The work of repair: Capacity after colonialism in the timber plantations of South Africa By ThomasCousins, New York: Fordham University Press. 2023. 320 pp.

The book provides a serious inquiry into what it means to labor in the timber plantations of South Africa and how life is produced and reproduced in its vicinity. The question of labor is central to the book as it unpacks how capacity to and of labor is held together through the plantations and beyond. Availability, maintenance, and reproduction of labor in postapartheid South Africa are closely dealt with in the text as it traces the history of conquest and violent removal of populations. The dispossession is read alongside the everyday negotiations and relations between contractors, employers, kin, neighbors, and lovers to understand how labor is produced for the eucalyptus plantations of KwaZulu-Natal. The text conceptually engages the meaning of capacity and “Amandla” through the everyday negotiations for sustenance, kinship, calories, and circulation of curative substances. Amandla understood through the contours of capacity and labor power along with the bearing of the spatial, material, and cultural life of people becomes a key to analyzing what produces the plantation itself. Women workers occupy center stage in the book as Cousins works his way through the postapartheid development projects in South Africa. The nutrition intervention projects, the HIV epidemic, conditions of labor, understanding of wage and calorie relations, the homestead, kin relations, and circulation of curative substances are all explored through the different chapters to understand how bodies and relations are sustained under deeply exploitative and numbing conditions of plantation life. Amandla, read as an “ethical substance” (4), is situated within the South African political milieu of governance where capacity and endurance between potentiality and actuality are explored. Shared vulnerabilities and their redistribution attend to the composite understanding of Amandla. Bodily capacity and ethical aspiration become the central fixtures through which Amandla gets configured in the book which pushes the conversation to understanding repair. The work of repair through the subtle acts of care and everyday negotiations finds substantial engagement in the book in understanding how capacity and Amandla are situated within the shifting regimes of capital. Labor power and Amandla are read simultaneously as folded relations by indexing histories of exploitation, abstraction, and repair across ethnographic accounts. Labor power and the way it is extracted in a plantation regime through the repetitive singular activity during the workday becomes an important locus which interacts with wages, health, living accommodation, and nutrition to produce the working body. The working body for Cousins, placed within the local “social projects” (146) in and around the plantation, where marriage, reproduction, childcare, bodily integrity, and political and spiritual authority interact to produce an understanding of capacity and endurance. The book provides a consistent engagement with the meaning of Amandla and capacity and how it is produced, reproduced, augmented, and stretched out through the work of repair in the plantation. Labor and women workers then become central in this operating milieu of the historical and contemporary topography of work, kin, and health relations of plantation life. The book's first few chapters spend time with how labor and labor power are constructed and extracted in the context of the South African plantation regime. An exploration of the conception of labor power is of primordial importance for the project of capital and the postapartheid state. Cousins' engagement with what Amandla means sits within and beyond the expanse of labor power as it interacts with bodily capacity and ethical aspiration. State, corporate, and kin relations through ethnographic accounts allow the reader to understand how the work of repair underplays through the interaction of food and sustenance, hunger and ingestion, along with the circulation of curatives and healing. Health and the medical is a hovering epilogue through the book as the long history of colonial expansion, dislocation, and the capitalist plantation economy has had an overarching and devastating impact on people's health and well-being. It is an enquiry of the same that allows for the actual and imaginative responses of those working in plantations which bring together a material assemblage for the production of Amandla or capacity. Endurance is not looked at as a threshold but capacity to endure the condition of plantation, as it raises questions on how the body (of the worker) bears the traces of assault on its capacity. Curative substances, their circulation, and the gut enter the conversation here again as Cousins takes us through the health and nutrition projects. This specific inquiry into the projects through the multiple utterances extensively documented helps examine the work of repair through kin, gut, and the pharmaceutical. As the book is thinking about how capacity is produced, mustered, contained, and sustained in the plantation, endurance, work, and repair become the axis that holds the story together. Cousins' work proposes a synchromatic account of plantation life where the work of repair and capacity exist simultaneously in timber plantations of South Africa. What remains exceptional about Cousins’ analysis of health, the work of curatives and nutrition interventions, is the way he brings the reader into conversations of social reproduction and the circulation of “alienated and materialized labor” (120) by pushing us to think about the ways in which material, natural, and social are absorbed within the folds of the gut. The gut in the book goes beyond occupying a metaphorical place and becomes an actual mechanism to relate to others and as both a site of discursive and reflective action (142). For students of medical anthropology, the book provides expansive space to understand how to work with conceptual themes developed through a rigorous methodological approach along with wide theoretical debates. The book very systematically holds the reader's hand through its theoretical interventions as it takes one through extensive ethnographic accounts. The work done by Cousins of walking the reader across the terrain of understanding how nutritive and medicinal substances work through the gut as “capacity, strength, force or virility” where Amandla becomes the vital quality helps us understand the work of repair as an unfinished and ongoing project. For those interested in the field of plantation studies, rural sociology, and broadly studying the agrarian question, the book provides a consistent engagement with what the plantation means and looks like in the new globalized political economy. Plantation as an overarching site of inquiry as well as a conceptual framework is further developed in the final chapter of the book where Cousins expands on the plantation as a “topographical space” (146). The cartographic construction of the colonial space is brought back into the discussion from the earlier chapters. In the first few chapters, it allowed the reader to situate how territory was acquired for the construction of the plantation labor regime—through dispossession and policing. In the final chapter, the cartographic project in South Africa helps the reader understand how tribes, peripheries, and the nation interact first through forced removals and then the murky legal terrain of the postapartheid land restitution project and land claim trusts. This cartographic topography, as Cousins puts it, interacts with the “fluid topology of HIV surveillance” (146) and its “spacial epidemiology” (163) by different state and private health institutions. Cousins asks what kind of social is created by constructing a social space through the data projects where the pharmaceutical, the demographic, and the pathogens interact to create the “hotspots” (168). The book points out how spatial mapping of these hot spots gives a tangible geographic home to the virus and the host onto which the physical, political, and human environments interact with the physiological context of the human body. It is in the slippages and intersections of distinct topologies of the book where the “sketches” (173) of life, be it creative, imagined, and tangible produce life and labor visa vi the plantation. Even though the work is situated within the sociopolitical milieu of timber plantations in South Africa, it speaks to a larger audience and context. Those interested in studying the transformation of regimes of capital, governance, property, modes of production, and reproduction will gain immensely from engaging with the book. The gender, sex, and kinship systems that oscillate between colonial and postcolonial plantations dealt with care and detail in the book are of primordial importance to those studying communities across various contexts.