Thomas Cousins’ exceptional contribution – The Work of Repair – accounts for the social and historical topology of a timber plantation in KwaZulu-Natal. He frames it as a site for understanding slavery, colonialism and racialised capitalism; composed of by a complex assemblage of people, machines, plants and animals. The figure of the labourer anchors this composition, positioning the work of repair as the capacity to endure the conditions within the plantation. The isiZulu term Amandla – loosely translatable as power, strength or capacity – captures the thick set of relations that sustain bodies, nurture moral projects and situate the capacity to act and forge a more livable world.
Empirically, the book is based on Cousins’ research on a nutrition intervention from 2008 to 2010 that was implemented by Mondi South Africa to improve working conditions amongst contracted labourers in their plantations.
Divided over five chapters, his aim is to show how amandla brings together moments of a postcolonial scene unfolding within the timber plantation that involves the ordinary yet vital concern with life across material, ethical and biological worlds. In Chapter One, Cousins conceives of this nutrition intervention beyond the simplistic logic of either augmenting labourers’ capacity to be more productive or as an extension of corporate social responsibility. Rather, repair is understood as a multiplicity of projects for fashioning a world in and through the space of the plantation by labourers who forge relations of authority and intimacy that sustain bodies and nurture moral projects enduring within this space.
Chapter Two weaves together biographical description with historical analysis, starting with an ‘uncanny genealogy’ with Cousins’ ancestor – Johannes E.S. Henkel, born in 1871 – who helped establish the material arrangements of silviculture, labour, commodity, kinship, sexuality and food described in the book. Combined with the biographies of his main interlocutors, he frames the plantation as a topological space and site for the maintenance and reproduction of labour in post-apartheid South Africa. This topological space is constituted by a history of violent conquest and forced removals – as well as by everyday relations. Repair becomes topological as biographies intersect with the plantation as a particular kind of problem space where workers are sustained to be productive through a dietary regime.
Chapter Three extends the situation of unionisation, nutrition intervention and entrepreneurship. Cousins explores the discursive potential for studying repair through the laughter and communication associated with umshado wokudlala or a ‘game of marriage’. This praxiography specifies kinship as a matter of managing nutritive substances as well as establishing, contesting and reformulating grammars of intimacy, desire, norms and law.
Chapter Four is conceptually adventurous, locating repair work where nutrition is mediated: the gut. Via this biosocial anchor point Cousins produces an account of medicinal substances that circulate within the human economy of Durban that help individuals endure the conditions of plantation labour. Despite the controversy surrounding substances used in the fight against HIV/AIDS more generally, labourers pragmatically translate between traditional and modern. As a politics of the living, the capacity to act is staged through the nutritional and curative means that elicit different ethical projects and temporalities in relation to HIV/AIDS.
Chapter Five engages with the spatialisation of the plantation and forms of life that are entangled within everyday relationships, modes of composing labour, calories, policies, markets and calculations. These plantation analytics are constituted within a set of distinct historical and spatial referents. What Cousins calls the ‘vicinal politics of repair’ accounts for the ways in which living is made possible in the context of plantation labour within which amandla expresses the capacity to navigate particular histories of cartographic violence and an enlivened politics of life.
This is not a book about repair work. It is much more than that. Resisting a singular definition, the book sensitises the reader to the work of repair as the capacity to contain, to receive, to act, to know, to produce, to make. Capacity is both situated action and an engagement with the multiplicity of topological forms that bear down on the question of what it means to live in a postcolonial scene set in the context of a timber plantation. In these terms, amandla is that which is required in, and emerges from, the ordinary work of repair. Ultimately the concept of amandla points to the conditions of possibility for forging persons as ethical actors in a particular postcolonial zone of labour and extraction.
