Editorial

Frequent readers of Transformation may note that our first issue of 2022 has arrived in your hands somewhat later in the year than usual. Perhaps readers have got tired of hearing about unusual times, but local and global contexts continue to impact our world of academic publishing. In April this year the city of Durban, the founding home of this journal, and the city in which both editors of this issue live was ravaged by devastating floods. These floods killed over 300 people in two days, destroyed homes and damaged critical water, sewage, and electrical infrastructure across the city. Many residents and local politicians in the city now accept that these types of severe weather patterns will become more frequent in this time of climate change. How governments have responded to national disasters over the last few years has opened fierce public debate on the role of the state in securing social, economic and environmental justice.

Thinking ahead, we invite our readers to look out for our calls for papers towards a set of special issues under the umbrella topic ‘The State of the State’. As editors, we have identified four focus areas that we think will generate theory, analysis and intellectual debates of relevance to the aim of the journal and its long legacy of critical engagement with radical ideas in a world in transition. These focus areas, which will guide our editorial approach over the next few years, are (in no particular order):

1. 1. The relation between state and capital;

2. 2. The grammar of belonging in the state;

3. 3. Collapsing the archives and the state’s memory; and

4. 4. The ecological transformations of our environment and the role of the state.

We open this issue with a challenging provocation from Mahmood Mamdani to step outside the paradigm in which the political body is always tied to the nation state. In responding to the four review essays¹ on his recent book Neither Settler nor Native: the making and unmaking of permanent minorities published in Transformation107, Mamdani challenges us to be brave in how we think ‘the relationship between the social and the political’. Courage and imagination, he argues, is needed to theorise and analyse beyond the stubborn perception that the ‘nation is the only possible political community’ on offer for social justice. Mamdani reminds his reviewers that the book interrogates how past anti-colonial and anti-imperialist social movements in different contexts, including South Africa, imagined ‘a multiplicity of futures’. Not all of which were defined by nationalism and its logics of minorities, majorities and belonging. Whist the nation-state has become a dominant form of political community, it is not inevitable. Mamdani urges us to explore these paths not taken in which there is an epistemic shift in imagining political communities.

Claudia Gastrow’s article ‘“If Angola were Libya”: protest and politics in Angola’, also analyses the idea of nation states and democracy. Gastrow argues that discourses of democracy could paradoxically be used for both liberatory as well as repressive actions. These contestations in Angola reveal how Africa’s ‘third wave’ of protest calls for a questioning – and learning from – the shortcomings of current electoral democracy.

Deborah Whelan’s ‘Colonials, protest and aspiration: current polemic in “decolonised” South African vernacular architecture’ focuses on the complex relationship between ‘everyday architecture’ and ‘societal requirements’ in shaping architectural language. Whelan illustrates how, in societies experiencing significant transformation such as South Africa, new vernaculars are more overt. The article further argues that a rapidly expanding black middle class adopts lifestyle clues from television programmes such as Top Billing in creating a vernacular pastiche using a neo-classical toolkit. This paper discusses these hybridised vernaculars to suggest that the proliferation of these new types of houses infer that decolonisation of the physical and intangible built environment has in fact, ironically occurred. In doing so, Whelan invites us to rethink the ‘fundamental aesthetic codes of decolonisation debate’.

In the article ‘Transition in decision-making in the South African Reserve Bank: an area of interest to Vishnu Padayachee (1952–2021)’, Jannie Rossouw invites us to critically interrogate the institutional structures of...