This article series reproduces three scholarly commentaries on the work, initially offered as part of a forum at the 2025 meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Detroit, Michigan. The commentaries, by Alex Loftus, Theresa Enright, and Camilla Hawthorne, are bracketed by an introduction by the organizers of the forum and a response by Yousuf Al‑Bulushi.
Yousuf Al‑Bulushi’s Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City presents us with an analysis of the relationship between globalization, state development, and social movements that work against the inequalities and violence of capitalism’s racial dimensions. It was published in 2024 in Palgrave Macmillan’s “Contemporary African Political Economy” series. Building upon 17 months of fieldwork between 2011 and 2018, it details the shack-dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban, South Africa. The book offers an account of the global conjuncture by thinking about the world through the lens of Africa, South African developmentalism, and Durban’s shack-dweller struggles.
South Africa has a vexed history that has been strongly shaped by racial capitalism, which refers to the confluence of racism and capitalism. The country was first colonized by European settlers from Holland and France in the 1600s and later seized by the British Empire in the 1800s and 1900s. These white settlers established a unified republic in 1910. This society was premised on the segregation of its various racial groups and the dispossession of the local African population. These trends reached a peak in 1948 with the establishment of the apartheid government, a structurally racist government that further entrenched these divisions and lasted until 1990. Only in 1994 did the country hold its first fair and democratic elections, leading to the election of Nelson Mandela and the inauguration of what has been termed the “post-apartheid” era ever since. Although much was accomplished with the dismantlement of the structures of urban and national segregation that apartheid had institutionalized, many of the forms of inequality from that era have remained stubbornly persistent into the present.
This dilemma lies at the center of Al‑Bulushi’s study. The ongoing forms of racist dispossession and urban segregation have fundamentally shaped both the urban policies of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) political party that has governed the country since 1994, and the political imagination of South African social movements that continue to fight for access to land, housing, and a right to the city.
South Africa has a number of major cities, but three stand out from the rest : Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. It is the latter—and the less-studied—city of Durban, that sits at the center of Al‑Bulushi’s book. This Indian Ocean city is located in the broader province of KwaZulu‑Natal, a region whose colonial history continues to shape its present political tensions. Sugar cane formed the foundation of the colonial economy, and the white settler-owned companies that first acquired land in the 1800s for the purposes of growing sugar cane continue to be the largest landowners there. On the other hand, the African population remains largely disenfranchised economically in terms of access to land throughout Durban’s modern agricultural and political history.
The ongoing nature of this racialized history of dispossession and unequal land distribution therefore continues to shape politics in the society. On the one hand, the ANC-led government has tried to build homes for the poor, but the corrupt nature of the allocation of these homes—coupled with the slow pace of their delivery and the inadequate scale of such projects—has meant that most people are unable to access such benefits. Those who are left out in the cold have been forced to fend for themselves, moving into the cities in search of a better life, but forced to squat on any available land and construct makeshift homes in areas the state terms “informal settlements.” Because these residents lack formal title to these spaces, they are criminalized and forced to organize collectively if they hope to be able to continue residing in such spaces, and to win access to basic necessities such as water and sanitation. These struggles form the crux of the account Al‑Bulushi offers in Ruptures.
His study focuses on the most prominent social movement mobilizing in these shack communities : Abahlali baseMjondolo. Abahlali began in 2005 and has endured for a remarkable two decades, overcoming political assassinations and tremendous repression. At the time of Al‑Bulushi’s research in 2013, the movement reported tens of thousands of members across South Africa, with a presence in approximately 40 different shack communities in Durban alone. The movement is the most prominent struggle in contemporary South Africa, and, as Al‑Bulushi demonstrates, it offers a variety of lessons for parallel movements in other parts of the world fighting against the intertwined nature of racism and capitalism in urban environments. It has done so amid a changing post-apartheid political conjuncture in which the ANC increasingly competes for hegemony with the leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the neoliberal Democratic Alliance (DA) party to the right.
Tensions between the ANC and Abahlali include political repression through force and policy. In the lead up to the 2010 World Cup, the ANC provincial government in KwaZulu‑Natal passed the Prevention and Elimination of Slums Act in 2007 to make it easier for state forces to displace shack communities from land that was seen as publicly visible to tourists ; the government needed a special act because the post-apartheid constitution forbids removing people from their homes. In a huge movement victory, Abahlali then partnered with lawyers to take the case to the Constitutional Court, which ruled the act illegal. Armed repression occurred in 2009 when an ANC-supported mob accompanied by the local police attacked Abahlali’s headquarters in the Kennedy Road settlement, forcing the organization’s leadership to displace and relocate its head office to downtown Durban. In subsequent years, over twenty Abahlali members have been assassinated.
Ruptures fills a gap in current social-movement research by providing readers with an account of one of the most significant yet understudied recent social movements in South Africa, the African continent, and the world. Ethnographically rich, the book uses Abahlali’s locally rooted political imaginaries and practices to theorize four key areas crossing development, social movement, and Black studies : the relationship between movements and municipal governments ; the ongoing threat of racism in the present and how this threat complicates but does not abandon the imperative of pursuing traditional Marxist projects or solidaristic alliances across difference ; the political economy of Blackness and anti-Blackness globally in conjunction with uprisings against neoliberalism around the world since the 1990s ; and the imperative for researchers to develop a militant methodology that can think with and alongside, rather than on behalf of, social movements.
