Environment, Power, and Justice: Southern African Histories

By Graeme Wynn, Jane Carruthers and Nancy J. Jacobs

Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these historical and locally specific case studies analyze and engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity.

This book highlights the ways poor and vulnerable people in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe have mobilized against the structural and political forces that deny them a healthy and sustainable environment. Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these studies engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity. Some chapters track the genealogies of contemporary activism, while others introduce positions, actors, and thinkers not previously identified with environmental justice. Addressing health, economic opportunity, agricultural policy, and food security, the chapters in this book explore a range of issues and ways of thinking about harm to people and their ecologies.

Because environmental justice is often understood as a contemporary phenomenon framed around North American examples, these fresh case studies will enrich both southern African history and global environmental studies. Environment, Power, and Justice expands conceptions of environmental justice and reveals discourses and dynamics that advance both scholarship and social change.

Contributors:

• Christopher Conz
• Marc Epprecht
• Mary Galvin
• Sarah Ives
• Admire Mseba
• Muchaparara Musemwa
• Matthew A. Schnurr
• Cherryl Walker

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9780821447772

Book preview

PREFACE

Aldo Leopold, a Homeric figure of the American environmental movement, reflected in his essay Good Oak on the work of cutting down a tree on his property in rural Wisconsin. As the newly filed saw bit through the trunk, wood spilled from the cut and accumulated on the snow in front of each kneeling sawyer. Stroke by stroke the sawdust piles grew. Together they represented the chronology of a lifetime written in the concentric annual rings of the sturdy oak.

This evocative description of once-familiar manual labor has often been taken as an allegory for the work of history. The little chips of wood pulled from the tree by the saw are the historian’s facts, forming archives or piles of information about the past. Loggers and historians both draw inferences about larger wholes from the fragments (of wood or evidence) exposed by their efforts, until finally the metaphorical tree falls, and a more complete picture of the past is revealed in the accumulated record of the stump. There the skilled interpreter finds, in the traces of tree rings, burn scars, and other marks, the story of changing circumstances, of drought and temperature, and of human presence across the years, just as the historian composes a revealing account of lives gone by from the links and juxtapositions of information in archives and other sources. But there were other messages in Leopold’s tale. His story was also about the centuries of natural history that sustain human activities on earth and the importance of thinking ethically about the intricate connections between people and places, societies and nature through time.

This seems a good place to begin, because this book, like Leopold’s good oak, has deep roots and a complex history. It is the work of almost a dozen scholars of different ages, from very different backgrounds, educated in a variety of disciplines and settings, and trained in a wide range of disciplines. Yet we find common ground and united purpose in our shared interest in the past and present of southern Africa and in the larger issues of social and environmental justice that continue to beset the world in which we live. Together, we also hope the injustices will become less egregious over time, in some small way through our collective effort in these pages but more efficaciously through the good sense and gathering wisdom of the generations that follow us.

The immediate origins of this book lie in a conversation between Nancy Jacobs and Graeme Wynn, sparked by the 2017 announcement of the program theme for the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) in 2018: Environment, Power, and Justice. Graeme had recently returned from a spell as visiting fellow at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, which had driven home for him the radically different discourses around environment, power, and justice in southern Africa and North America. Recognizing the parallels between the new program theme and the title of Nancy’s 2003 book, Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History, he broached with Nancy the prospect of devoting a session of the 2018 conference to showcase southern African work on the theme. With a special session within his purview to organize as ASEH president, this was easily achieved. Graeme and Nancy quickly agreed that Jane Carruthers (a leading figure among environmental historians in South Africa, and recent past president of the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations) should be one of our panelists. Further conversations among the three of us led us to approach Jacob Dlamini, Muchaparara Musemwa, and Sandra Swart as potential participants and happily fill out the panel when they agreed to attend the conference in Riverside, California.

Environment, Power, and Injustice in Southern African Histories proved to be a lively, well-attended session, despite its 8:30 a.m. start time on Friday morning. Sandra Swart spoke about The Animal in the Mirror—Baboons and the Politics of Power; Jacob Dlamini focused on Ka-Skukuza: The Kruger National Park in the Political Calculus of the Lowveld; Muchaparara Musemwa addressed The Environment-Power-Injustice Nexus through the Lens of Water in Zimbabwe; and Jane Carruthers offered her thoughts on Power to the People! Energy, Environment, and Equity in South African History.

