The native body as blue ground: South Africa’s infrastructural production of race

Abstract

ABSTRACT South African municipalities increasingly celebrate prepaid water and electricity meters for enabling them to build more resilient cities. This framing has been critiqued for its neoliberal underpinnings, where the discourse of resilience masks the reality that people are being coerced into surviving with consistently diminishing resources. While these infrastructures undeniably materialise neoliberal logics, this paper considers the labour compounds of nineteenth-century Kimberley to suggest such infrastructures also have a racialising function with a much older lineage. The Kimberley compounds were designed and managed by various technical experts tasked with maximising productivity and balancing economic constraints with mortality rates. In so doing, they relied upon and produced racialised theories of the body. Where the experts framed their work as turning on the observation of “the native races,” in fact those experts were producing the very racial truths they claimed only to uncover. The compound, most often studied as an infrastructure of racial domination, has rarely been recognised as productive of emergent notions of “race.” Read through this lineage, continued infrastructural coercion in contemporary South Africa, which relies on the techno-racial expertise developed in earlier eras, reveals itself as critical to race’s continual reproduction.