Nuclear Worldmaking Under Apartheid

Nuclearism in South Africa and beyond has had a multiscalar worldmaking power through the operation that Nelson Goodman, in his 1978 book Ways of Worldmaking, has called “ordering”: “arrangements and groupings” of time and space that engender new logics that shape how we understand and experience the world.¹⁰ Apartheid itself is an example of such an ordering, building itself into being through a strict spatial demarcation along racial lines that came to constitute the South African world. From the very beginning of the apartheid regime with the election of the National Party in 1948, however, radiation and nuclear materials have been surprisingly central to its power to build itself into being through the co-constitution of racial and spatial orders.

Many of the legal and material infrastructures of apartheid most central to its reordering of space – native reservations, the passbook system that controlled and surveilled movement – had already been put into place by gold mining companies before the election of the National Party in 1948, and the Party’s “new” system of apartheid was reliant on the continuation of these structures.¹¹ A particular challenge, however, was that the gold mines themselves had been severely disrupted during World War II and many mines were on the verge of closure after the war, threatening to disarrange the racial-spatial order that was both the template for the apartheid system and one of its primary enforcers. It was uranium that would secure the ongoing spatially segregated world instantiated by the mines. In June 1948, the National Party government began negotiations with the Combined Development Agency, a joint US-UK uranium-purchasing project, towards a contract that would secure one hundred percent of South African uranium for the US and the UK once South Africa’s uranium processing plant was up and running in 1952. The agreement, finalized in 1949, ensured a ten-year guaranteed income for the gold mining corporations at the same time as the production of gold amortized the cost of uranium production. South Africa’s uranium boom thus ensured the continuity of gold (now gold-and-uranium) mining’s central place in the economy and culture of apartheid-era South Africa, allowing apartheid to continue to build out from the template of the gold mines into every part of everyday life and protecting the regime from the international isolation that it might have faced much earlier if American foreign policy had not been primarily shaped by the need to, in the words of Truman’s Under-Secretary of State Robert Lovett, “bear in mind the importance of South African uranium in all our future dealings with the Dominion.”¹²

Radiation environments were thus both the template and the pinnacle of apartheid’s spatial segregation, and they also became sites of intense racialization. Under the spatial ordering of nuclearized apartheid, proximity to the physical harm of radiation became an aspect of blackness, creating a new racial-technological regime that translated what Denise Ferreira da Silva has called “affectability,” “the condition of being subjected to both natural (in the scientific and lay sense) conditions and to others’ power,” into nuclear terms.¹³ As Gabrielle Hecht’s work has shown, black South African mine workers were assigned to worksites much deeper into the mines and with much worse ventilation than white workers.¹⁴ This spatialization of race meant that workers were racialized through their exposure to radon, a gaseous uranium daughter that causes lung cancer and other illnesses. The mine was – and remains – a racialized infrastructure that produces racial difference through the uneven distribution of vulnerability and harm. Through this re-ordering, apartheid nuclearism scientifically constructs blackness as Ferreira da Silva’s “affectable I,” defined by its inability to claim mastery over nuclear materials and its condition of being subject to both “natural conditions” (irradiation) and “others’ power.”

The Pelindaba reactor site, conversely, was a space for the production of whiteness: due to “the presence of atomic bombs,” Pelindaba became the most completely segregated space in South Africa – as Hecht and Paul Edwards write, it was the only place where “whites clean[ed] toilets.”¹⁵ Having constructed the affectability of blackness through the spatial ordering that aligned black miners with nuclear harm, apartheid leaders and scientists at Pelindaba could construct themselves as the affectable I’s opposite: the “transparent I,” defined by Ferreira da Silva as “Man, the subject, the ontological figure consolidated in post-Enlightenment European thought.”¹⁶ Scientific control over radioactive materials without exposure to their physical harms produced whiteness on a local level in contrast to blackness, and it also linked white South Africans into a larger system of nuclearized racial formation that was remaking the world in its image at the time.

