Introduction
On Tuesday 16 November 2021, an 11-year-old boy was playing with friends near a body of water in Tjovitjo informal settlement in Orange Farm, a sprawling working-class township located southwest of Johannesburg. The boy stepped on a live wire taking electricity to the settlement and died. The state-owned electricity company, Eskom, which provides 95% of the energy used by South African consumers, offered official condolences to the boy’s family before criticising members of the community for organising ‘illegal’ connections to the electricity grid for those without access. The Eskom spokesperson for Safety, Health, Environment and Quality in Gauteng, Kith Maitisa, found it ‘most concerning to us that it is often children who fall victim to these unscrupulous acts of criminality, where cables are openly laid along the ground to steal electricity’ (Maphanga 2021, emphasis added). He did not mention, however, that Eskom had failed to provide safe electricity connection to the shack community of Tjovitjo in the first place. In South Africa, like in many parts of the world, people living in informal settlements will connect themselves to the electricity grid if the authorities fail to do so. Sometimes those who are connected are subsequently disconnected because of their failure to pay for the service.
Life without electricity is very difficult and even hazardous for the working class and the poor. People who do not have access to safe and reliable energy often resort to unsafe and expensive alternatives such as paraffin, open fires, braziers, and collecting wood. In South Africa, there are regular shack fires that result in death, injury and loss of property due to accidents caused by the use of candles and other unsafe energy sources. Electricity ‘self-connections’, by communities not connected to the grid or who get cut off, are a means of accessing safe electricity that is needed to live comfortably and safely. Rather than blame the Tjovitjo community for connecting itself, Eskom should admit its culpability resulting from its failure to provide safe energy for all.
South Africa is a country with a history of black exclusion and marginalisation that undermined adequate access to basic services such as housing, water, electricity, education, healthcare and transport. The apartheid system implemented policies and laws which were based on a system of racialism. In other words, it started from the fundamentally flawed and unscientific assumption that ‘race’ was a biological category. Segregation and classifications were based on these categories and therefore reinforced racism, which is the system of oppression of one racial group over another. This was a requirement for capitalism to flourish in South Africa (and elsewhere), hence the term racial capitalism (Legassick and Hemson 1976). When the system of apartheid formally ended racial capitalism mutated and arguably was emboldened.
The apartheid system not only politically disenfranchised black people but also prohibited them from living in ‘white’ urban areas, cities and towns, and from enjoying equal access to amenities and services. Influx control was an integral component of the migrant labour system which was used to keep the number of black people permanently settled in the urban areas as low as possible. Black people were regarded as temporary sojourners in the cities whose presence was tolerated on the condition that they were formally employed. Black working-class townships such as Alexandra in Johannesburg were known as ‘dark cities’ because they had no electricity or streetlights. At the time of the student uprisings on 16 June 1976, Soweto, the biggest black working-class township in South Africa, was still a dark city.
By contrast, Eskom was formed in 1922 and over time not only ensured a reliable and cheap supply of electricity to industry, including the mines, but also to all white residential areas. The exclusion of black people through separate development, as will be argued in this paper, suggests that they suffered from a form of energy racism. Because of their skin colour, they were excluded from access to safe energy in the form of electricity. In addition, the racism that underlined apartheid was also a project of capital accumulation premised on black labour digging out the coal that fired Eskom’s furnaces, and which as a rule paid starvation wages to lay out the pylons and electricity lines for the national grid. Noting the entanglement of the state-owned electricity company in South Africa’s history of racial oppression and inequality, its chief executive officer, Willem Kok, apologised at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for ‘[Eskom] entertaining apartheid policies and, in so doing, perpetuating oppression’ including leaving black areas without electricity (SAPA 1997). But the continued energy marginalisation and criminalisation of communities such as Tjovitjo suggests that this chapter of energy racism has not been completely closed in South Africa.
This article provides evidence that energy racism continues in post-apartheid democratic South Africa. The country is currently beset by an energy crisis, whereby the shortage of electricity power is mitigated through controlled blackouts designed to avoid system overload that could result in a total collapse of the grid, throwing the whole country into darkness. Racism and classism are mutually reinforcing. As capitalism is dependent upon economic inequality it requires racial differentiation (Ashman 2022, 33). We agree with Hall (1980) that, ‘[r]ace is thus, also, the modality in which class is “lived,” the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and “fought through”.’
