White supremacist rule socially engineered impoverishment, dispossession and fomented brutality that black people in South Africa were made to endure through centuries of settler colonial history, which was intensified during apartheid and continued in the nearly three decades of the post ap era. Governance through attritional warfare, which actively worked to suppress and debilitate the black majority as a tactic of rule, used death, and the threat of death and disablement, to ensure white, and now also black, elites’ security. The political economy was fundamentally premised on the right to produce black death-disability-debility to extract wealth in industries such as mining, and destroy, not just black security, but also black wealth through land dispossession. Structural violence, due to white supremacist rule, massified black death, disability and debility. In a country like South Africa, the black majority experiences conditions such as inadequate housing, food insecurity, and dangerous, violent neighbourhoods which causes an expansion of death-disability-debility. Death-disablement-debilitation is produced, and the continuity of structural violence intensifies and exacerbates disablement and debilitation and, for a great majority of black people, leads to an early death. The massification
of black vulnerability to death-disability -debility is not shared with the majority of white South Africans and cannot be theorised as if it were. The overwhelming and obvious racialised distribution of disability is not a significant concern for South African disability studies and the thesis argues that this lacuna constitutes ontological
erasure that supports, maintains and furnishes a white epistemology of ignorance. This allows a place in transnational white disability studies that erases and ignores the costs of white supremacy, even as white supremacist reasoning is shored up through the evisceration of history. In some ways, the thesis offers up a crude catalogue to demonstrate the scale of black death-disablement-debilitation and the conditions of endemic violence. In the thesis, I provide openings for questions to emerge, and to demonstrate the vast scope that is possible for a historically...
Keywords: Ontological erasure, settler colonialism, death-disability-debility imaginaries, epistemologies of ignorance, death, disability, debility, protest, endemic violence, attritional warfare