‘Historicising Crisis in a South African Rural Municipality: Spatial, Administrative and Extractivist Dimensions’
By Joel Pearson
This seminar contributes to existing local government scholarship by presenting a situated and relational historical study of the Mogalakwena Local Municipality in present-day Limpopo Province of South Africa. Drawing off an empirical foundation compiled from archival and oral history sources, this analysis reveals that the shifting array of power relations which have historically structured the field of rural local governance (or local politics) have been enacted and concretised through specific and identifiable processes of (1) spatial transformation, (2) administrative government, and (3) economic extractivism. While existing scholarship has elaborated on aspects of these processes, the present study insists on analysing all three together, in relation to each other, attentive to forms of both mutual constitution and contradiction, and cognisant of how these processes have fed into political dynamics of varying scales – local, regional, and national. These three sets of historical processes should be understood as axes of rural local governance, and they continue to shape the ground of rural local governance within which municipalities operate today.
