Environment, Power, and Injustice
A South African History
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:26th Jun '03
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This book explores the environmental dynamic in the history of rural black South Africans.
Explores the environmental dynamic in the history of rural black South Africans. It historicizes food production and other environmental relations. But class, gender and, later, race determined the food production individuals practised. After the mid-twentieth century, the interventionist state enforced coercive conservation and segregation, undermining most food production by blacks.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.
'… a fascinating story of the relationships of different groups of people with their environment, as they interact with each other … a work of impeccably detailed research, supported by more than 50 pages of notes …' Geography
'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
ISBN: 9780521010702
Dimensions: 229mm x 153mm x 19mm
Weight: 428g
324 pages