While nuclearism has most usually been analyzed, following Joseph Masco’s influential formulation of “radioactive nation-building,” as a technology used to bring a new iteration of the nation into being, a post/decolonial perspective reveals the extent to which even highly nationalistic nuclear programs and politics also worked to reconstitute the global relations between nations.¹⁷ As historian Jacob Darwin Hamblin has shown, the nuclear powers – especially the US – saw the world through a (neo)colonial lens that continued to divide the world between transparent-I Western powers who made technology and affectable-I nations who existed to export natural resources (now including nuclear materials such as uranium and monazite) to the West. Being seen as a uranium resource in the same bracket as the colonized Congo was anathema to the white-supremacist apartheid government in South Africa, who wished, in the words of a diplomatic official in 1951, to have “some kind of special position in atomic energy matters in recognition of the new status of that country as a uranium supplier.”¹⁸ As the international nuclear system began to coalesce as a racial and (neo)colonial ordering of global space, South Africa, in Hamblin’s words, “did not wish to be treated like a colonial, colored people, and the Americans did not treat them as such.”¹⁹ South Africa, unlike (for instance) India, were recognized as white and therefore incorporated into the new “global nuclear order” on the side of the nuclear colonialists; its white leaders were granted the technology to process nuclear materials in ore refineries and nuclear reactors, not defined as themselves sites of nuclear-colonial mastery as in India, where the US had refused to provide ore processing facilities.²⁰ As a new nomos of the earth that manifested in sites as small as the irradiated cell and as large as the global flows of the uranium commodity circuit, nuclearity’s worldmaking power operated through a racial-spatial (re)ordering that established a new set of colonial relations for the nuclear age. The fact that this set of global relations was referred to by postcolonial nations as “atomic apartheid” by 1967 reveals both the extent to which the global racial-spatial relations of global nuclear colonialism were modeled on the ordering practices of apartheid and how obvious these continuities were to the rest of the Global South.

When the apartheid regime began to dismantle itself in 1990, it was a temporal ordering that allowed the nuclear-colonial relations of race, space, and vulnerability that had been put in place during the apartheid era to remain in place. The ongoing operations of the Pelindaba reactor were emplotted into a particular narrative form that made transition seem like transformation, as in the following account from the website of the company currently running the reactor:

Amazingly, the enriched uranium (HEU) used to fuel SAFARI-1, and provide uranium target plates (for the production of medical radioisotopes), was produced from the very same processes that had originally been used to create South Africa’s nuclear warheads. From weapons of mass destruction to life-saving isotopes, SAFARI-1 was at the very centre of one of the country’s most important and remarkable transformations.²¹

This is an emplotment of radical rupture, building on the perceived opposition of “mass destruction” and “life-saving isotopes” to suggest not only that the nuclear complex now has the opposite effect in the world to that of its previous apartheid iteration but also that this 180-degree spin was “was at the very centre” of the “important and remarkable” transformation of society out of apartheid itself.

Both within South Africa and internationally, the conjoined narrative of denuclearization and/as decolonization has been remarkably effective at positing a world in which South Africa has successfully denuclearized and decolonized. South Africa has been perceived as a global champion of denuclearization; in addition to its namesake role in establishing the African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone with the Treaty of Pelindaba, the post-apartheid state has become a major player in the global nuclear nonproliferation industry, with South Africans “fill[ing] the ranks” of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, most strikingly, being called up after 9/11 when “a team of South African nuclear weapon experts was sent to Iraq to persuade Iraqi authorities to open up to international safeguards as the South Africans had done a decade earlier.”²² What Robin Möser has called the “moral and normative” payout of the “disarmament dividend” has led to “the phoenix-like rise of Pretoria’s leaders on the global non-proliferation scene” – a remarkable transition from apartheid South Africa’s status as international nuclear pariah to its recognition as post-nuclear hero, including by the other African states to whom its apartheid politics had been anathema.²³

South Africa’s abolition of its nuclear weapons does have a certain utopian valence, proving, against the impossibility politics deployed by other nuclear powers, that disarmament is possible. What this narrative occludes, however, is all of the other aspects of apartheid nuclearism that remain in place: the infrastructures of nuclear power, nuclear waste, nuclear medicine, and other non-weapons nuclear activities that, as Jo-Ansie van Wyk has argued, have served to maintain “the country’s nuclear geographies where nuclear colonialism (a system whereby government and business target communities directly or indirectly to maintain the nuclear process) has been perpetuated by the democratic government since 1994.”²⁴ The temporal ordering of the transition narrative thus comes to subtend the worldmaking power of apartheid nuclearism’s spatial ordering, continuing its worldmaking effects into the twenty-first century. Just as apartheid itself continued to structure South African life well past its formal ending, given what Poyner calls “an apparent paradox: that despite South Africa undergoing momentous political transition, little in the socio-economic reality has actually changed,”²⁵ so the technopolitics of apartheid nuclearism have continued well into the twenty-first century, limiting democratic praxis and continuing to enact racialized harm.