Buoyed by this exchange, we three editors began to envisage a larger, more lasting follow-up project. You hold the result in your hands. In retrospect, the path from Riverside to Ohio University Press was both more tortuous and more gratifying than we envisaged. Four years of hard work lie between the conference and the appearance of the book. We began by recruiting contributors—approaching colleagues whose work on the general themes we had in mind intrigued us—to ask for suggestions and to extend invitations to join us. Unfortunately, some whom we hoped to include were unable (or unwilling) to commit to the project. Then, inevitably, there were unforeseen bumps along the road, from the personal to the pandemic; some who agreed to contribute withdrew; others who participated initially were unable to continue; restrictions on travel introduced in response to the COVID-19 situation in March 2020 led to the cancelation of much anticipated opportunities to meet and collaborate in person. Perhaps most disappointingly, a writing residency at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, that would have granted the editors opportunity to collaborate on the introduction and afterword fell victim to the virus. So, too, did a couple of our contributors’ scheduled visits to Vancouver to present early versions of their work.

On the other hand, there has been much that is good and remarkable about the road we have traversed together. Contributors came through in spades and on time and were exemplary in engaging with the copious comments of hyperactive editors. Green College, a residential college for graduate students and postdocs from across the University of British Columbia (UBC), and a lively center of intellectual life on the campus, provided funding for a thematic lecture series that enabled several contributors to present early versions of their ideas to engaged audiences between September 2019 and spring 2020. These visits were also supported, financially and otherwise, by the departments of History and Geography and the African Studies Programme at UBC. We extend our thanks to Principal Mark Vessey, the staff at Green College, and the heads of the other departments and programs involved for their important support. Together they helped to impart momentum to the project that sustained it, despite the early withdrawal of one of our scheduled speakers, the failure of another—who presented in Vancouver—to revise or submit his work, and the disappointment of those whose springtime visits to this fair city were stayed by the virus that turned much of the world inward as this book came into shape.

From the editors’ perspective this project has carried us on a Homeric odyssey—a remarkable intellectual journey in the virtual company of our contributors and each other. We think it safe and true to say that none of the essays, reflections, and arguments presented in the pages that follow are quite what any of us envisioned when we began—but that they are the better for that. To belabor the Aldo Leopold reference with which we began, we editors might be likened to the kneeling sawyers, but it is the work of the contributors whose writing appears in these pages that has, without question, raised the good oak of historical reflection on matters of transcending importance to even greater glory than we imagined possible at the outset.

Finally, a few more specific acknowledgments. The beautiful maps in this book are all the work of Eric Leinberger, the remarkably gifted cartographer associated with the Department of Geography at UBC. His skill in translating the uncertain sketches and verbal instructions of those who thought that a map or two might help into valuable, integral parts of the book is remarkable; his patience in dealing with the local editor has been equally impressive. No book sees the light of day without the work and support of many people whose names never appear in the table of contents. We thank Jim Webb, of Colby College, general editor of the series in which this volume appears, and Rick Huard of Ohio University Press, for their support of this project. We extend overall thanks to the press for its expert and courteous handling of the publishing process and to Christopher Merrett for his skillful compilation of the index. The comments of the two anonymous reviewers of the original manuscript, commissioned by the press, were probing, thoughtful, and supportive; they did much to tighten and improve the organization of the book and challenged us to move beyond the place that time had allowed us to reach in our editors’ end papers. The Publication Fund of the History Department of Brown University generously paid fees for the cover illustration, Johnny Miller’s unequal scene of the segregated landscape of the town of Stellenbosch, the township of Kayamandi, and the mountains behind. Finally, we are very pleased to recognize the University of British Columbia’s global commitment, realized here by its donation of a clothbound copy of this book to forty institutions of higher education in Lesotho, South Africa, and Zimbabwe through the Office of the Vice-Provost International.

Ultimately, this has been a team effort, and we as editors are privileged to have had the opportunity to work together, and with our fine, thoughtful, and creative contributors. Would that all academic endeavors encompassed such reassuring, intellectually stimulating, and ultimately rewarding toil.

