Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History (Studies in Environment and History)
Cambridge University Press, 6/26/2003
EAN 9780521010702, ISBN10: 0521010705
Paperback, 324 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
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.