Unmaking the Nuclear Order in Get a Life

Antinuclear writers, activists, and scholars in South Africa have thus wrestled since the early twenty-first century with the fact that, in the words of Earthlife Africa, “[parastatal energy company] Eskom’s nuclear plans are an Apartheid hangover.”²⁶ South African nuclearity has been represented as a continuation of apartheid’s racial violence in cultural venues from Earthlife Africa’s 2002 campaign to Jassy McKenzie’s 2017 nuclear thriller Bad Seeds, in which both the actual nuclear materials produced under apartheid and the continuation of the “secretive…corrupt” “apartheid mentality” that creates a lack of democratic “transparency” in nuclear politics become threats in the present.²⁷ As South Africans wrestled more generally with the difficult realities of how, as in Pheng Cheah’s definition of decolonization, “to open up a world that is different from the colonial world,” both understanding the worldmaking power of apartheid nuclearism and, crucially, developing a theory and praxis of how a decolonized world might be opened up in its wake have been central to the post-apartheid antinuclear project.²⁸

The racial, spatial, and temporal ordering of apartheid nuclearism was maintained across the end of apartheid by a particular narrative construction: the emplotment that told the story of bad apartheid radiation being transformed into good decolonized radiation. It is perhaps then not surprising that South African literature’s most extended treatment of post-apartheid nuclear issues, Nadine Gordimer’s 2005 Get a Life, is a stylistically experimental novel that uses the affordances of narrative to complicate the nuclear complex’s fiction of a smooth transition from the colonial to the decolonial atom. Get a Life takes up the two technologies that facilitated the South African nuclear complex’s transition from apartheid to post-apartheid: the novel’s protagonist and most frequent focalizer, white English-speaking Paul Bannerman, has become radioactive after being treated for thyroid cancer with iodine-131 and the novel opens with him entering quarantine at the house of his parents, Lyndsay and Adrian, to protect his wife Berenice/Benni and his young son Nicolas from the radiation that he now gives off. During and after quarantine, Paul works as an ecologist for an environmental NGO alongside his two black colleagues Thapelo and Derek on a project to prevent the construction of South Africa’s first Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR). Throughout the novel, Gordimer consistently works at the level of both content and form to undo the ordering power of nuclear-colonial worldmaking. At the same time, she deploys the counterworldmaking power of literature to both represent alternative worldmaking actions and train the reader in the meaning-making practices that are necessary to undertake these actions in the real world.

While widely recognized as one of South Africa’s most important anticolonial writers, including with the awarding of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, Gordimer is not often thought of as a nuclear writer. Get a Life, however, brings to fruition a quiet but persistent attentiveness to nuclear colonialism across Gordimer’s career. Gordimer has long described her attentiveness to apartheid’s racialization of space as having stemmed from growing up on the gold (and subsequently uranium) mines of the Witwatersrand; her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), takes up these issues, and in 1968 she published a photo-essay in Optima with the photographer David Goldblatt surveying the physical and social remnants of the mines around Johannesburg. Her most explicitly ecological novel before Get a Life, 1974’s The Conservationist, juxtaposes the ways that conservation discourses are used to justify the expropriation of land with the more explicit dispossessions of South Africa’s nuclear colonialism in Namibia, where, the protagonist Mehring’s son reports by letter, “Kurt had tried to drive him where he wanted to go, but of course the uranium mine area was sealed off, you couldn’t get nearer then Khan Canyon. The Damaras in the area have all been – the word was in quotes – ‘removed’ and herded into a Reserve somewhere, the entire population.”²⁹

In her 1984 novella “Something Out There,” Gordimer narrates the bombing of a power plant that is clearly modelled on the bombing of the Koeberg reactors the year before (an event that is referenced in the text). And in an essay written in 1995 titled “Our Century” Gordimer refracts the whole history of the period through “the mushroom cloud that hangs over our century,” the ultimate “conquest of nature” that extends the imperial conquest of man and land alike across the planet.³⁰ Get a Life should not, I propose, be seen as incidentally nuclear, but rather as the culmination of an interrogation of nuclear colonialism in South Africa sustained over many years and extended after the end of apartheid.