INTRODUCTION

Historicizing Environmental Justice in Southern Africa

Jane Carruthers, Nancy J. Jacobs, and Graeme Wynn

THE ORIGINS of environmental justice lie in the recognition that human inequity and harm to the more-than-human world are intertwined. Ignore one of these things and the other will bear consequences; consigning people to poverty leaves them with little time and few resources for environmental stewardship; despoiling the earth robs some people of opportunities. This is an old idea common to cultures around the world, but in the last quarter of the twentieth century, environmental justice also became a traveling concept, an idea that moves between disciplines and connects disparate societies while still retaining its core meaning. The cause has also inspired movements worldwide, but because both environmental harm and human inequality are shaped by ecological and social circumstances, they are usually localized and best understood in context. Less acknowledged are the ways they have varied over time.

With appreciation for both regional and chronological variation, the chapters in this volume focus on southern Africa and ask historical questions about what is usually understood as a contemporary phenomenon framed within North American precedents. The contributions not only track the traveling global concept of environmental justice and look for its influence in southern Africa, but also seek out popular concepts of social-environmental harm. Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these historical and locally specific studies engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly ideas about, and examples of, social-environmental inequity.

While many environmental histories have put emphasis on the long record of inequity in environmental realms, this volume lays weight on conceptions of justice and efforts to realize it.¹ Our title, Environment, Power, and Justice: Southern African Histories, echoes that of Nancy Jacobs’s 2003 monograph, Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History, to signal this new emphasis.² Some of the chapters track the genealogies of contemporary organizations; others describe positions, actors, and thinkers not previously identified with environmental justice. They uncover a range of Indigenous, vernacular, and elite thought about harm to people and their ecological relations. Some of these cases may appear to have little in common with prevailing understandings, but their lessons about inequality and environment enrich both history and contemporary politics.

As a prologue to the research articles that follow, this introductory essay reviews ideas about environmental justice and the political movements associated with them in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe. Rather than close off local conceptions with a ready-minted definition of environmental justice, we look for specific understandings of justice and injustice in environmental relations. This introduction weighs a series of perspectives on environmental injustice and efforts to overcome it, arranged in a broadly chronological order. The first section, Global Environmentalism and Environmental Justice, begins far from southern Africa, with the emergence of the transnational traveling concept. The second section, Segregation and Environmental Justice in Southern Africa: A Deeper History, reviews environmental aspects of the histories of colonialism and segregation. Focusing on Environmental Justice in Late-Apartheid South Africa, the third section considers the first appearance of the international concept in the region in late twentieth century. The fourth section, The Politics of Environmental Justice in Southern Africa after 1994, evaluates the movement after the transition to democracy. As the first four chapters of this volume deal with developments during this extended postapartheid moment, we introduce them in the fifth section, New Histories of Postapartheid Environmental Justice. The end of apartheid is no longer the end of the story, however; our sixth section, Environmental In/Justice in Southern Africa Today, considers the Anthropocene condition in the region. The penultimate section, Decolonial Histories of Environmental Justice in Southern Africa, introduces our last four chapters, which discuss emergent and pressing questions about the decolonization of knowledge (a theme taken up again in the afterword). The essay concludes with an eighth section, Final Thoughts, Future Directions. Together, these essays inspire us to look toward a deeper history, including older African conceptions, of human relations with the environment and through it with each other. With our contributors, we hope that these analyses will expand environmental justice in productive ways and reveal previously unrecognized discourses and dynamics that advance both scholarship and justice.

1. Global Environmentalism and Environmental Justice

The concept of environmental justice that has spread around the world grew out of the rise of environmentalism in the global West and industrial North. After World War II, the Environment (the nonhuman field surrounding and supporting human life) emerged to become a frame of reference with a discourse distinct from Nature (the nonhuman realm separate from humanity).³ Writers in the developed world shaped the emerging philosophy by publicizing the inextricable, but hitherto under-recognized, link between human and ecological health and well-being. Of these, Rachel Carson is probably the best known for her remarkable, indeed epochal, book Silent Spring (1962).⁴ With the celebration of the first Earth Day in 1970,⁵ environmentalism catapulted into the political agenda of the United States, a country that, at the time, lacked any federal environmental legislation or regulation but celebrated the glories of remote nature in designated spaces such as national parks.⁶ In Europe and elsewhere—although not behind the Iron Curtain—new Green political parties placed environmental concern front and center, and popular rallies to support these concerns attracted many thousands of people.⁷ By linking human health to ecological health, at a time when anxiety about the development of nuclear armaments was strong, the global environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s led to a growing appreciation that political ideologies were inherently environmental. In addition, the inequities of environmental suffering between the First World and the Third World (as they were then known) also came into focus.⁸ Activism infused the international environmental policy arena in June 1972, when the United Nations (UN) convened a conference on the human environment in Stockholm, which established the UN Environment Programme.

