The Work of Repair: Capacity after Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa
The Work of Repair is an ethnographic examination of the intimate relationships between laborers in the timber plantations of post-apartheid South Africa, in the wake of the HIV crisis and the contentious politics of nutrition. It explores how capacity is augmented as the wounds of history are embodied and modulated.
Published under licence from Fordham University Press.
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The Work of Repair: Capacity after Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa
In the timber plantations in northeastern South Africa, laborers work long hours among tall, swaying lines of eucalypts, on land once theirs. In 2008, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, timber corporations distributed hot cooked meals as a nutrition intervention to bolster falling productivity and profits. But life and sustenance are about much more than calories and machinic bodies. What is at stake is the nurturing of capacity across all domains of life—physical, relational, cosmological—in the form of amandla. An Nguni word meaning power, strength or capacity, amandla organizes ordinary concerns with one’s abilities to earn a wage, to strengthen one’s body, and to take care of others; it describes the potency of medicines and sexual vitality; and it captures a history of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle for freedom.
The ordinary actions coordinated by and directed at amandla do not obscure the wounding effects of plantation labour or the long history of racial oppression, but rather form the basis of what the Algerian artist Kader Attia calls repair. In this captivating ethnography, Cousins examines how amandla, as the primary material of the work of repair, anchors ordinary scenes of living and working in and around the plantations. As a space of exploitation that enables the global paper and packaging industry to extract labour power, the plantation depends on the availability of creative action in ordinary life to capitalize on bodily capacity.
The Work of Repair is a fine-grained exploration of the relationships between laborers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, and the historical decompositions and reinventions of the milieu of those livelihoods and lives. Offering a fresh approach to the existential, ethical and political stakes of ethnography from and of late liberal South Africa, the book attends to urgent questions of post-apartheid life: the fate of employment; the role of the state in providing welfare and access to treatment; the regulation of popular curatives; the queering of kinship; and the future of custom and its territories.
Through detailed descriptions, Cousins explicates the important and fragile techniques that constitute the work of repair: the effort to augment one’s capacity in a way that draws on, acknowledges, and re-imagines the wounds of history, keeping open the possibility of a future through and with others.
‘Cousins’s focus on repair points to the regenerative capacity of hope amid consuming violence, vulnerabilities, and despair. Thoughtfully argued and meticulous in detail, this book highlights why cultures of interconnection, inclusivity, impurities, and repair in South Africa and elsewhere are key to convivial theorization in Anthropology and kindred disciplines.’ Francis B Nyamnjoh, University of Cape Town.
Thomas Cousins is Clarendon-Lienhardt Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa at the University of Oxford and a Research Fellow at Stellenbosch University. Cousins grew up in Swaziland, Zimbabwe and South Africa, and studied at the University of Cape Town and at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, MD.
“The Work of Repair draws from a dazzling array of theories, concepts, and ideas from many different fields and disciplines. This scavenging interdisciplinarity is one of the book’s major strengths. … [and it] is therefore an astute and timely book that contributes to many different fields. It particularly makes an important addition to ongoing plantation scholarship that bears witness to the continuing racialized effects of plantation systems (Li and Semedi 2021; Thomas 2019). But it also contributes to a broader (feminist) project of grounding, situating, and enfleshing “capitalism” (Bear et al. 2015). As such, it “offers another perspective on life in the midst of capital, subtending capital, making capital something other than it is” (p.24). Moreover, the book stands out because of its eye for detail and minor keys, its subtle attention to the material textures of ordinary life, its relentless historicization of its subject matter, its keen ear for individual voices and biographies, its political acumen, and its deeply lived scrutinization of the ethical conundrums of ethnographic writing (which becomes so much more than a standard chapter on reflexivity and positionality).” Thomas Hendriks for full review
https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Book-review_Hendriks-on-Cousins.pdf
“The Work of Repair is a groundbreaking study that challenges static notions of power, resilience and suffering. Cousins redefines repair not as the undoing of damage, but as the careful and creative reweaving of life amid persistent harm. His work not only deepens our understanding of South African plantation labour but also broadens the scope of what anthropological scholarship can and should do. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of those often marginalised, this book offers a compelling argument for the importance of interconnection, inclusivity, and attending to the nuances of everyday life in ethically engaged anthropological inquiry. Ultimately, Cousins demonstrates how these everyday acts of repair, grounded in cultures of interconnection and inclusivity, offer valuable insights for theorising incompleteness and conviviality, not only in South Africa and other postcolonial settings, but globally as well. This is an essential text for scholars in anthropology, African studies and postcolonial theory –and for anyone interested in how people survive, care and imagine alternative possibilities in the face of systemic injustice.” Francis B Nyamnjoh, University of Cape Town, https://sajs.co.za/article/view/22599 (for full review)
“Cousins has written a powerful, often brilliant, empirically rich, and extremely provocative book that will be read with profit by many on and outside of the continent.” Reviewed by Michael J. Watts (University of California, Berkeley)
Published on H-Environment (April, 2024) https://networks.h-net.org/group/reviews/20030478/watts-cousins-work-repair-capacity-after-colonialism-timber-plantations (for full review)
