Empowering heritage: understanding the cultural costs of South Africa's energy futures

Accessible, reliable energy grids are credited as crucial to modernization in African countries, with transitions to renewable and low-carbon energy systems accompanying promises of just energy provision for all. In South Africa, democratization in 1994 brought national guarantees of energy justice and heritage justice: revitalizing African pasts long-denied by racist governments.

However, building energy infrastructure to achieve development targets damages archaeological remains, producing conflict between access to power and to African pasts only recently affirmed as public resources. Across the continent, these impacts vary based on geography, energy type, and national regulations but their cumulative cultural cost remains unknown at any scale due to barriers to data availability.

And as in many post-colonies, South Africa's industrial reforms compelled developers to mitigate the effects of building on archaeological sites, but this lack of accessible data has precluded any effort to evaluate the outcomes of this accountability system.

This project offers an unprecedented analysis of the archaeological impacts of South Africa's energy sector through novel use of the national regulatory repository SAHRIS, chronicling how governmental and non-governmental actors have attempted to salvage the past from destruction in the service of progress. We interrogate how three decades of deregulation, privatization, and shifts to renewables have affected archaeological data at risk of loss, and shed new light on where and to whom that loss has accrued.

We provide an urgently-needed assessment of the tradeoffs between energy and heritage justice as South Africa navigates an on-going crisis of blackouts and failing grids, and prepares to expand access to renewables. Energy transitions succeed or fail based partly on social factors, and in sub-Saharan Africa heritage costs have never been examined as such a factor; our groundbreaking project rectifies this gap and aims to facilitate South Africa's energy futures.

We focus on South Africa's most archaeologically-rich provinces (Western Cape and Limpopo) for their wealth of heritage sites, diversity of energy types and infrastructures deployed, and long-term interventions to achieve heritage justice across rural and urban areas. This selection allows us to analyse the relationship between heritage and industry across major population centres and energy catchment areas, while locating this analysis within a detailed understanding of domestic political arenas; this complements the prevailing disciplinary model of highly localized case study.

As a preliminary to more in-depth questions, we will produce a database collating all regulatory decisions from SAHRIS related to energy infrastructures in Western Cape and Limpopo since 1994. Our database will link all permitted actions within the lifespan of an energy project, enabling us to view the decision-making process from archaeological impact assessment to mitigation and salvage.

For all reports, we will extract archaeological data on artefact types and time periods, buried and surface features, and human remains. Our database will permit targeted questions about the geographical distribution of archaeological impacts, the heritage costs of specific energy types and infrastructures, the frequency of different regulatory outcomes, and the vulnerabilities of different forms of archaeology.

To contextualize our findings within on-going research and national priorities for heritage and development we will organize a policy workshop in Year 2. We will disseminate our finds through seminars and conferences in cross-disciplinary African Studies fora in South Africa and the UK. We will produce four publications, including a policy review paper for South Africa's heritage regulatory agency, an open access monograph with UCL Press, and articles in top archaeology and development studies journals.