Review of “Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Post-Apartheid City”

Abstract

How do postcolonial states manage increasingly urbanized surplus populations, or those rendered superfluous to global capitalism? Zachary Levenson’s Delivery as Dispossession tackles this question from the vantage point of land occupations in South Africa. This is an extreme case: unemployment is dramatically high, often hovering around 40 percent (including discouraged job-seekers). Under apartheid, policies of racial exclusion restricted urbanization, but with the lifting of influx control restrictions, the poor and jobless today concentrate in urban areas. In post-apartheid cities, a sizable housing backlog remains, informal settlements proliferate, and overcrowding defines low-income residential areas—all this, despite the fact that the democratic state has delivered approximately four million homes in less than three decades (Levenson 2022, p. xi). Levenson’s account focuses on two land occupations in Cape Town: Kapteinsklip and Siqalo. Both represented attempts by residents to escape overcrowded conditions in nearby townships and informal settlements, and to build new communities where they could find some dignity and autonomy in their living situations. Yet, the two land occupations met with varied success: Kapteinsklip was evicted, Siqalo was not. The cases raise two important questions: first, why is the post-apartheid state, committed as it is to redressing the ills of apartheid and colonialism, evicting poor Black residents—including so-called “African” and so-called “Colored” residents—from vacant land; and second, why are some evicted but others not?