Environment, Power, and Injustice
A South African History

This book explores the environmental dynamic in the history of rural black South Africans.

Nancy J. Jacobs (Author)

9780521811910, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 June 2003

322 pages, 21 b/w illus. 6 maps 3 tables
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.4 cm, 0.536 kg

'This is a seminal contribution to southern African rural and environmental history, authoritatively meshing natural and socio-political environments in ways that make many new connections and interpretations … Jacob's approach throughout is refreshingly nonideological and morally aware …' Anthony Lemon, Cultural Geographies

This book presents the socio-environmental history of black people around Kuruman, on the edge of the Kalahari in South Africa. Considering successive periods - Tswana agropastoral chiefdoms before colonial contact, the Cape frontier, British colonial rule, Apartheid, and the homeland of Bophuthatswana in the 1980s - Environment, Power and Injustice shows how the human relationship with the environment corresponded to differences of class, gender, and race. While exploring biological, geological, and climatological forces in history, this book argues that the challenges of existence in a semidesert arose more from human injustice than from deficiencies in the natural environment. In fact, powerful people drew strength from and exercised their power over others through the environment. At the same time, the natural world provided marginal peoples with some relief from human injustice.

Preface
1. Approaching Kuruman
2. Goat people and fish people on the agro-pastoral frontier, c. 1750–1830
3. Intensification and social innovation on the cape frontier: 1820s–1885
4. Colonial annexation: land alienation and environmental administration
5. Environmental trauma, colonial rule and the failure of extensive food production, 1895–1903
6. The environmental history of a 'labor reservoir', 1903–1970s
7. Apportioning water, dividing land: segregation, 1910–1977
8. Betterment and the Bophuthatswana donkey massacre: the environmental rights of tribal subjects
9. Retrospectives on socio-environmental history and socio-environmental justice
Appendices.

Subject Areas: Agriculture & farming [TV], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], African history [HBJH], Regional studies [GTB]