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Paper short abstract

Extending on the definition of infrastructure as “matter that moves matter” through asking what happens when matter stops moving. The cessation of access to water due to aging, absent and overloaded infrastructure has influenced the citizenship of farmers in a former bantustan under dual governance.

Paper long abstract

In this article I extend Larkin’s definition of infrastructure as “matter that moves matter” by asking what happens when matter stops moving, long after the political animation that once accompanied democratic change. Drawing on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Ratanang Vegetable Garden in Mankweng, the periurban area in the former bantustan of Lebowa in Limpopo, I conceptualise ‘lost momentum’ as an infrastructural condition that links water, land and governance. While the 1994 transition to democracy set post-apartheid South Africa “in motion” through promises of universal services and equal citizenship, three decades on recurrent load-shedding, aging and absent infrastructure, uneven service delivery and low density urban sprawl have produced chronic interruption rather than reliable flow.

At Ratanang, women farmers confront hydrological and electrical breakdowns—a stolen water tank, deteriorated and bypassed water connections, stolen cables, mounting bills and load-shedding—that mean many must rely on labour intensive manual watering. These infrastructures show that momentum is less about speed than about maintaining flows, and that infrastructural breaks are unevenly distributed along the lines of gender and apartheid spatial legacies. Tracing farmers’ engagements with government departments and traditional authorities (makgoši), in this article I examine how dwindling and increasingly inaccessible state funding, clientelist interventions and the monetisation of communal land stall both livelihoods and technopolitical aspirations. Foregrounding hydrological stillness and stalled assistance rather than flow, I show how lost momentum names the chronic slowing and diversion of material circulation and democratic possibility in post-apartheid South Africa.