Environment, Power, and Injustice A South African History [Paperback]

This book explores the environmental dynamic in the history of rural black South Africans.This book explores the environmental dynamic in the history of rural black South Africans. It historicizes food production and other environmental relations, over successive dispensations. But, class, gender and later race, determined the food production individuals practiced. Also, herders and cultivators faced drought, stock disease, bush encroachment, water shortages, and the high labor demands of irrigation. After the mid-twentieth century, the interventionist state, enforcing coercive conservation and segregation, became a partner in black people's relations with the environment. State intervention, as well as an increasing dependence on cash, undermined most food production by blacks.This book explores the environmental dynamic in the history of rural black South Africans. It historicizes food production and other environmental relations, over successive dispensations. But, class, gender and later race, determined the food production individuals practiced. Also, herders and cultivators faced drought, stock disease, bush encroachment, water shortages, and the high labor demands of irrigation. After the mid-twentieth century, the interventionist state, enforcing coercive conservation and segregation, became a partner in black people's relations with the environment. State intervention, as well as an increasing dependence on cash, undermined 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, l39