Description
Book SynopsisBeginning in the 1960s, the security of electricity supply has shaped South Africa’s economic growth and prosperity, and electricity shortages have negatively inflected the rise of its postapartheid democracy. Construction delays and escalating costs have thwarted the nation’s mining, manufacturing, and power generation.
Trade ReviewFaeeza Ballim's timely work successfully explains the durability of [electricity utility] Eskom, offers some sense of why the backlash against Eskom (including assassination attempts) is mounting, and offers historians valuable tools for analyzing the relationship between electric power infrastructures and the state. * H-Environment, H-Net Reviews *
A fascinating and timely study of South Africa’s state corporations—in particular its national electricity provider Eskom—and their relationship to the (post)apartheid state. Drawing on meticulous historical research, Ballim powerfully revises existing accounts of state power in South Africa and speaks to urgent questions of energy politics and democratization in the present. -- Antina von Schnitzler, author of Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid
The inevitable intertwining of power supply, politics and the market has been well explored. Yet in policy debates, one continues to hear calls for the separation of the three parts of the assemblage. Ballim takes up the issue in South Africa and captivatingly shows how calls for disentanglement obscure better insights. -- Richard Rottenburg, University of the Witwatersrand
The trouble of a timely book is that one is tempted to demand proposals and solutions to the current crisis.
Apartheid’s Leviathan is not that book and that is perhaps one of its greatest strengths. Faeeza Ballim’s careful exposition of archival documents and valuable insights from first-hand interviews add a human character offering a useful contribution demanding us to reflect on Eskom in its broader historical context. -- Brian Kamanzi * Africa Is a Country *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1 The Unlikely Exploitation of the Waterberg
Chapter 2 The Taming of the Waterberg
Chapter 3 Eskom and the Turning of the Tide
Chapter 4 Contested Neoliberalism
Chapter 5 Labor and Belonging in Lephalale
Chapter 6 The Medupi Power Station
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