Employing the methodology of militant research, it exemplifies Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s (2014) “globalectics” approach to theorize the local-global continuum. Ruptures dialectically connects the local, national, and global ; African and Black studies ; as well as theory and practice in the research process itself and in its textual rendering. An interdisciplinary contribution to debates about alter-globalization and right-to-the-city movements, the book draws upon and intervenes in urban geography, African studies, Black studies, Marxism, and social movement analysis.
Ruptures is a rigorous inquiry into the nature of racial formations and politics. It deconstructs the concept of race amid today’s divergent approaches to the concept, as well as its corresponding processes of dehumanization and their political implications. These include both (a) racist deployments of racial classifications that produce “differential relations of life and death” (p. xvii) rooted in the “biologically disproven notion of race” (p. xv) as well as (b) “an affirmative deployment of racial categories” in which Black is not a stagnant identity but primarily a political project of becoming that is also potentially open to those who may not be commonly classified as such. Noting what can be a tension in radical movements between race and class, the book highlights Abahlali’s political analysis and action on the question of leftist racial politics.
To do so, the book focuses on post-apartheid urban social movements in South Africa. It situates struggles such as Abahlali within prior resistance mobilizations globally in the early 2000s. This contextualization also draws out the tensions between different left, electoral, and grassroots political traditions in the country that are relevant for analyzing movements across the world. The book presents a history of the persistence of racist logics in South Africa post-apartheid despite the celebrated transitional justice process in the mid‑1990s. It argues for a notion of transition rooted in the ongoing everyday and radical democratic practices of movements like Abahlali rather than one that focuses exclusively on bureaucratic practices of the state itself, which claims to have transitioned once and for all from a condition of apartheid into one of liberal democracy. Ruptures illuminates the ongoing anti-Black necropolitics (Mbembe 2019)—or politics of death—embedded in state repression and electoral politics in Durban in the 2010s to analyze the relationship between class-based economic precarity, race-based existential precarity, and movements against racial capitalism in today’s global cities. It connects Abahlali’s urban politics to struggles over autonomy in the Americas to assess strategies of resistance and counter-hegemony, shedding light on the—potentially not mutually exclusive—nuance of anti-state anarchist versus state socialist approaches.
It also analyzes the latest round of state developmental responses to protest movements by the ruling African National Congress government. Al‑Bulushi poses the concept of an “alter-globalization from above” to refer to top-down strategies deployed by states—especially in BRICS countries—to evolve out of the Washington Consensus model of globalization toward a kind of “globalization 2.0” that has not entirely departed from neoliberal policies but instead articulates them with an increasing reliance on state capitalism and forms of developmental redistribution. The book elucidates the contradictions of this reemergence of the developmental state in the wake of orthodox neoliberalism as a response to protest movements. This alter-globalization from above, as argued in the book, is defined by new forms of the developmental state that, rather than eroding state power as is often assumed under neoliberalism, concentrates power in the state as it works to deliver housing to some poor people but also oppress criticism. Al‑Bulushi narrates the trajectory of urban struggle in Durban in relation to broader theories about how to forge progressive or radical transitions from racist to nonracial societies, anticolonial movements’ search to achieve national self-determination against colonialism and imperialism, as well as Marxist class-based struggles to overthrow capitalism’s exploitation and forge egalitarian communism. Ruptures elucidates how Abahlali’s concept and practice of a “living politics” enacts an already-lived grassroots praxis that presents a more immediate transformation alternative.
Exemplifying its militant research methodology, Ruptures concludes with lessons from Durban about the current global conjuncture in which the radical left and authoritarian right are increasingly pronounced and in antagonism with one another around the world. The monograph is an astute reflection on theories about the relationship between race, social movements, and the state that will provide both scholars and activists with insights about the political economy of resistance amid racial capitalism. From the strategic vantage point in urban Africa, this critical take on state developmentalism and community organizing speaks to questions of oppression and liberation across the globe.
This work is an attempt to deprovincialize studies of social movements to put struggles in different regions in conversation with each other, which is consistent with Abahlali’s geographical imaginary of internationalism. It also bridges academic divides by showing how Durban’s shack-dweller movement is emblematic of the global and regional context rather than African studies’ tendency to isolate it as a unique case, while also linking this African social movement with a diasporic Black-studies approach for a globally rigorous theory of Blackness and resistance to anti-Blackness in and beyond the Black Atlantic region. As such, it is relevant for academic and non-academic intellectuals concerned with emancipation struggles anywhere.
This forum proceeds with interventions from scholars Alex Loftus, Theresa Enright, and Camilla Hawthorne, who delve deeper into the book’s claims to articulate critiques and generate further discussion, followed by a response from author Yousuf Al‑Bulushi.
Articles in this series :
- 1. Introduction, by Christopher Courtheyn & Joseph Palis
- 2. Urban Racial Regimes, Development, and the Black Radical Tradition in South Africa, by Alex Loftus
- 3. Settler Colonialism, Black Radicalism, and the Urban Political, by Theresa Enright
- 4. Rethinking Capitalism, the State, and Black Politics from the Global South, by Camilla A. Hawthorne
- 5. Author response | Thinking with Abahlali : The Local State, Solidarity, and Research, by Yousuf Al‑Bulushi
Bibliography
- Mbembe, A. 2019. Necropolitics, Durham (North Carolina) : Duke University Press.
- Thiong’o, N. W. 2014. Globalectics : Theory and the Politics of Knowing, New York : Columbia University Press.
