Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History

African Studies Review, Dec 2004 by Lee, Christopher J

Nancy J. Jacobs. Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Studies in Environment and History. xxi 300 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. $65.00. Cloth. $24.00. Paper.

This book is a case study of environmental history and social change that deserves a wide readership. Despite its expansive title, Jacobs's text focuses on the Kuruman District along the southern edge of the Kalahari Desert, in what is now the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. Though this may appear to be far-off territory, a common ground, literally so, is shared between this history and the work of Jean and John Comaroff, and, more distantly, of Charles van Onselen. Jacobs's study, however, poses a fundamentally different set of questions from those of these scholars. Through a sequence of chronological and thematic chapters, Jacobs seeks to reveal the long conversation between the African communities of the district and the land they inhabited. The result is a history that recenters land and resource management within contemporary academic debates over state power and colonial knowledge, underscoring the importance local practices had in shaping the definition and outcome of such broadly conceived issues.

Jacobs begins by emphasizing the importance of environmental factors in creating structures of social inequality; there was no precolonial harmony with the land. These social differences in turn shaped how resources were utilized over time. Contingent environmental factors, such as drought and rinderpest, combined with settler intrusion and escalating state power, provide the larger causal reasons for historical change. Jacobs charts the impact that these micro- and macro-elements had on the shift from foraging to cultivation and pastoralism, to intensive agriculture, and finally to wage-labor migration. Describing her narrative in this way makes it appear overly schematic: it is not, since these practices typically overlapped, and indeed, informed the social disparities of class and gender that she underscores. The advent of the modern South African state in 1910 and its segregatory land policies following the 1913 Natives Land Act prove to be the final catalysts for environmental change that bring her story to the present. Eviction and forced removals no doubt affected access to land and water resources, though technocratic government policies of "betterment" further complicated matters by trying to correct what were perceived to be inappropriate indigenous practices. A case study of state-sanctioned culling-the Bophuthatswana Donkey Massacre in 1983-illustrates the drastic, ill-conceived nature of such policies. Such gradual and eventually harsh state intervention consequently make up her main argument about the connections between the environment, state power, and historically developed senses of social injustice in the Kuruman District.

This book contains several key strengths. The first is its depth of analysis-from the precolonial period to the present-and the second is its depiction of social categories of gender, class, and the like being created from the ground up, as it were, through practices of labor and competition over resources. Too often such a topic is the province of top-down analyses. A third strength is her effort to link the historiography of South Africa to work done in other parts of Africa and the world. Environmental history is not new to the African historiography. In many ways it has been a foundational component, particularly in the literature on West Africa. The promise it holds in South Africa is to help recast existing interpretations of land use and the changing dynamics of rural African communities. As Jacobs suggests, such an approach points out the limitations of Colin Bundy's "rise and decline" thesis of the South African peasantry, for example. Opportunities change, local expertise may decline, but the environment still persists with its attendant value.

So should this book. It offers a fresh chronological outlook for this region and speaks to issues of state discourse, land, and common livelihood raised similarly in the recent work of Diana Wylie and Charles van Onselen. It is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on environmental history in southern Africa.

Christopher J. Lee

Stanford University

Stanford, California