The forceful message of this new environmentalism—that a deteriorating planet would have a deleterious impact on humans—quickly gained traction in many parts of the world, inserting itself into a more general counterculture of dissent in that Cold War era. While never a universal or unified movement, it contributed to the rise of activism in the West against air and water pollution, nuclear energy, harmful pesticides and herbicides, and the destruction of forests. It created a growing international consensus that human activities were changing the earth’s climate and diminishing its natural resources irreparably. For many people this was far more than a movement to protect or conserve nature in pockets of wilderness or protected areas. The environmentalism of the late twentieth century intended to limit the damage that people did to water, air, soil, plants, animals, and also themselves. But it did not, at first, disaggregate people or address inequalities among them.

In the United States, it needs to be recalled, the beginning of the environmental movement was also the era of the civil rights movement.⁹ The struggle to insert considerations of class, and most notably race, into environmentalist discourse came from civil society actors such as residents’ associations, labor unions, and churches. They brought to light the fact that the poor and marginalized, particularly African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos, were disadvantaged in their living conditions, exposure to toxins, and other dangers. After 1968, the United Farm Workers Union, led by Cesar Chavez, drew attention to the dangers of pesticide use for workers in California’s vineyards, extending a concern that Carson had raised more generally almost a decade earlier.¹⁰ Later, in 1982, community civil disobedience against placing a hazardous landfill in overwhelmingly Black Warren County, North Carolina, protested the unequal burden of pollution.¹¹ A subsequent data-driven exposé by the United Church of Christ, Toxic Wastes and Race (1987), asserted that the discriminatory siting of harmful facilities was systemic.¹² This convergence of environmentalism and the civil rights movements created first an awareness of environmental racism, defined by Robert Bullard as any policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages . . . individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color¹³ and then the broader, international effort against the inequity and exclusion known now as the environmental justice movement.¹⁴ Even today, the United States remains the center of politics and research in these fields.¹⁵

In the 1990s, political and social movements for social and environmental reparation also intensified in Africa. West African activists protested toxic waste dumping in the 1980s.¹⁶ In Kenya, the biologist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai rose to international prominence by founding the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots tree planting and women’s empowerment campaign.¹⁷ There were also projects to green up Black and Coloured¹⁸ communities in apartheid South Africa through tree planting and organizing people against toxic dumping.¹⁹ The execution of environmental and minority-rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria in 1995 was a stunning demonstration of the high stakes in this work. A few months before his death, Saro-Wiwa wrote, Whether I live or die is immaterial. It is enough to know that there are people who commit time, money, and energy to fix this one evil among so many others predominating worldwide. If they do not succeed today, they will succeed tomorrow.²⁰

In the international arena, a UN Commission on Environment and Development in 1983, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, and its report, Our Common Future (1987), provided a blueprint for managing the earth’s resources with the notion of equity and fairness at its core.²¹ After the Cold War ended, the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the so-called Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, spawned numerous international protocols and agreements. Environmental justice for the global community lay at the heart of this meeting and the resulting conventions which, together with the growing philosophy of sustainable development, gained further traction. When the Spanish ecological economist Joan Martinez-Alier coined the phrase the Environmentalism of the Poor in the title of a 2002 book, it caught the imagination of many in the developing world.²² Today, the concept is global.²³

2. Segregation and Environmental Justice in Southern Africa: A Deeper History

This volume finds its warrant in the understanding that environmental justice varies across space and time and addresses the legacies of colonialism and segregation in southern Africa. Across this region, environmental injustice was not just a problem for the poor; here, as Martinez-Alier observed of South Africa, race is even more important socially and politically than in the United States.²⁴