The article discusses research conducted in Soweto and Orange Farm that indicated that Eskom targets black working-class areas when effecting these blackouts. In addition to the programme known as load shedding, there exists another intervention by Eskom, one that applies only in black working-class townships, shack settlements and villages called ‘load reduction’ which is causing much hardship and suffering in people’s everyday lives, with research participants suggesting that it is experienced as a continuation of apartheid-inspired racial discrimination. These continuities of past racial, class and gendered oppressions and exploitations, we contend, requires a new theorisation of South African society that eschews the aspirational and idealistic image of a ‘rainbow nation’ espoused by Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on the one hand, and the South African Communist Party theory of ‘colonialism of a special type’ and the ‘national democratic revolution’ on the other (Tutu 1996; SACP 1962). Both theories fail to grasp the essence of the interwoven relationship of racism and capitalism in South Africa. In the US, the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer inspired a return to Cedric J. Robinson’s concept of ‘racial capitalism’ as African American scholars grappled with the question of the continued brutalisation and murder of black bodies in a liberal democratic society. Similarly, the death of the young boy in Tjovitjo inspires a search for explanations of energy racism by revisiting the concept of racial capitalism which originated on South African soil as anti-apartheid, neo-Marxist scholars tried to understand apartheid to better fight it.
Energy racism and racial capitalism: an exploration
It was Martin Legassick and Dave Hemson (1976) who first used the term racial capitalism in their analysis of South Africa, arguing against the liberal analysis that suggested that apartheid was a problem for capitalism because of its ascriptive and irrational racism. They set out to show that, in fact, racial discrimination was essential in squeezing out large profits from poorly paid and disenfranchised black labour. They deployed the concept of racial capitalism from the perspective of political economy, explaining how the apartheid social formation created conditions that facilitated the exploitation of cheap black labour. Thus, without the vote, black workers had no say over policies that governed labour relations and the production process at the state level. Furthermore, in the context of land dispossession and colonial rule, legal mechanisms such as the pass laws and taxes compelled black (men) peasants to leave their rural homesteads to work as oscillating migrants in South Africa’s gold and diamond mines. Various work by neo-Marxist researchers has supported the thesis of the functionality of racism to capital accumulation in the South African context (Johnstone 1976; Hindson 1987). Wolpe (1972) seminally argued that rural families, in particular women, subsidised white mining capital by providing unpaid reproductive labour that kept homesteads alive and functioning (and producing a supply of cheap black labour). In his later work, eschewing functionalism, Wolpe emphasised ‘contingency’, arguing that the relationship between capitalism and the racial regime was an outcome of class struggle and thus ‘simultaneously functional and contradictory’, advancing and undermining different class interests (Wolpe 1988; Ashman 2022, 34).
Robinson (1983) approached the question from the perspective of philosophical history, arguing that the relationship between race and capitalism was deeper than Marxist functionalist analysis suggested. For him, it was not the case that capitalism required and employed racism to achieve its accumulation ends. The relationship between racism and capitalism was not ‘contingent’, it was integral: there could be no racist-free capitalism because racism predated capitalism and the latter’s development was from the start mired in already racialised (feudal) societies such that ‘racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism’ (Robinson 1983, 2; Burden-Stelly 2020). Robinson’s insight points emphatically to the centrality of racism in the development of capitalism, as opposed to regarding race as an epiphenomenon as some liberal and Marxist analyses were wont to do (see, for example Tutu 1996; SACP 1962).
In this regard, the concept of racial capitalism calls attention to the centrality of racism to capitalism as a system of exploitation and oppression. Thus, race and racialism should be regarded as operating within the logic of capital. However, the exact relationship between racism and capitalism, as Wolpe (1988) argued, is contingent and may take different forms in different racial regimes. This suggests that there will be conjunctural variations and dynamism in the specific way race and class converge and diverge. From the point of view of social actors, their racialisation, subjectivities and identities are, as Hall put it, not ‘singular, essential, ahistorical, given or fixed, but multiple, conjunctural, and always a process’ (Hall 1980, 3). Similarly, we can expect dynamism in the form and content of specific racial-capitalist practices such as energy racism. The ‘meanings, constraints, and interests’ that define, constitute and affect them are ‘in flux, articulated and re-articulated in a constant process of contestation’ (Ashman 2022, 21).
