“Working time” in environmental activism: Engaging “slow violence” in the Philippi Horticultural Area

Abstract

Tracing the history of activism in post-apartheid South Africa from the Treatment Action Campaign to the Social Justice Coalition, amongst others, one is able to develop an account of various practices and strategies that have been utilised to leverage state resources and lobby support for various causes. This history of rights-based activism has provided various social movements and community-based organisations with a framework with which to engage the state and more localised bureaucratic structures like the City of Cape Town. This article, which is based on two years of ethnographic research, looks at the activist practices and strategies employed by an environmental activist organisation called the PHA Campaign, which operates in a landscape that has been characterised as neoliberal and that explicitly caters to private developers. By looking at how this organisation leveraged the acute water scarcity that threatened the Western Cape from around 2016, or what has been called the “Day Zero” water crisis, this article applies Ahmann’s concept of “working time” to the South African activist landscape and examines how organisations can mobilise how a crisis is framed to their benefit.