In Get a Life, Gordimer accesses the experience of living in relation to nuclear colonialism through the figure of the irradiated body. Critics have tended to read Paul’s irradiation and subsequent quarantine as a seclusion narrative, a turn from the public/political to the private/ahistorical, as in Michael Titlestad’s description of the central family’s “temporal and ideological insularity.”³¹ The figure of the white Paul in the walled garden might indeed suggest a recapitulation of apartheid’s nuclear segregations. To take Gordimer seriously as a nuclear analyst attuned to the geopolitics of radiation would lead us, however, to quite a different spatial interpretation: to see the irradiated body in Get a Life as a node in global nuclear flows and as what Agard-Jones has called, a “sign of encounter between the body and the…state.”³² Paul’s understanding of his embodied state is, in fact, quite the opposite of insular and enclosed. Radiation forces him constantly to reckon with embodiment as something that is networked and expansive, impossible to enclose: the novel’s opening lines tell us that “he remains, he will be still, out of his control, exposing others and objects to what he emanates, whomever and whatever he touches.”³³ Everything that he touches must be thought of as an extension of his irradiated body, as “his plate is paper and the utensils he uses must be put aside separately by Lyndsay or Adrian before they leave for the day” (28), and yet even these safety precautions cannot contain his embodiment within the household: “what about the paper plates touched by radiant saliva on spoons and forks, got rid of,” the narrative contemplates through Paul’s internal focalization (60). “Thrown away in the trash to lie on waste dumps picked over by kids from black squatter camps. What is ‘rid of’ in terms of any pollution, it’s a life’s work to inform us that it’s not only what is cast into the sea that comes back to foul another shore, no matter whose it is” (60–1) While Paul may feel himself to be isolated – “He’s the receded. It’s him. Far away” (15) – the materiality of the irradiated body renders him intimate not only with the people close to him, “whomever and whatever he touches,” but also to distant strangers, those who may touch what he has touched and incorporate his imparted radiation into their own bodies.

At the same time as radiation spreads the materiality of the body outwards, it is also the vector through which the body is penetrated by the material residues of history and politics – an ordering of time that challenges the narrative of absolute rupture between past and present in play at Pelindaba. This is true in a figurative sense – Paul imagines his nuclear body through the historical lens of “his Chernobyl” as well as through the contemporary political struggle of “his own Koeberg experimental nuclear reactor” (60) – but also in a very material sense. The iodine-131 that Paul takes to “what’s their word, ablate residual cancerous tissue” (11) would have come from Pelindaba, made using the highly enriched uranium that was generated by the apartheid state’s nuclear weapons program and linking Paul materially and directly to the mechanisms by which the nuclear complex kept itself alive across the end of apartheid.

The apartheid bomb may have been dismantled, but its materials are still here and still continuing to occupy and threaten life (Paul’s as well as proximate and distant others’). Nuclear medicine bears complex valences in the novel as it does beyond it, where radiation – inimically harmful to life – is deployed to prolong life against a more imminent threat. Paul imagines this deployment in the language of violence: “When he thinks in this dim-dozing timeless half-consciousness lying in bed, of what must have been done to him while he was totally absent in an operating theatre, he watches a few maverick cells dartingly escaping the knife, later fleeing the radiant iodine to set up a new base in what he experiences is the territory of his body” (14). This formulation of the body as territory is hardly new, and Shane Graham notes that “the symbolic conflation of bodies and landscapes” is a particularly prevalent trope in post-apartheid literature.³⁴ But the resonances here are unexpected: in a country where for decades the “maverick cells” have been freedom fighters working to overthrow the vicious apartheid colonial state, the “radiant iodine,” officially life-saving, is aligned with the colonial forces seeking to secure the “territory” for that state. Radiation may be a way of securing life, but Gordimer represents it as perpetuating the deathliness of colonialism into the post-apartheid world.