Recently, there has been a resurgence of rethinking racial capitalism as a framework (Go 2021), which simultaneously shows the salience of the concept and the need to fully understand it as a structure upon which our current reality is built. The system of capitalism itself has changed since the times of Robinson, Wolpe and others. For example, the migrant labour system, which Wolpe conceptualised as a source of subsidy for low wages in the mines, is no longer premised on a strict rural–urban divide; the reality is more nuanced, with many mineworkers moving from one rural origin (for example, Eastern Cape) to another rural mining town (for example, Marikana, in North West province), while the profits extracted from their labour serve both to ensure the development of the metropoles and to under develop the rural outlands (Alexander 2013). Similarly, racialism has undergone serious changes. Following the formal end of apartheid in 1994, black people no longer face legal discrimination and are better represented in government, policy, and the general media. Yet, anti-black racism persists and relies on changes in the economic structure to survive. The articulation of capitalism with racialism – or indeed, racism – has augmented, but only to the extent that both are able to sustain themselves. But, as Bhattacharya (2018, ix) notes:
Racial capitalism is a way of understanding the role of racism in enabling key moments of capitalist development – it is not a way of understanding capitalism as a racist conspiracy or racism as a capitalist conspiracy … racial capitalism does not emerge as a result of a plan.
It is important to note here the notion of ‘legitimating architectures’ that are necessary for any social order to make sense of and justify itself (Burden-Stelly 2020). Antonio Gramsci suggested that ruling classes use force and consent to obtain and retain their power. His influential concept of hegemony is a development of this basic idea. Following from this, in her development of the concept of racial capitalism, Burden-Stelly (2020, 5) argues that particular societies, what Robinson called ‘racial regimes’, require or utilise specific dominant narratives which play a legitimating role, both rallying support among allies and sowing confusion among enemies. In the case of the United States, anti-blackness and anti-radicalism played this role (Burden-Stelly 2020, 5). These narratives serve to justify treating black people as ‘lesser humans’ (Dawson 2016, 149) and less deserving of respect, dignity and social recognition, as well as access to basic goods and services. Thus, the apartheid regime denied black people access to electricity on the basis of skin colour. Moreover, black working-class people laboured to produce the raw material to create electricity and bore the brunt of the environmental hazards of electricity production. The concept of energy racism is used to describe a system in which the process of energy production and distribution is unequally distributed in post-apartheid South Africa on the basis of apartheid’s continuing spatial geography. Racist theories originated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of the legitimating architectures of slavery, colonialism and other forms of dispossession and ill-treatment of people with a darker skin. In some instances, they were even given a ‘scientific’ veneer through, for example, social Darwinism. The victory of the anti-colonial struggle, the impact of the civil rights movement in the US, and the defeat of apartheid served to undermine their credibility. Nevertheless, the continuation of key elements of racial capitalism meant that conditions existed for their survival, reshaping and re-emergence. As we suggest in this paper, energy racism was reconfigured and repackaged in line with changing conditions of racism and capitalism.
Our research report on energy racism, working with other researchers, highlights that black working-class townships did not receive the same level of electrification as richer, former white areas of urban South Africa. While the research addressed the extent to which cut-offs occurred nationally through quantitative analysis of Eskom’s Twitter announcements (Maggott et al. 2022, 1), the main body of the research was conducted in 2021 in Pimville, Soweto, at the height of South Africa’s energy crisis and the controlled power failures called load shedding. The research aimed to establish how working-class people and the poor experienced the energy crisis, since most previous research into the issue had focused on the economy and policy, a top-down rather than bottom-up orientation (Maggott et al. 2022).
