Shaping the African Savannah
From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia

A history of 150 years of social-ecological transformations in the arid savannah landscape of Namibia.

Michael Bollig (Author)

9781108488488, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 July 2020

336 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.6 cm, 0.65 kg

'In this important new book, Michael Bollig provides an environmental history of the Kaoko region in North-Western Namibia while contributing to wider debates on colonialism, conservation, and land-use in Africa … this is just one of the many issues that Bollig's book compels us to revisit and reconsider.' Eduard Gargallo, Human Ecology

The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an 'Arid Eden' in recent literature, as one of Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a 'last frontier' by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia's Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this 'Arid Eden' came into being, how this 'last frontier' was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.

I. Introduction
1. Doing research on a changing savannah landscape
II. The evolution of pre-colonial environmental infrastructures
2. The prehistory of North-western Namibia and the riddled emergence of pastoralism
3. Elephants and humans in the late 19th and early 20th century
III. Encapsulation and pastoralisation, 1900s to 1940s
4. Scientist, cartographers, photographers and the establishment of western knowledge of the Kaokofeld
5. The establishment of colonial administration and the re-immigration of pastoralists into the Kaokoveld – 1900s to 1920s
6. The politics of encapsulation: game protection, instituting borders and controlling mobility
IV. The state, intervention, and local appropriations between 1950s and 1980s
7. A hydrological revolution in an African savannah
8.Conservation and poaching in the 1970s and 1980s
V. Dynamics of social-ecological relations between the 1990s and the present
9: Pastoralism, environmental infrastructures and state-local society relations in the late 20th and early 21st century
10. The establishment of “new commons” by government decree
11. Into the future – envisioning, planning and negotiating environmental infrastructures
VI. Theorizing time, space, and change in a pastoral system
12. The changing environmental infrastructure of the north-western Namibian savannah

Subject Areas: Sustainable agriculture [TVF], Rural planning [RPG], Conservation of the environment [RNK], Environmental management [RNF], African history [HBJH]