Our field, African environmental history, has long conducted explorations of race in environmental realms.²⁵ Writing in the early 1940s, the historian C. W. De Kiewiet pointed out the environmental inequities of overcrowded native reserves and indicted the mineral revolution (and the tightening grip of industrial capitalism) for creating unhealthy, even dangerous, conditions under which Blacks labored in mines and factories.²⁶ In the 1970s, a radical school of South African history emerged and challenged its liberal predecessors over their failure to pose a structural critique of capitalism and empire. Influenced by Marxist analysis and the British social history tradition, these young historians, some South African exiles at British universities, exposed the connections between class and race to explain the capitalist origins of segregation.²⁷ In elite South African universities laboring under the constraints of segregation, historians were inspired to study the past from the bottom up based on oral testimony.²⁸ The transformation of the countryside into a capitalist space was a major theme in this literature.²⁹ This rural social history served as a seedbed for the environmental history of the regions. Unlike much environmental history emanating from the US and Europe, the southern African version represented by the early work of Nancy Jacobs has never been celebratory in tone or focus, nor self-congratulatory in respect of individuals, events, or movements. From the first formal scholarship on national parks and protected areas, including that by Jane Carruthers, a large body of literature has interrogated and highlighted the unequal use of, access to, and impact of land alienation among different human groups, particularly in relation to racial disadvantage.³⁰

Historical analyses rest on an array of documents; a sizable fraction acknowledge the impact of settlers on those on the other side of the frontier, but relatively few record the reactions of colonized Africans to the newcomers’ presence. Among those that do, we find Klaas Stuurman, a KhoeKhoe subject of the Cape Colony under the Dutch East India Company, speaking directly about the European disruption of Indigenous environmental relations: We lived very contentedly, said he, before these Dutch plunderers molested us; and why should we not do so again if left to ourselves? Has not the Groot Baas (the Great Master) given plenty of grass roots, and berries, and grasshoppers for our use; and, till the Dutch destroyed them, abundance of wild animals to hunt?³¹ The missionary John Philip echoed this attention to the destruction of local communities by describing the depredations of Dutch farmers trekking northward into already-settled regions in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.³²

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, capitalist extraction left long and lengthening environmental shadows that lay more thickly over poor and Black people. Industrial gold mining began in the Witwatersrand region in 1886. Eventually, the industry drew Black workers deeper underground than anywhere else on the planet; environmental dangers inside the mines included rock bursts, heavy labor in forbiddingly hot and poorly ventilated conditions, and accommodation in packed compounds that created an incubator for tuberculosis.³³ Outside, around the mines, half a century of extractive toil produced mountainous tailing piles of rock waste, some of it radioactive, the finer parts of which were carried on winter winds into the lungs and bodies of nearby residents, even as leaching sulfuric acid polluted the groundwater. Asbestos mining—carried out in the Northern Cape, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga provinces (as well as in Eswatini and Zimbabwe) under unsafe conditions put deadly fibers in workers’ lungs and living spaces within mining settlements and far beyond, with disproportionate effects on Black workers and communities.³⁴

Rule by Europe also structured environmental problems elsewhere in the region. Subsistence economies gave way to dependence on wage labor.³⁵ Colonial assumptions about household economies and greater demand for male workers helped nudge food insecurity in Malawi into a killing famine in 1947.³⁶ In many British colonies, soil erosion became an imperial concern, and Lesotho became the textbook case. In its high mountain territory, both topography and climate are conducive to erosion, and it became evident as a problem early in the twentieth century as the spread of White settlement pushed more and more Basotho into the uplands and they adapted their traditional farming to new commercial opportunities. In the 1920s, experts held the destructive grazing habits of stock responsible for the already-evident erosion scarring the hillsides. By the 1930s, the damage was such that the British began engineering schemes to terrace vulnerable hillsides. According to Kate Showers, a historian and soil scientist, these anti-erosion works exacerbated the problem by concentrating water behind poorly built terrace walls until structural breaches released it in an erosive torrent to cut deep scars through fields below. Additional factors also intervened. A burgeoning population, changing weather patterns, the failure of officials to consult with farmers, and political pressures all played their parts, but in the end experts blamed the Basotho for bad practices. Years went by before anyone acknowledged the hubris of the field scientists and others who imposed inadequate technocratic solutions on local farmers.³⁷ Lesotho’s most contentious environmental politics originated in late-apartheid South Africa. Planned in the 1980s and constructed in the 1990s, the Highlands Water Project has bisected the country with large dams that supply water to South African cities. The royalties paid to the Lesotho government by South Africa for this water supply created employment within Lesotho and led to infrastructural investment in development, including electricity and roads.³⁸ However, the project removed thousands of people from their homes in the high mountain valleys. This dislocation destroyed communities and disrupted lives, and the compensation to those affected has not ameliorated the losses.³⁹

