When compared to the time allotted to individual human beings, geological time, the immense amount of time since the formation of the earth, is a staggering concept (Bjornerud 2018). The earth, as we know it within the solar system, was formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Individual human lifespans, on the other hand, barely exceeded 35 years prior to the industrial revolution.1 Not surprisingly, human perspectives on the past tend to stay stuck in lived experience, and rarely exceed twenty years (Baddeley 1990; Crawley and Pring 2000; Schacter 1996; Shum 1998). Yet, life itself began 3.7 billion years ago, when many of the mineral resources that would later come to be mined by humankind were being concentrated and deposited.
Throughout geological time, the earth has constantly been shaping and reshaping itself, and organisms have long been part of this process. Organisms photosynthesising the sun’s energy caused the iron that had been dissolved into the earth’s oceans, to precipitate out as iron oxide minerals, which we now find in deposits as banded ironstone. At the same time, this process, known as the ‘great oxygenation event’ (approximately 2.460 billion years ago),2 liberated the atmospheric oxygen that we need in order to breathe, which eventually enabled human life to emerge.
Now, for the first time in history, humans have evolved in such a way that they can directly influence the world as a whole, and their impact as a species is geologically discernible. For many, the Anthropocene as a geological epoch is marked by the development of the industrial era, and more specifically by the nuclear fallout of the nuclear explosion carried out on 16 July 1945 during the ‘Trinity’ test in New Mexico. Whether it is the hydrocarbons of the industrial revolution, or the uranium of the nuclear era, mining lies at the basis of the Anthropocene. An era that has left gaping holes, visible in most landscapes.
Between 1870 and the 1920s, industrial mining in southern Africa stood at the very forefront of imperial expansion. While at that time it promised modernity, progress and economic development, nowadays southern Africa is bedevilled by the toxic legacy of economic collapse, societal upheaval and environmental ruin. Mineral extraction, once heralded as the epitome of progress, has been central to the Climate Crisis in the Anthropocene, yet at the same time it is touted as essential for the ‘Green Revolution’, which is supposed to help us overcome this crisis).
The historiography and anthropology of mining in southern Africa have been dominated by the gold mines of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and the copper mines of the Central African Copperbelt in Zambia and Congo DRC. Ample socio-anthropological studies exist (Wilson 1941; Gluckman 1961; Kesselring 2021; Siegel 1988; Coplan 1994), as well as political, economic and cultural histories of southern Africa’s industrial mining revolution (Larmer 2021; Rubbers 2021; Van Onselen 1984; 1982; 1976), yet hardly any neo-materialist environmental histories or anthropologies of this transformation have been written, except maybe for LeCain’s work (2015). In addition, the bulk of research has placed its focus on the mines of the Witwatersrand and the Copperbelt, primarily due to their continued economic and demographic dominance in the present, thereby inadvertently ignoring, and silencing, the histories of other mining sites that have been fundamental to the establishment of contemporary southern Africa.
Almost as a given, the issues of ‘Labour and Capital’, and ‘Race and Class’, have dominated the study of mining. Indeed, these issues have formed the key points of departure for the majority of the existing research. In South Africa the works of Nkosi (2012) and Davenport (2013) neatly reflect this tendency. Recently the platinum mines in the North West Province of South Africa have come to the fore (Mbenga and Manson 2010; Manson and Mbenga 2003), partly through the stunning work of Benya (2015; 2017), but primarily on account of the Marikana massacre of August 2012 (Alexander 2023; Benya 2016; Pillay 2013; Sikweyiya et al. 2022). In the present the pursuits of informal miners, Zama Zama, and their associates in the deep level gold mines of the Witwatersrand, as well as in the diamond fields of the Northern Cape, have become a focus in social science research (Makhetha 2023; Nhlengetwa 2015). Similarly, the activities of small-scale and informal gold miners in Zimbabwe have attracted attention (Mkodzongi 2020; Mkodzongi and Spiegel 2018; Spiegel 2015; Shaba 2023; Nkomo 2022). Partly as a reflection of the rise in copper prices after 2000, the Central African Copperbelt has enjoyed significant research attention from the humanities and the social sciences (Rubbers 2021; Larmer 2021; Peša 2021; Guene 2017; Money 2022). Within this body of research, the works of Schumaker (2008), Ross (2017), Chansa (2020; 2021; 2022) and Peša (2021a; 2021b, etc.) have been central to drawing attention to the detrimental environmental effects of mining on the Copperbelt. Hecht (2012) has demonstrated the knock-on effects of uranium mining in Africa. Her Residual Governance (2023), dealing with gold mining on the Witwatersrand, explores the ‘racial contract’ that underlied the technopolitical project of mining in South Africa, which allowed for the exploitation and poisoning of people and spaces.
The processes that led to the establishment of industrial mining in southern Africa, were part of a single technopolitical project (Hecht 2012), initiated in the 1880s within the racial capitalist setting (Alexander 2023; Legassick and Hemson 1976) of the British Empire, which extended from the Cape to southern Congo and beyond. In the present, the compartmentalisation and restriction of academic research within the nation-state borders of post-colonial Africa obscures the interconnected transregional aspects of this technopolitical project. This was not always the case. From the 1880s onwards the British imperialist and mining magnate, Cecil John Rhodes, and the coterie that surrounded him, made their intentions abundantly clear. In the ongoing Scramble for Africa their intention was to ‘open’ Africa for the British Empire and colour the map of Africa from Cape to Cairo in ‘Imperial Red’. Fundamental to this endeavour were mines, railways and telegraph lines. The capital for this technopolitical project was available because of Rhodes’ monopolist control of the world’s largest and richest diamond mines in Kimberley. This diamond capital was used to sway the British government (Maylam 2005), and it was in this context that Rhodes was granted the right to administer and govern colonial Zimbabwe and Zambia in the name of the British Crown, through the British South Africa Company (BSAC) (Galbraith 1974). Although thwarted from gaining Congo as a whole, Rhodes acquired mining rights to Katanga, the heavily mineralised copper rich southern region of Congo, through investments in Tanganyika Concessions Limited (TCL) (Gewald 2015; Guene 2017: 51; Roberts 1976).
