Browsing by Author "Rabbaney, Zaakiyah"

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    Making and remaking life under threat: Disposability, extraction, and anti-black historical processes in old coronation, Mpumalanga
    (University of the Western Cape, 2022) Rabbaney, Zaakiyah; Gillespie, Kelly
    Developed in the 1980s on an abandoned Anglo American coal mine, Old Coronation informal settlement in Mpumalanga is a site of environmental, infrastructural, social, and economic ruin. This thesis looks into the lives of the residents of Old Coronation as they navigate their existence in a scarcely-habitable environment compounded by poverty, joblessness, struggle, and historical and ongoing extractivist processes. The thesis intends to understand the lives of Old Coronation residents as they negotiate survival in a political and economic system, and mineral industry, in which their lives and futures have been abandoned. The main argument is that because of racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and extractivist processes, Old Coronation residents are forced into a life of extreme effort: making and remaking life always against threats, the escape of which only heightens the exposure to further threat.
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    Making and remaking life under threat: fenceline communities in eMalahleni, Mpumalanga
    (Routledge, 2025) Rabbaney, Zaakiyah
    In fenceline communities alongside coal extraction operations in South Africa, residents experience extreme environmental, social and economic conditions that can be traced to the country’s extractivist economy and race-based capitalist logic that created informal settlements in abandoned landscapes to which abandoned people have been relegated. These dystopian spaces present the immortality of coal’s impacts, even in its obsolete post-industrial extraction state. Because of this destruction, in addition to a lack of basic services and mass unemployment and underemployment, individuals are forced into a perpetual cycle of making and remaking life, underpinned by the afterlives of industrial coal extraction, and aggravated by the state’s relegation of impoverished families, who cannot afford formal housing, to abandoned and forsaken spaces. This article illustrates the extent of the deleterious effects of systematic environmental devastation on people whose lives have been historically and systematically devastated, and the ways in which their efforts to make life under such circumstances all too often turn out simply to reinforce their marginality and extreme vulnerability.