Urban environments were also unhealthy. The swampy alluvial flats south of the port in Durban were designated for industrial use in the 1930s, following commonly practiced precepts of modernist, functionalist town-planning doctrine. From the first, these plans contemplated the parallel racial zoning of residential areas around the industrial zone, housing (as a 1944 plan had it), each race in a separate area whereby the interests of all would best be served.⁴⁰ As industrial development gathered momentum in the following decades, the South African Group Areas Act (1951) solidified patterns of racial segregation in the surrounding landscape. The opening of a major oil refinery soon attracted petrochemical industries. Late in the 1950s, the immediate surrounds of plants producing chromium and various petrochemicals were severely polluted.⁴¹ So, too, were neighboring settlements occupied by Indian, African, and Coloured people.

As new industrial projects were developed piecemeal, so these communities were unsettled: land was taken for factories and other noxious uses, such as the city abattoir. People, most of them poor and very few of them White, had to move; new housing developments were built to keep labor close; churches, clubs, and other forms of social infrastructure were disrupted. Despite its unusually active residents’ and ratepayers’ association, the predominantly Indian Clairwood neighborhood was blighted, and its sense of community shattered in the 1960s. The conversion of residential land to other uses heightened the residents’ despair. Perhaps forty thousand of them left, either voluntarily or by force, in a decade, reducing the population of a once lively community to a mere six thousand. By the 1970s, almost three-quarters of Durban’s industrial activity was in the South Durban corridor. Four decades later, the area was officially described as environmentally degraded; it included two major petrochemical refineries, several hazardous waste dumps, fiber plants, the Mondi paper mill, hazardous chemical storage facilities, a major airport and more than 150 industries which are dependent on crude oil. Of the four hundred thousand people resident in the basin, over half of the adults were not economically active in the first years of the current millennium, and only one in five earned more than R15,000 per annum (barely above the minimum living level income for a two-person household).⁴²

Nor were Africans living in rural areas spared the ravages of environmental injustice during these years. In South Africa, the processes of dispossession described by Stuurman and Philip in the nineteenth century intensified in 1913 with the Natives Land Act (No. 27) that proscribed ownership or rental of land across most of the country by any member of an aboriginal race or tribe of Africa. The 7 percent of territory available to Africans, placed under control of tribal leaders and designated reserve land, was inadequate for the needs of those initially consigned there, the more so as population increased. Although the area available for Black South Africans was increased to 13 percent in 1936 by the Native Trust and Land Act (No. 18), neither the quality of their land nor their circumstances were much improved and the state intervened more vigorously in land use with a policy ironically called Betterment.⁴³

Part of the suite of legislation that entrenched apartheid after 1948, the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951, further deepened rural marginalization by establishing political entities officially known as Bantustans—widely, if misleadingly, described as homelands. At least 3.5 million Africans who occupied farms beyond these areas were relocated, effectively confining rural Africans to what was generally the worst rural land available, often land that was already badly degraded, and thus accelerating a cruel cycle of poverty.⁴⁴ Although four of these homelands received independence in the late 1970s and late 1980s, they were, as antiapartheid activist Allan Boesak recognized in 1984, no more than dumping grounds for the discarded blacks of this land; . . . places where our elderly die of misery and want, and our children are stalked day and night by hunger, sickness, and grim death that sits on the shoulder of hopelessness.⁴⁵

Studying rural communities in South Africa, researchers Valerie Stull, Michael Bell, and Mpumelelo Ncwadi of the LAND Project encountered circumstances like those Boesak described and named them environmental apartheid, an inverted form of environmental racism. In their eyes, locating Black South Africans on markedly poor and remote land and ensuring their continued isolation and neglect constitutes environmental abuse aimed at marginalizing a racially defined group. Stull, Bell, and Ncwadi illustrated their case with detail from KuManzimdaka, a village of about three hundred people at the base of the Drakensberg Mountains in the former Transkei of the Eastern Cape Province, showing how social and environmental injustice feed on each other in a continuing cycle of immiseration of people and land.⁴⁶

