Anne-Maria Makhulu. Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home.

Abstract

Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home focuses, variously, on “the steady expansion of periurban settlements on the outskirts of Cape Town from the 1970s to the early 2000s” (4), “a history of battles for access to the city for and on behalf of African migrants” (5) with “particular attention to practices of settlements and homemaking . . . [in] informal settlements” (11), and “getting by and making do” (130). This analysis is accompanied by frequent commentary on South Africa’s economy and criticism of the country’s neoliberal macroeconomic policies and outcomes. There is considerable literature on these topics, but a book that draws together and contextualizes this literature would provide a valuable service. In addition, in a context of ongoing, but rapidly slowing, African migration to Cape Town, understanding the travails of homemaking and getting by is of ongoing interest. Does the book provide the service of introducing the reader to these topics? Markedly lacking are an introduction to the implications for housing policy of a democratic South Africa and a constitution wherein housing became a right, the geography of apartheid and informal settlements in Cape Town, and the data pertaining to the scale and timing of African migration.