Apartheid Modern: South Africa's Oil from Coal Project and the History of a Company Town.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationships between apartheid and modernism, arguing that the South African apartheid state’s oil-from-coal project, SASOL, and the company town Sasolburg were key sites for the elaboration of the ‘apartheid modern’, the particular form which industrial modernity took under apartheid. Moving across a number of domains, the dissertation shows how nationalist discourses celebrated SASOL’s technological prowess and the ‘pioneering’ toil of South African scientists, but the viability of oil-from-coal depended on the cheap cost of black labor in the early apartheid period. SASOL’s managers and Sasolburg’s burghers envisioned the project transforming rural Afrikaners into respectable industrial citizens. The architect employed by SASOL to design Sasolburg, Max Kirchhofer, valorized congeniality in residential neighborhoods and leisure as antidotes to the alienating aspects of industrial modernity. Kirchhofer’s belief that ‘lower-income’ whites in Sasolburg could be reformed by good planning dissipated because of their reluctance to make themselves in the image of a culture linking respectability with particular aesthetic practices. African women’s domestic labor was critical to the making of respectable white families, but the black subculture which emerged around these women in Sasolburg made this dependence subversive of white respectability. The intensity of a co-produced ‘paternalistic’ culture in the SASOL compound in nearby Zamdela township until the mid-1960s saw the compound manager facilitating migrants’ attempts at encapsulating themselves from the corruptions of industrial modernity. Zamdela’s aspirant middle class similarly enrolled white officials in their attempts at constituting a respectable local community. Increasingly pervasive capitalist commodity culture, the emergence of assertive forms of black politics and workforce ‘South Africanization’ in the 1970s undermined ‘paternalism’ at SASOL. The company belatedly extended home-ownership schemes to Africans, but in the 1980s, in the context of unprecedented labor militancy it renounced ‘paternalism’, undertook retrenchments and subcontracting increased. With the end of apartheid both ‘paternalism’ and the jobs which defined this company town and the ‘apartheid modern’, have disappeared. In the apparent ruins of the ‘apartheid modern’, young African residents of Zamdela are demanding for their township the civic infrastructure which the ‘apartheid modern’ produced in Sasolburg.