In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been
interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such
as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period
has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure,
including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of
metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy's
Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state
became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid
struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid
present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters,
Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through
which democracy takes shape. Von Schnitzler explores a
controversial project to install prepaid water meters in
Soweto--one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service
charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle--and she
traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become
sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows
engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they
consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows
how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints
imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the
perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of
South Africa's transition, foregrounding the less visible
remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more
material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial
world. Democracy's Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane
technological domains become charged territory for struggles over
South Africa's political transformation.
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