This is a story with deep roots. The villagers of KuManzimdaka are amaXhosa people, descendants of Nguni pastoralists, whose difficult existence at an elevation of almost twelve hundred meters is a direct consequence of the spatial marginalization that pushed their ancestors into the foothills as White farmers occupied the territory over which their cattle ranged in the late nineteenth century. Their ties to earlier cultural practices are evident in their perception of their kraals, or livestock corrals, as sacred male-only spaces, in their reliance upon traditional Xhosa practices in raising sheep, cows, and goats on communal pastures, and in their dependence on maize. Residents of KuManzimdaka descend from many Nguni clans and some claim to occupy the same dwellings as their forebears did before the Natives Land Act of 1913. Their livelihoods, culture, and identities are deeply entwined with the ingca (grass) of the pastures and the cattle it nurtures.⁴⁷ Residents are aware of local landscape changes, but in their recollections, black wattle (idywabasi in isiXhosa and Acacia mearnsii in binomial nomenclature) has been a feature of the district for as long as memory serves. Introduced from Australia in the nineteenth century and then grown in plantations for its tannin-rich bark, this aggressive invasive tree probably escaped cultivation and marched up the valleys surrounding the village early in the twentieth century. A nitrogen-fixing pioneer species, it thrives on disturbed ground and spread fast and wide across hills and gullies, valleys, and plains. KuManzimdaka people make heavy use of it for fuelwood and for construction. Only recently, through the Working for Water Programme, have some residents come to see these trees with which their lives and livelihoods have become inextricably entangled as thirsty, invasive villains reducing stream flows, destroying the grassland, and jeopardizing the future of the community by drawing two hundred liters from the ground water every day. As one student of this community observed, black wattle stands are stark reminders of the entangled legacies of colonialism, post-apartheid nationalism, and the inequalities that pervade rural South Africa.⁴⁸

In Zimbabwe, as in South Africa, the incursion of White settlers saw a massive engrossment of land by newcomers, the substantial dispossession of African inhabitants, and the beginnings of substantial ecological change. In little more than three decades a tiny minority of the total population (3 percent) claimed title to three-quarters of the most productive land in the country. A few years later the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 formalized the allocation of 49 million acres to 50,000 White farmers and consigned 1.1 million Africans to 29 million marginal acres in Native Reserve Areas. By 1965, these reserves housed 4.5 million Black Africans. Little wonder that the land question was a major trigger of the Liberation War, which led to independence in 1980. Of the country’s 33 million hectares (81,544,775 acres) of arable land, 45 percent was owned by 6,000 White farmers; 700,000 Black families occupied some 40 million acres of the country’s least productive land.⁴⁹

Across southern Africa, the processes of dispossession, population growth, ecosystem change, land-productivity decline, and urban-industrial growth set people in motion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, displacing them from the countryside and drawing them to work camps and the surrounds of cities. Often it was the men who left and the women and children who remained in rural settings. Although cities retained complex webs of connection with their hinterlands through reciprocal exchanges of people, goods, services, money, and food, family and kin ties stretched and were sundered. In time, poor parts of the burgeoning cities came to be described as veritable food deserts, where even the informal economy failed to provide many with access to healthy food, diets were compromised, and malnutrition was common.⁵⁰ As was generally the case, such developments had unanticipated consequences. One tragic recent legacy of these disruptions lies in their contribution to the spread of HIV/AIDS, the incidence of which exploded throughout the region in the 1990s and impinged upon all aspects of life in southern Africa for the next quarter of a century and beyond. At the end of the twentieth century, environmental injustices were acute and the need for environmental justice was dire.

3. Environmental Justice in Late-Apartheid South Africa

South Africa, the largest country in the region and the first to bear the burden of settler colonialism, has also engaged most broadly with ideas of environmental justice. Environmentalism, as understood in the global West and North, came late to southern Africa; Carson’s Silent Spring caused barely a ripple in the 1960s, Earth Day 1970 went unnoticed, no Green Party came into existence, and no emotional rallies in defense of the earth took place. Coal-fired and water-hungry power stations proliferated and with them atmospheric pollution. A nuclear plant was constructed in 1980; incessant mining was extremely destructive to the landscape; waste and toxins choked rivers and streams. South Africa was ostracized internationally and distanced from the UN in the days of high apartheid, homelands, and forced removals; as Phia Steyn notes, neither the National Party government nor the majority of its White citizens (but particularly the politically empowered Afrikaans-speaking population) took any notice of the international groundswell of environmentalism.⁵¹

South Africa and Zimbabwe have a record of conservation that dates back to the early years of the twentieth century.⁵² Slowly, the