The report further outlined the changing nature of the state in relation to capital, noting that apartheid was a form of racial capitalism (Maggott et al. 2022). The ANC, under a black leadership, reinforced key aspects of racial capitalism through the implementation of neoliberal policies after 1994 which had ‘rolled back the state’ and therefore weakened its ability to deliver basic services, including water, housing and electricity, in townships and rural areas. The findings indicated that Soweto suffered more planned power outages than usual because of the load reduction programme, which almost exclusively targets black working-class areas. We noted that, ‘the demise of apartheid did not eradicate some key forms of oppression, exploitation, and domination in the “new” democratic South Africa’ (Maggott et al. 2022, 1). Critically, the spatial geography created during apartheid remains mainly intact. For the most part, the same communities that were punished by apartheid are scapegoated and punished in neoliberal South Africa. They are both less likely to be able to afford to pay, which means they are victimised by the load reduction policy (on the basis of supposed non-payment) and because they are working-class areas, they are less likely to receive services. Furthermore:
In parts of Soweto such as in the sample, struggling households often opt for illegal electricity not because they enjoy criminality but because they must make means to access power for their families’ survival. In municipalities such as Soweto’s, the state is weak and local processes of service delivery are bound to the structure of racial capitalism since residents – much like the working-class residents of mining towns, who work in electrified mines but go home to be in the dark – have been historically and systematically denied basic services such as electricity. (Maggott et al. 2022, 62)
It became clear that a form of collective punishment was applied, whereby individuals were a priori found guilty of these alleged crimes by virtue of living in a black working-class area rather than any proof being provided to support the accusations. This is arguably reminiscent of the apartheid ‘common purpose’ legal culpability that sent many innocent black people to jail and even to the gallows during the anti-apartheid resistance.
In the search for a concept that best crystallised the lived experiences of Sowetans suffering from load reduction and poor servicing, the report considered ‘energy poverty’ and ‘energy insecurity’. Research participants tended to explain their suffering as due to their being ‘poor’ and ‘black’. They felt that their needs, views and complaints were not taken seriously because of this. This is why we settled on the concept of energy racism and proceeded to explore its possible link to racial capitalism in order to locate it within an overarching conceptual framework. It should be noted that the investigation’s research methodology had a bearing on this conceptualisation, given that most research into the energy crisis in South Africa tended to neglect the experiences and views, including the solutions, proffered by black working-class people.
The researchers aspired towards a methodology that was informed by decolonisation, conducting non-extractive research and producing socially useful knowledge that contributes to progressive social change. Participatory action research seemed most suited to these principles. As a result, the research was conducted by fieldworkers who were familiar with the research site, Soweto, including some who lived there and had participated in energy struggles in the area. The research in Orange Farm was conducted by postgraduate students, some of whom also live in the area, although these findings were not included in the energy racism report. The same methods were used as in Soweto, with fieldworkers conducting interviews with residents, soliciting their experiences and perceptions of the energy crisis. Furthermore, one of the authors of this article, Trevor Ngwane, has long and ongoing acquaintances with activists and community leaders in Orange Farm.
Origins of energy racism in Orange Farm
The boy who died in the Tjovitjo informal settlement, Orange Farm, like many other children who die from stepping on live electricity wires or in burning shacks due to paraffin and candle accidents, is a victim of energy racism. It is part of the continuation of a racial capitalist (apartheid) strategy of criminalising and objectifying black bodies and preventing predominantly black communities from accessing basic services which they require to live comfortable, secure and dignified lives. In advertisements published in the mass media and on billboards, Eskom has since 2002 used the imagery and language of izinyoka (isiZulu for snakes) to depict people who ‘steal’ electricity and electric cables. This happened in a context of the imposition of cost recovery and privatisation, leading to exponential increases in tariffs; a context where the electricity supply for townships, informal settlements and villages was constantly cut off because they could not afford to pay (Fiil-Flynn 2001). Aired on national television from as early as 2007, one advert shows a man’s black body, clad in a long, black trench coat, transforming into a devilish snake with yellow eyes at the moment when he decides to connect to the power grid (Mandlanne 2007).
The Orange Farm research findings suggest that ‘illegal’ connections are both a product of energy racism and, importantly and dialectically, also – from the point of view of the black working class – a form of resistance and tactic through which dispossessed people reclaim their collective agency. From Robinson’s (1983) perspective, they are an aspect of people’s power which contributes to the development of Black Marxism, that is, ‘the making of a black radical tradition’. In other words, the deployment of the concept of energy racism and its framing under racial capitalism is not only to understand interlinked systems of oppression, but also to highlight the potential for the oppressed to overcome them through collective mobilisation and popular revolt – to achieve freedom or liberation.
