Technology and Culture

Written by a historian of African science and technology, Apartheid's Leviathan coincides with the conference "Technology and Material Culture in African History," held in Dar es Salaam in January 2023 and cofunded by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), the Foundation for the History of Technology (SHT), and the Global History of Technology Project at TU Darmstadt. The book's central idea is that while the South African government used state-owned corporations—such as Iscor (steel manufacturing) and Eskom (power)—to bolster racial politics, these state corporations did not entirely conform to state-engineered political twists. The government tried to use steel and electric infrastructures at Waterberg to counteract the depopulation of border regions, improve the lives of "poor Whites," and control the mobility of Africans, but the state corporations charted their own routes in their relations with the government, making them "both autonomous and immersive" (p. 41). In chapter 5, Ballim confirms Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1980) [End Page 380] by maintaining that "the [Matimba] power station became an important site [for political undertakings] … as workers across racial lines agitated for residents of the region to be prioritized for employment and promotion opportunities" (p. 22), something that removed the industrial color bar. In the author's view, the apartheid regime sowed the seeds of its own unmaking.

Ballim unfolds her narrative along the transforming socioeconomic and political landscape in South Africa since the heyday of apartheid in the 1960s. Building on Thomas Hughes's idea of the socio-engineering of technological systems in Networks of Power (1983), she highlights multiple factors in shaping Iscor and Eskom's technologies, such as the broader racial politics, global economic dynamics, environmental conservationism, trade unions, foreign manufacturing firms, and the dry environment at Waterberg. By intersecting steel manufacturing at Waterberg with industrialization and how it set the precedent for Eskom's erection of the Matimba coal-fueled power plant in the 1980s, she reminds us of David Hart's The Volta River Project (1980), in which he upholds that the marriage of convenience of technology and postcolonial politics in Ghana made the state-engineered Akosombo megahydropower schemes and steel and aluminum industry into vehicles toward national industrial development. This demonstrates the purely Keynesian economic thinking about massive African technological infrastructure of the 1960s–1980s.

The stories of the Matimba and Medupi power systems presented in chapters 3 and 6 reveal not only the ambiguities and economic thinking behind building megatechnological infrastructures but also the fact that the landscape of infrastructure service provisions in Africa is typified by unfulfilled promises and precarious malfunctioning and errors. She shows for instance that while the construction of the Medupi hydropower station was intended to end power outages, its derailed completion extended the outages. On the failing of gigantic electric power schemes in the 1960s–1980s, May-Britt Öhman in "Taming the Exotic Beauty" (2007) and Emanuel Mchome in "Blackout Blues" (2022) uphold that it was due to Western "armchair" engineers' low environmental knowledge of Africa, unscientific feasibility studies, and turnkey technologies. Ballim's account joins such scholars in disclosing the sources of errors and malfunctioning of technological systems in Africa, which include South Africa's arid environment, the hasty designs of electric power infrastructure, and inadequate operation procedures. Ballim is contrary to McDonald's argument in Electric Capitalism (2009) that the abortive Western-driven electric reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were driven by the capitalist nature of the electricity industry. She highlights that the failure of neoliberal reforms in the electricity sector was caused by a coalition of local and global cartels of corruption (which she calls Leviathan) that were difficult to eliminate.

Apartheid's Leviathan draws on rich archival material and oral history interviews with Eskom engineers. Its analysis, however, lacks direct quotes [End Page 381] to visualize how actual negotiations between the South African government, state corporations (Iscor and Eskom), and foreign actors unfolded. Furthermore, based on its...