Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest After Apartheid by Antina von Schnitzler

Author:Antina von Schnitzler [Schnitzler, Antina von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691170770
Google: WyjtjwEACAAJ
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2016-07-15T19:35:52+00:00

BUDGET ENERGY CONTROLLERS

(JOHANNESBURG, 1988)

As Clark himself was well aware, the context in which the prepaid meter came to be deployed in South Africa was quite different from late-nineteenth-century Britain. South Africa in the 1980s, he suggested, was “in a mess” because of “that political thing.” For him, as for many other engineers I spoke to in the course of my fieldwork, talking about “politics” was not part of their job description and was often accompanied by frowns or pained expressions. Many had been in the business since the apartheid period and were at best uncertain about how to incorporate the antiapartheid struggle into the narration of their professional biographies.

As I showed in the last chapter, the antiapartheid struggle became known to the world outside South Africa through its campaigns for political rights, which for the most part were articulated at a national scale, but it often took the shape of localized struggles that involved the more tangible, if less visible administrative connections to the apartheid state. During the “rent boycotts” in the 1980s, township residents all over South Africa withheld payment for rents and service charges as part of the effort to make the townships “ungovernable.” Such acts of fiscal disobedience became both symbolic and material tools of insurgency—with dramatic effects—disabling township administrations and turning disconnections from services and evictions into sites of political struggle. It was in this increasingly militant and militarized context of the boycotts that engineers began the search for technical solutions to the problem of nonpayment.

At the same time, there were increasing moves toward the electrification of the townships by Eskom, South Africa’s powerful electricity parastatal. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, it had become clear that “urban Africans” would not “return” to the Bantustans as grand-apartheid ideologues had envisioned. This realization prompted an increasing interest in the black urban population as an untapped market and as potential consumers of electricity and electrical appliances, particularly given that Eskom had an overcapacity of electricity generation at the time. It had also become increasingly clear to local officials that the disparity of services between black and white areas had become a major cause for urban protest. While white areas were fully electrified, in most townships there was either no or minimal domestic electrification. In 1988, Eskom thus embarked on its “Electricity for All” program that sought to extend electricity to all black households. It was in this profoundly paradoxical context of planned large-scale electrification and simultaneous politicized nonpayment–of “reform” and counterinsurgency—that prepaid meters emerged.

As Peter Clark told me, in 1986 he and a colleague developed the first South African prepaid meter and tested it in the Bantustan QwaQwa that had also been hit by widespread nonpayment. Much as for engineers in Britain, one of his primary tasks was to construct a functional assemblage of device, consumer, and utility. Clark transformed the original technology primarily in two ways. First, in order to “protect” it from South African users, he replaced the coins with a magnetic card and nontransferable “tokens.

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