The roots of the energy crisis faced by Orange Farm residents today are found in the history of birth of the place under apartheid. As we shall see, Orange Farm is, to a significant extent, like all black townships, a product of racial capitalism. The apartheid government was intent on keeping black people away from South Africa’s urban areas as much as possible. One mechanism was the regime’s failure to provide enough residential accommodation for the black working class. This led to the ‘illegal’ occupation of land by the homeless and the building of temporary shelters. The apartheid state condemned such actions as ‘squatting’ and waged a war against them using bulldozers and police. Orange Farm was born from the successful occupation of land by black workers at Weiler’s Farm, whose white owner turned a blind eye. The 1980s was a time of intense anti-apartheid mobilisation, including in the Vaal area where this farm was located. This put pressure on the apartheid regime to revise its influx controls and housing policy, notably after the Vaal Uprising in 1984 (Rueedi 2021). In June 1988, the regime amended the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act and proclaimed a new black township, Orange Farm, which would provide space for low-income housing. The Weiler’s Farm community was identified as one of those that would be accommodated in Orange Farm (Naidoo 2010, 240). From an initial 4300 stands, Orange Farm, located about 45 kilometres south of the Johannesburg central business district, has ballooned into a working-class area accommodating nearly a million people who live in brick houses, and in backyard and standalone shacks.
The population of Orange Farm grew significantly after the demise of apartheid as influx control laws were legally eradicated and people moved into the cities in large numbers. The ANC government found it convenient, if not wise, to have housing projects in and around the area due to the low cost of land, given its distance from the city and its amenities. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) policy of building low-cost housing for the poor in faraway places led to urban sprawl and entrenched apartheid geography, whereby black people were located marginally in the cities by racial capitalism. The RDP was the ANC government’s vaguely social democratic economic policy that was adopted in 1994, the year of liberation, but was soon discarded in favour of the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy in 1996. The latter found approval with the World Bank and included privatisation, commercialisation, deregulation and cost recovery. The RDP’s promise of houses, water, electricity, healthcare and education for all was subjected to neoliberal principles, notably the idea that the ‘user must pay’ for services. Indeed, Nelson Mandela launched the Masakhane campaign in February 1995, which aimed to encourage black communities to pay for their services in the light of the history of service payment boycotts used against the apartheid regime (von Schnitzler 2016, 94).
The problem of poor black people not affording services was attributed to a so-called culture of nonpayment. The result has arguably been that the ANC’s market-oriented energy policies implemented from the mid to late 1990s further exacerbated the historical legacy of racial capitalism which remains with us today. New electricity connections for black working-class areas were reduced from the standard 80 amps to 20 amps, ostensibly to limit the use of electricity by communities that were less likely to pay, and it became standard practice to install prepayment electricity meters rather than conventional ones in RDP housing developments. Conventional metering allows for ‘regular, cyclical’ payments on a monthly basis and, importantly, ‘continuous access’ (von Schnitzler 2016, 6). With high unemployment and poverty rates besetting the black working class, ‘self-disconnection’ due to unaffordability abounds, such that:
‘[l]iving prepaid [meters]’, with often only temporary access to services and flows of water or electricity punctuated periodically by cut-offs, has thus become an increasingly normal condition for many poor residents of informal settlements and townships. (von Schnitzler 2016, 6)
Orange Farm case study: immediate solutions, long-term systemic problems
Since 1994, Orange Farm, like other black working-class areas, has engaged in various forms of protest in response to the ANC government’s neoliberal attacks on people’s access to basic services. In 2001, the community formed the Orange Farm Water Crisis Committee to fight the installation of pre-paid water meters (Earle, Goldin, and Phemo 2005). Although this organisation is no longer active, there have been numerous protests in the area since then. This section presents preliminary analyses of data from seven respondents in Orange Farm who took part in a series of in-depth interviews by students at the University of Johannesburg in August 2021 as part of a wider project on energy racism. Two central threads emerged: load reduction as punishment for non-payment; and alternatives when the power goes out.
