“We have been thrown away”: surplus people projects and the logics of waste

ABSTRACT

This essay considers discourses of waste that include humans among the objects of discard: surplus/disposable populations in the Marxian tradition, or what Zygmunt Bauman has called “human waste.” Notions of “surplus people” have a long history in South Africa, and this essay traces a genealogy of their narrative and cultural forms. These forms can alternately mask and expose the “indispensable dispensab[ility]” of vulnerable communities treated as waste: devastated, depleted, discarded, disregarded. I situate the blockbuster film District 9 within a longer tradition of documenting the plight of people who recognise that they have been “thrown away,” in texts by Solomon T. Plaatje, Cosmas Desmond, Nadine Gordimer, and others. Attending to questions of geographic and temporal scale, I read between the historical example of South African apartheid and “global apartheid” as shorthand for the stratifications effected by neoliberal globalisation. How do these formations attend to the ideological violence, racial specificity, and enforced invisibility of surplus? This exclusion from the polity works through acts of un-imagining: in moments of crisis when they are pushed to the brink, the poor may have no recourse to the ethical and political grounds upon which they might claim the right to survival.

KEYWORDS:

• Surplus
• waste
• enclosure
• forced removal
• apartheid
• recycling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. My primary focus is on the conflation of humans with dirt, disease, and waste within attempts to engineer this idealised geography into facts on the ground. Plaatje documents the plight of families cast off of farms in the wake of the 1913 law, which not only left them without livelihood, shelter, or access to water or fuel, but also cut off their livestock—a source of food and a store of wealth for many black South Africans—from water and pasturage, and forced many to surrender their livestock to their former landlords and employers. This dispossession of non-human animals represented a collision between capitalist and pastoral modes of accumulation.

2. I borrow this phrase from the comical account of a Hindi-speaking construction foreman in Meja Mwangi’s classic novel of postcolonial Nairobi, Going Down River Road (Mwangi 1976).

3. I do not mean to say that those forcibly moved to Ndabeni were the first people in southern Africa to be dislocated by colonial conquest, but instead that the creation of Ndabeni was seminal in the system of labour canalisation that was engineered to manage urbanisation at the turn of the twentieth century.

4. Apposite here is the notion that the “expulsion of the poor from the defensible, populist enclaves of the middle class is not only a matter of economic access. It also entails – indeed, it requires – a retraining of perception, a process of technical mediation … [which] yields the perceptual paradox of a certain visible invisibility” (Martin 2010, 124–125). Here Reinhold Martin reflects on David Harvey’s analysis of the US postmodern architecture of consumerism, but the insight about perception is particularly helpful and can be expanded to issues of race in apartheid South Africa, in which these paradoxical relations, visible invisibility and indispensable dispensability, intersect.

5. Gordimer’s comparison of the casualties of apartheid to those of warfare is a trope that runs through discourse on environmental conflict in the Global South: warfare offers an analogy for the forms and scale of harm. In the South African context, the observation of wartime tactics used in a country ostensibly at peace occurs elsewhere, as “Nude Pass Parade,” Can Themba’s 1957 essay in Drum: “We aren’t at war. There’s no emergency. We’re a civilized country, we keep telling the rest of the world” (Themba [1957]1991, 370).

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Jennifer Wenzel

Jennifer Wenzel is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009) and co-editor (with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger) of Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham, 2017).