The disjointing effects of radiation on how Paul experiences his body in time and space ramify outwards to his own worldmaking activities and how he conceives of their possibilities. As a novel about a white English-speaking South African in the post-apartheid era, Get a Life situates Paul as both part of what Cornum calls “the irradiated international” of shared nuclear harm and as a potential threat to it; while the irradiated international may contain multiple subject positions in their shared exposure, neither Cornum nor Gordimer collapse the difference between “families, communities, enemies, and strangers.”³⁵ Paul’s membership in the irradiated international as something other than a perpetuator of nuclear-colonial relations requires a broader transformation, one that is facilitated through radiation exposure. The “radiant iodine” that Gordimer figures as the ongoing presence of colonial nuclearity both treats Paul’s cancer in the present and makes it more likely to recur in future; he is both a beneficiary and a potential victim of radiation, and Gordimer’s image sets Paul into an antagonistic relation with the ongoing actions and structures of nuclear colonialism in the present. These relations at the cellular level are mirrored in the novel at the scale of Paul’s environmental activism, where the individual experience of vulnerability to radiation also changes how both Paul and the novel imagine the work of environmentalism as postcolonial worldmaking.

As a white environmentalist “qualified academically at universities and institutions in the USA, England, and by experience in the forests, deserts, and savannahs of West Africa and South America,” Paul’s structural position pursuing environmental justice “in this country of Africa in which he was born” is a tricky one (6). Like his multiple positions in relation to radiation and its ongoing nuclear colonialism, where he is at once victim, perpetrator, and threat, Paul’s work has the capacity to perpetuate racial oppression and neocolonialism through environmental activism even as he has a stake in securing a more environmentally just future for his young country.

Gordimer is no eco-Calvinist, however, and Get a Life does not suggest that a white South African can only ever occupy a position of harm when it comes to either radiation or postcolonial worldmaking; Paul’s body-as-territory is, let us remember, a battleground between colonial and decolonial forces, the maverick cells and the radiant iodine. Rather, she frames Paul’s embodied encounter with radiation as an experience in which Paul’s exposure makes him more able to engage in the transformative environmental and social solidarity work that I call antinuclear worldmaking from below. The exposure to nuclear harm disarticulates Paul from the structure of whiteness that is generated by the experience of nuclear safety; as Vivek Santayana notes, “Get a Life’s focalizing through Paul…allows for close attention to the ways in which his exposure to radiation provokes a profound reconfiguration of his self and its interaction with his environment as a result of the development of nuclear technology in neocolonial contexts.”³⁶ Like other members of the irradiated international Paul experiences irradiation as a re-ordering: a penetration of colonial histories of mastery into his own body, and a spatial connection with the black “others” decreed separate by apartheid’s own nuclear order.

Paul’s re-ordering of time and space in his embodied encounter with radiation ratchets him away from a white colonial scientific habitus in which knowledge brings control – the habitus of the “transparent I.” Whereas for the apartheid nuclear complex (and nuclear complexes in other places) control over nature in the form of the atom came to mean colonial relations of control over populations, race, and space, Paul experiences radiation as something that decreases both what he knows about his body and his level of control over his body, his desires, and his life. Radiation thus situates Paul as the “affectable I,” open to influence and even mastery by nature and by others. As he leaves quarantine and returns to work, Gordimer raises the possibility that environmental work will be the thing that resettles Paul in his life: “Going home: home that is work to be done” (89). Yet the home that is work to be done is not a heimlich experience. This line leads into the extended eco-epiphany at the center of the novel, where Paul processes his encounter with the Okavango Delta. Paul’s assumptions of his own knowledge – “He thought he was fairly familiar with the ecosystem, at the time, had read up a bit to refresh this colloquially” (90) – have been transformed by a visit to view the delta from above: “he realised he knew too abstractly, himself limited by professionalism itself, too little of the grandeur and delicacy, cosmic and infinitesimal complexity of an ecosystem complete as this. The Okavango could never have been planned on a drawing-board by the human brain. Its transformations, spontaneous, self-generated, could not have been conceived” (90–1). Post-irradiation, Paul experiences a transformation not only in how he conceives the delta itself but in how he experiences his own work in relation to it. This transformation flirts with being a crisis of faith, as Paul contemplates the radical scalar mismatch between his environmental campaigns and the size, complexity, and duration of the environment itself and the subsequent impossibility of mastering it; this is “heresy,” he notes, for one who when asked about his work replies “I’m a conservationist, I’m one of the new missionaries here not to save souls but to save the earth” (94). And this is how this moment is most often read, as a transformation in personal consciousness that is either adequate or inadequate to the political needs of post-apartheid South Africa.

