Fugitive infrastructure in the fight against South African apartheid

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the case study of a secret communication infrastructure developed as part of Operation Vula and operational from 1988 to 1991 during the final years of the South African liberation struggle. The purpose of Vula was to bring key leaders back from exile to steer from the ground the machinery of mass movement against the apartheid regime. To make Vula a reality in a highly militarised South Africa in the late 1980s a whole infrastructure of covered resistance (physical, technical, and people-based) was necessary. I propose the concept of fugitive infrastructure to understand this form of resistance. I suggest that the secret Vula mission and its communication system can be interpreted as a fugitive infrastructure whereby the system comprised not only an instrument for coordinating resistance to the apartheid regime but also a materialisation, at the level of infrastructure, of a potential alternative future for South Africans. Methodologically, this paper is based on mixed data collection methods including empirical and archival materials collected and analysed during my Ph.D. research.