of homelessness.

Part of a new section of the journal, ‘Theory after Covid’, Shireen Hassim’s essay makes the case for the importance of ‘care’ as a ‘keyword’ (in Raymond Williams’ sense) as a way into better understanding the political sociology of the ‘post-Covid’ world which we hope to now be entering. Hassim reminds us that while ‘care’ has long been important to feminist theorisations of ethics, economics, and social policy, the Covid pandemic has underlined the ways in which the labour(s) of ‘care’ structure economic and social life on the planet. Covid lockdowns exposed underlying social fissures, whether in terms of deepening strains placed on (gendered) divisions of care-labour within households, or the wider ‘crisis of care’ within care institutions, precipitated by austerity budgeting, the rise of care-for-profit, and the mismanagement of public health systems. Hassim suggests that the crisis-of-care which Covid has revealed presents the left with an invaluable political opportunity to reverse decades of divestment from public health, but the prize remains a world where the burden of care is more fairly distributed, and care-labour(s) better compensated, particularly where those labour(s) are performed overwhelmingly by people of lower social status: such as, for instance, female immigrants from the global south.

#107 also boasts an exciting book forum dedicated to discussion of Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book, Neither Settler nor Native: the making and unmaking of permanent minorities (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2021) by three critics: Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese scholar of American foreign policy, Islam and globalization; Thiven Reddy, a scholar of comparative politics, settler colonialism and post-colonial theory, and Nafisa Essop-Sheik, scholar of law, gender and labour in the nineteenth century British empire. Mamdani will respond to his critics in #108.

We close with a review of Flora Veit-Wild’s account of her relationship with the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, by the sadly recently deceased Margaret Daymond. Finally, we would like to draw our readers’ attention to the Call for Papers for a focus issue, guest edited by Bernard Dubbeld (Stellenbosch...