Faeeza Ballim (she/her) is a senior lecturer and head of the history department at the University of Johannesburg. She has previously published on agricultural cooperatives and urban racial segregation in the small town of Mokopane in the Limpopo province of South Africa. She is also currently the coeditor of a five-volume series entitled Translating Technology in Africa. Her research interests cohere around science and technology studies and its relationship to African history, and her new research is in the development of artificial intelligence technology in Africa.
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Listed in: African Studies · South Africa · History | Africa | South | Republic of South Africa · Business & Economics | Development | Economic Development · Technology & Engineering | Power Resources | Electrical · Social Science | Technology Studies
Apartheid’s Leviathan
Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence
By Faeeza Ballim
Beginning in the 1960s, the security of electricity supply has shaped South Africa’s economic growth and prosperity, and electricity shortages have negatively inflected the rise of its postapartheid democracy. Construction delays and escalating costs have thwarted the nation’s mining, manufacturing, and power generation.