05 ISSUE VII
SEPTEMBER 2025
SEPTEMBER 2025
The technological ambivalence of electricity
What role do state corporations play in capitalism’s past and present, reshaping our view of the state? Is technology always ambivalent? South Africa offers insights.
By Julián Gómez-Delgado
Textbook definitions of electricity often lead us to think about electricity in a very technical, apolitical, and perhaps (for those with good luck) personal way. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, provides two definitions of electricity: “a form of energy resulting from the existence of charged particles, either statically as an accumulation of charge or dynamically as a current, [associated with] the supply of electric current to a house or other building for heating, lighting, and powering appliances.” The second describes it as “a state or feeling of thrilling excitement.”
Image by Hennie Stander, via Unsplash.
Historian Faeeza Ballim’s book, APARTHEID’S LEVIATHAN: ELECTRICITY AND THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY AMBIVALENCE invite us to look at electricity differently: as a social and economic project of modernization, which, in the case of South Africa, was carried out in an ambivalent way with the promises, violence, and contradictions of the apartheid and post-apartheid regimes. The book explores Iscor, South Africa’s former steel manufacturing corporation, and Eskom, the national electricity provider from the 1970s. Ballim considers them as crossroads where technology meets (and dissociates from) politics, and as such, neither can be subsumed into the other. The book combines archival records, including minutes from the executive boards of state corporations, newspapers, and personal archives from former workers, with oral history interviews of miner engineers, high-ranking employees, and union leaders, and secondary literature.
Ballim argues that what keeps political assemblages of governments, parties, corporations, and individuals “durable” is the emergence of “writhing leviathans,” like Iscor and Eskom, which are made up of “disparate elements that are both human and nonhuman” (3). Throughout six chapters, Ballimsuggests that state corporations not only supported a “minerals-energy complex’ or a “racial capitalism” project but also played ambivalent roles: guaranteeing welfare for Whites or trying to build family housing for African workers while also contaminating or facilitating the infrastructural bases for maintaining the racial “color bar.”
In the first two chapters, Ballim describes how the apartheid government collaborated with Iscor and Eskom to pursue a national industrialization project that was fundamentally about racial segregation: it aimed to serve the White poor while carrying out the forced removals of Africans from White-owned farmlands, which the Group Areas Act had supervised since its inception in 1952. As Ballim suggests, this attempt resembles the “authoritarian high-modernism” that James Scott describes. However, the roles of both state corporations—portrayed in different chapters—show that state functionaries, engineers, and even workers had some political influence on changing the results, while also facing the limitations and uncertainties linked to a “central planning” model that often created more anxieties than solutions.
In the third chapter, Ballim traces Eskom’s arrival in the Waterberg in what is now Limpopo Province in the 1980s and how it also contributed to the taming of the region through the construction of the Matimba power station, which received that name to “acculturate” to the terrain since it meant “power” or “strength” in Xitsonga. Such an infrastructural endeavor enabled Eskom to build “new geographies of electricity supply” connecting all the power stations of the country to a national electricity grid (60). The objective was to direct electricity to areas with the highest demand. The power station was also the result of a huge technological innovation that dealt with the dry climate and that, for its smaller cooling towers, also represented less vulnerability to sabotage. The construction of the Matimba power station marked a significant point for Eskom to consider the possibility of mixed-race neighborhoods near power stations nationwide, which, in the author's view, signifies the beginning of dismantling racial segregation in the 1980s, closely tied to the Soweto uprising of 1976. This effort at racial integration through employment mostly failed, but it enabled Eskom and Iscor, against the wishes of the White residents, to build housing for African workers.
In chapters four and five, episodes of partial privatization and the role of trade unions are discussed. Since right-wing anti-monopoly policymakers, intellectuals, and organizations like the Congress of South African Trade Unions (founded in 1985) were opposed to complete privatization, commercial restructuring emerged as an alternative. Here, the narrative of an even neoliberal transition is problematized.
Finally, in chapter six, the author explores the more recent history of Eskom and electrification in South Africa: the emergence of the Medupi power station in the same area in the Waterberg, which, while addressing the political promises made in 2007 during a period of significant electricity outages, became not only an air polluter but also a protagonist of “state capture” in corruption acts that resemble many cases across the global south. The corruption narrative, however, is complicated as the author reveals that accusations have sometimes been used to blame competent individuals instead of addressing the “complex and multifaceted” reasons connected to these technological endeavors’ intricate technical and human elements. For this reason, Ballim argues that the faults were also due to technical difficulties and the region's particularities rather than simply political interference. This perspective is crucial for grasping the politics and the “technological ambivalence” surrounding electricity in South Africa and beyond.
Overall, Ballim’s book highlights the central role of state corporations and the significance of electricity in the modern world. It also prompts questions for future research: What is the role of “state corporations” in past and present capitalism? How can we describe them, what do they do, and how do they transform our understanding of “the state”? Does technology always have an ambivalent impact, regardless of the political project it is part of? These questions and others will help us look beyond the multiple and daily (energy) crises.
Julián Gómez-Delgado is a PhD candidate in sociology and historical studies at the New School for Social Research. His research focuses on theories of the state, histories of capitalism, technology, and social protests.