Load reduction and punishment for non-payment
Orange Farm is one of the areas where load reduction takes place. The energy racism report states that, in Gauteng province where Orange Farm is located, there were 39 instances of load reduction over and above the load shedding reported between September and October 2021 (Maggott et al. 2022, 13–14). Further analysis is needed to determine the frequency of load reduction in Orange Farm specifically. However, research participants suggested that it was very high.
Thato,2 a woman in her twenties, has lived in Orange Farm for a decade. At the time of the interview in August 2021, her only daughter was 10 months old. Thato holds an internship which pays R4000 per month, making her slightly better off than many others in Orange Farm. In her view, load reduction is unfair because ‘most black people do not have jobs and they do not earn big salaries.’ She explained that white people and those living in the suburbs are more ‘privileged’ since they can afford to purchase electricity: ‘[w]e are not on the same level as white people, because we do not have money.’ Thato added that in a black household, one might find 10 residents, only one of whom is formally employed. In the suburbs, however, Thato deduced that cut-offs do not last as long as in townships, since the affluent can afford to pay for services. She resolved that, ‘[w]e, the [black] majority, do not pay electricity [so Eskom] just ensures that the cut-off hours increase.’ In this regard, the load reductions in her community last painstakingly long:
On a normal basis neh [okay], during the week or weekly, we would experience it, maybe, like four times or three times, and electricity might switch off at 5:00 in the morning and come back around 9:00 in the evening. Or [it] switches off again at 5:00 in the afternoon and be back at 10:00 in the evening.
Nosipho has a similar story. Born in Orange Farm, Nosipho is a student at the University of Johannesburg and relies on a small monthly stipend. Like others in her area, she noted that ‘in Orange Farm, people cannot afford electricity’ because ‘they are unemployed, they survive on social grants.’ She indicated that ‘asking them to buy electricity on that level they are at … doesn’t make sense.’ While residents in certain parts of Orange Farm ‘bridge’ (bypass) electricity, others have been paying or wish to pay, despite the disproportionate cost of electricity for the black majority and load reduction. Sipho and Elizabeth fall into this category. Sipho, aged 49, has lived in Orange Farm for 22 years. He said that residents are undermined since ‘the majority of people of Orange Farm … hardly buy electricity, that’s why whenever they think [we are not paying], they switch off – without any notification.’ Sipho believed that residents should be able to meet face-to-face with authorities (including the ward councillor) in order to develop ‘a common understanding’, but if that fails, he and others may have little choice but to engage in collective protest. In the meantime, residents are forced to cope without power.
Alternatives for when the power goes out, including reconnections
Orange Farm residents use open fires, candles, gas and paraffin, and some even bridge the electricity meter to cope. Thato’s household uses a gas stove as an alternative, but when money is scarce, she is forced to collect firewood for imbawula (brazier). Nomsa has lived in Orange Farm since 1990. Currently unemployed, she is 30 years old, has a nine-year-old son and lives with four other adults. Her household has been in the dark since 2017. Like Thato, Nomsa must make use of fire-based energy:
At times, we cook one meal so that we save [the rest of the food] and imagine, they must eat once a day because we cannot be cooking food all the time. Also, our fridges are damaged as we don’t have electricity and it’s not even safe for kids, especially when they want to do their homework in the evening, leaving them with candles. Imagine when they want to run around, because now, they might make the candle drop then we end up burning the house.
At the moment, we are using candles … we are using paraffin. The major thing is that … we [have a] large number of [unemployed] at Orange Farm. Each candle is R4, a litre of paraffin is R19; so, you tell me, how am I supposed to survive if I am unemployed?
The people of Orange Farm, however, have sometimes reconnected electricity in order to offset its high cost. Eskom consistently reminds residents of mainly black and low-income areas, including Orange Farm, not to bother reporting cut-offs or load reductions. Residents like Thato have internalised the sense that there is nothing they can or should do about it:
When we do not have electricity … there is nothing we can do because this thing is known nationally on TV; we know that Eskom is experiencing shortages … so we just have to adjust to these electricity cut-offs or load shedding. It means this is how life is, so we have to accept the situation as it is.
really, I’m struggling [but] not me only. The majority of people in Orange Farm are struggling … On the other blocks, they started with the new boxes [meters], yes, they [maintained] the new boxes, they change[d] the transformer, then they have left the tokens for those people to go and buy, but on my side we are still waiting.