What I find more interesting to think with, however, is that it’s not primarily a transformation whose stakes are personal. Here I differ from Santayana’s terrific reading of the novel, which is primarily focused on Paul’s individual-scale realization of his “shared vulnerability with this ecosystem around him” as a subjective experience.³⁷ At the level of worldmaking, this revelation leads rather to a transformation in how Paul thinks about – and how the novel stages – antinuclear activism, and environmental justice work more broadly, moving from a focus on the individual environmental attachments and actions of the “transparent I” to a conception of environmental action that is social, collective, and sustained through carefully built relations of solidarity – relations whose possibility rests on a mutual condition of affectability. Nuclearism and conservationism share, or can share, colonial relations to nature that secure colonial whiteness by claiming mastery over both land and population. When Paul first turns to the “home that is work to be done,” he turns to the PBMR as something to be controlled through scientific research, recapitulating the relationships of nuclear colonialism: “The pebble-bed nuclear reactor project is neither abandoned nor finally approved…The thought is troubling: research must be continued to be used for protest as vigorously as possible to keep the issue alive.” (89). In this version of activism, the pause in construction is inadequate: “research” has to be deployed to reach a climactic end point, a final saving of the earth.

As Paul starts to integrate his embodied experience of radiation with his ecological perception, however, his understanding of what successful antinuclear activism looks like begins to change: “Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be. The pebble-bed reactor project has not been abandoned by the entrepreneurs but it hasn’t gone further than being claimed safe enough to walk away from” (99). By the final lines of the novel the uncertainty and incompleteness that has spread from Paul’s irradiation has fully taken over from the idea of the final environmental victory in a conversation between Paul, Thapelo, and Derek: “Final licence of destruction must never be admitted, granted. That’s the creed. Work to be done. Yona ke yona. This is it. Phambili. There’s a half-triumphal burst of laughter to be shared” (187). Just as Paul now lives in the reprieve of his nuclear disaster, “all clear for the present; another scan, maybe, delayed for another decision” (186), so nuclear disaster for the planet remains “pending” (186), halted for now, a “half-triumph” attained in a body that has managed to restructure its relations and orientations away from static colonial mastery towards a world, and a work, that is composed collectively, that remains provisional and in-progress, that can hold the “life” of the novel’s title as a process to be co-created with others.

This is a form of antinuclear activism that expresses itself not as the flipside of nuclear colonialism’s exertions of force through scientific mastery, where the heroic conservationist also wields science in an attempt to control nature and society, but as an alternative worldmaking project that involves working with others to hold off disaster and bring improvement where you can, under conditions of shared affectability. Antinuclear worldmaking appears in Get a Life as a form of coalitional sociality that is composed of multiple forms of relation. Some of these coalitions and relations are solid and ongoing, built on deep mutual ties and shared goals: Paul, Thapelo, and Derek are the tightest collective that we see here, coming together from a range of backgrounds (Paul’s white upper-middle class upbringing, Thapelo who “at seventeen was in a Mkhonto we Sizwe cadre, another kind of combat in the bush” (60), Derek who shares Thapelo’s blackness but not his indifference to irradiation) to conduct activities from field research to “undercover” (82) background operations to awareness-raising campaigns. Some coalitions are strategic alignments with peers and organizations with similar goals, as when Derek, Thapelo, and Paul’s foundation teams up with “chemical engineers, social scientists, anyone and everyone concerned with environmental management, the professionals along with the Greens, Save The Earth, Earthlife, International Rivers Network” (89). Some are fleeting moments of alignment, a moment at a party where copywriters, activists, a Black American photographer all briefly share an understanding of the dangers posed by the PBMR (113–4). And some are long community conversations where group and individual interests may differ and change over time, as in Thapelo’s ongoing conversation with “traditional leaders” whose land is under threat but who have also been offered “a fifteen percent stake in the mining deal, ten million dollars” to let it happen (145). The work of antinuclear worldmaking from below is achieved here through laborious (re)orderings of the world that themselves have worldmaking power, making apprehensible new spatial and temporal orders that depend not on racial segregation but on shared vulnerability to nuclear harm across lines of race, class, and nation.