We have met with some delegates of the community whereby we have agreed that let us not riot, let us not burn anything, let us show that we are matured, let us call the councillor on board, so when we do things he must acknowledge that we have approached him first … They [Eskom] promised us an engagement, but up until now, there’s nothing we can do. It means we have to wait … Eskom has promised [to respond to] us. If he or she doesn’t deliver anything, we need to have a petition and submit it to [Eskom].
These research findings trouble the notion of ‘illegal connections’ by showing that accessing electricity when the state fails to guarantee it is one way that powerless communities respond organically to not having power. Here, power – collective agency to influence over living conditions – and electricity are synonymous. The discourse in Eskom – and indeed within the neoliberal logic of paying for basic services – criminalises the poor by first denying them safe, reliable electricity, and second, presenting them as izinyoka, deviants who loot the public grid because they are criminals, and not because they are poor and in need of electricity that is crucial to daily survival. This top-down view misrepresents the ways in which ordinary people attempt to cope with being disconnected from the grid. However, when viewed from the perspective of ordinary people, electricity is more than a basic service, and rather a means to survival that must be accessed by any means necessary. As such, communities bridge electricity not because they are inherently criminal, but as a way to take back their power and to survive the daily woes of life under ANC rule. In this view, ‘illegal’ connections can be seen as collective ways to respond to the failures of the state and Eskom.
We want to suggest, then, that ‘people’s power’ is what is at stake in the current electricity crisis: by systematically denying the poor access to daily energy, Eskom is enhancing community struggles to take back their (people’s) power. Using language about illegality reinforces the state’s criminal policies of denying people power and suggests that the law does not serve all, but is being used by the capitalist state to exploit and oppress the working class. Apartheid was itself a legal system of oppression, segregation and exploitation, and from the mid 1980s, the masses rose up in the name of ‘people’s power’ to resist those laws and ultimately dismantle the legal racial system. What ‘illegal’ connections highlight is not a dastardly criminal populace, but an inherently unjust system of resource allocation, a product of neoliberal policy and consequence of the continued existence of racial capitalism. Could we think of ‘illegal’ connections as ‘community’ connections – collective actions that enhance people’s power to secure their own electricity when the state has failed to do so? As connections that ensure ordinary people the productive power to survive another day? As a step towards dismantling the anti-poor logic of racial capitalism? We suggest so.
Conclusion
Energy racism is a reality in Orange Farm, Soweto and South Africa. The continuities of oppression and exploitation from the past have arguably undermined the anticipated benefits of freedom and democracy in post-apartheid South Africa. Working-class access to energy resources is as precarious as it was during apartheid. The justification for this social injustice has changed in line with the new political situation, where a majority and non-racial government is in power. The new legitimating architectures are derived from the neoliberal logic of the primacy of the markets where ‘there is nothing for mahala [free]’ and people must pay for what they get or else do without. The coincidence of race and class, which can be explained by the particular form that racial capitalism assumed in South Africa, means that those who suffer the most have black skins.
Just as African American scholars turned to the concept of racial capitalism to make sense of the police brutalisation of black bodies in the US in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the continued hardship and suffering experienced by black working-class communities in South Africa is leading to a rethinking and new theorisation of social relations. Building upon Robinson’s ‘making of a black radical tradition’ (1983), which highlights the extent to which race and class are inextricably intertwined, this article points to the fundamental role of the state in perpetuating racial capitalism in the present period which is often misread as post-racial. It further suggests that the lived experiences of colonialism and apartheid are very much alive in the present. To do justice to the core message of #BlackLivesMatter and Robinson’s (1983) theoretical and historical analysis of oppression, our approach must be practically rooted on the ground with the people in the ongoing quest for liberation. We therefore maintain unreservedly that if energy justice is to be realised, we require a mass movement that can decisively challenge the system of racial capitalism, and eradicate all vestiges of oppression and exploitation inherited from the past and reinforced by the capitalist class and its bourgeois state.