Importantly, this solidarity is not born from a universalizing process of analogy but by realizing that the struggles are “linked,” are part of the same larger fight. Ordering here has worldmaking power because it reveals seemingly disparate social positions and experiences to be connected, making new relations of solidarity thinkable and possible. At the same time, however, worldmaking must be an active commitment: Paul’s positionality as a white South African means that mere membership in the irradiated international is not enough to ensure good relations. Gordimer’s emphasis on the work that re-ordering entails, the laboriousness of the process, demands not merely a conceptual connectedness but an ongoing commitment of solidarity in action that is prompted but not fulfilled by the recognition of connection.

This antinuclear worldmaking work is not straightforward or linear; it has switchbacks, reversals, overlaps, repetitions. In this it resembles the style and form of the novel itself, which in its fragmentation, nonlinearity, and often confusing syntax is actively quite challenging to read. While this example of Gordimer’s late style was not much beloved by reviewers (Jane Stevenson wrote in the Observer that the book “seems not to have been edited or proofread”), reading the novel as a project that both captures and performs antinuclear worldmaking gives us quite a different interpretation.³⁸ It is important to remember, after all, that Gordimer’s radical socialist, anticolonial politics have always demanded a redistributive politics that require the construction of a shared social, political, and environmental order through active participatory processes.³⁹ Get a Life’s un-reconstructable ellipses, moments of syntactical correction that bring “transitional zones” into the middle of sentences, and abrupt switches in focalization stylize a world-in-transition that is only a problem if you think that Gordimer’s political desire is for a new centralized political order to come in and replace the old one.⁴⁰ But I see no indication here that Gordimer awaits impatiently the arrival of a new fixed order to lock a new world into shape.

Rather, I see an argument at the level of style that this is the work of democratic life in general and antinuclear worldmaking in particular: an ongoing, confusing, vitally necessary and always incomplete process of shared meaning-making by individuals and collectives who can’t read each other’s minds and whose interests and allegiances sometimes align and sometimes don’t. The work of ordering is, and must be, ongoing and distributed: this is the style, the means, of the work of antinuclear worldmaking from below. As the reader learns to read Get a Life, they become entrained in mental habits of connection, of patience, of figuring out a mutually intelligible meaning from a process that requires both parties to contribute. As readers of this novel we are affectable and we affect, we work with the writer and with language itself to puzzle out an order that makes the world intelligible to us and that enables new relations and connections to form. Mastery is impossible here, but for the reader as for the antinuclear worldmakers the work of connection and collective meaning-making is ongoing.

Get a Life thus models at the level of theme, plot, and style the democratic, decolonial processes of antinuclear worldmaking that were foreclosed in South Africa by the ANC’s decision to exclude the nuclear program from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its later failures to incorporate the public into nuclear decision-making as it had promised to do. Post-apartheid nuclear worldmaking was meant to be part of the ANC’s general democratization program, but the ANC’s centralization and secrecy kept nuclearization out of what Poyner, building on the work of sociologist Mamphela Ramphele, calls the “intellectual space” of post-apartheid South Africa, forcing the public to accept a new nuclear “ordinary” that perpetuates apartheid-era nuclear colonialism into the spaces and practices of the present. In contemporary South Africa, the maintenance of these nuclear-colonial relations threatens native lives, lands, and sovereignty through the government’s efforts to build the deeply flawed Pebble Bed Modular Reactors on Indigenous lands and its bypassing of democratic processes in order to bring this about.⁴¹ And as the world yaws further towards nuclearism, with nuclear weapons states recommitting to weapons production and nuclear power being newly greenwashed for an era of climate anxiety, South Africa serves as a powerful warning of how technopolitical nuclear structures can build coloniality into land relations and political systems even in the absence of formal colonialism. Dismantling the racial-spatial order of nuclear colonialism and enacting the democratic ordering work of antinuclear worldmaking from below, Get a Life models the epistemological and activist reorientations that it will take to produce an antinuclear, decolonial world where a genuinely postnuclear postapartheid reality might yet be built.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.