The histories and anthropologies of mining in southern Africa usually focus on human endeavours with regard to mining. In this volume, the editors attempt to create a history and anthropology of mining in southern Africa in which the human is decentred. They do this by including the non-human in our descriptions and analyses. They set out to do this in two ways, i.) the non-human in terms of fellow sentients, ii.) the non-human in terms of the ‘inorganic material’. Thus, for example, non-human co-existence meant that plants evolved to find ways to live in mineral-rich soils. In the present, humans have labelled these plants as mining ‘indicator species’ that appear to ‘predict’ the existence of particular minerals hidden in the soil (Ahmad et al. 2022: 119). The same holds true for animals that exist in landscapes determined by inorganic material depositions (Laugrand and Simon 2020).
As Luning (2022) observes, this decentring of humans follows an old cosmological trajectory in which the assumptions of mining companies and local communities about distinctions between human and non-human life, and life and non-life underground, differ fundamentally (cf. Pijpers and Eriksen 2018). In her recent work, Povinelli (2016) proposes the concept of ‘geontologies to show how, in Australia, colonial settlers’ categorization of extractive landscapes as Nonlife has served to ignore and belittle the different categorizations of Life and Nonlife applied in Aboriginal societies.’
In order to do justice to this multispecies and neo-materialist angle on mining in southern Africa, the Gaping Holes conference on multispecies histories and ethnographies of mining in southern Africa was held at the African Studies Centre Leiden in June 2022.3 Out of the initial sixteen papers, seven were selected for this volume, exploring ways to research mining in southern Africa without merely focusing on humans, an intellectual challenge introduced by the editors.
In their initial Call for Papers, the editors pointed out that the many and varied histories and ethnographies of mining in southern Africa have tended to concentrate on the issues of labour and capital, to the detriment of an approach that seeks to give more prominence to the non-human. The rich ethnographic work of the Manchester School in Zambia, and the fractious race and class debates that dominated South African history in the 1980s, are two cases in point.4 The editors, who were also the conference convenors, are aware of recent studies that attempt to go beyond these debates, and attempt to situate human societies and mining in terms of their environmental context and impact (Peša 2020; 2022c). Whilst recognising and appreciating these efforts, in our Call for Papers the editors stated that they wished to go further. Drawing on Lovelock (1972; 2014) they explicitly acknowledged the symbiotic interconnected nature of the world, and called for contributions that would recognise this interconnectedness, decentre the human, and seek to investigate mining in southern Africa from a multispecies perspective.
The discovery of diamonds along the Orange River in 1865 initiated a mining revolution that continues to this day, in the mining for metals, hydrocarbons, and gemstones in southern Africa. Understandably, this revolution has been viewed and interpreted almost solely in terms of its impact on human societies. Yet industrial mining transformed southern Africa at all levels, from its flora and fauna to its water and air. To be sure, the mining revolution brought untold financial wealth, but it did so at the expense of shattered ecosystems and societies.
From the 1970s onwards, the environmental impact of industrial mining began to come to the fore in historical research and concerted activism.5 Whilst concentrating on the Cape, and not on mining, William Beinart was instrumental in initiating Environmental history, with a capital E, within southern African history.6 Following the 1994 democratic elections in South Africa, two conferences signalled the mainstreaming of environmental history in South Africa. The first one, which was held at the University of Natal Pietermaritzburg in 1996, resulted in a volume that, although focused on Natal, became the first explicitly titled environmental history of South Africa (Dovers et al. 2003). The second conference, held at Oxford University in 1999, resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies and an edited volume on Social History & African Environments (Beal et al. 2000). Historians Lance van Sittert, Sandra Swart (2023), and Nancy Jacobs were instrumental in carrying forward environmental history in South Africa.
The editors believe that a shift from a human-centred perspective provides one with an opportunity to recognise that non-humans can have sentient minds and experiences. Animals have the neurological correlates of consciousness, the neurochemicals for affective states, and the sensory faculties for sensory perceptions (DeGrazia 2020). In addition, the discussion about sentience in plants is gathering momentum, particularly in the light of increasing scientific evidence that substantiates these claims (Simmard 2021; Coccia 2017; Zonca 2023). Animals, and in the eyes of many, also trees and plants, are richly sentient beings that have qualitative, felt experiences and communication faculties. If examples of this could be brought to the fore in the contributions, so much the better.
Following the outcomes of the conference and their subsequent reading, theoretically the editors could be said to have adopted a neo-materialist approach (LeCain 2017) to mining in southern Africa. The editors are mindful of the technopolitical context (Hecht 2023; Seow 2022) of racial capitalism (Alexander 2023; Armiero 2021; Koshy et al. 2022; Leroy and Jenkins 2016), in which mining came into existence and transformed southern Africa over time. In this framework there are six points that the editors consider to be of cardinal importance within the context of industrial mining in southern Africa.
1 In and of Nature
More often than not, academic disciplines have treated the biological and physical environment as being non-human ‘nature’, a space that is somehow apart from our species, even though we live, and are formed, within it. The groundbreaking work of Cronon (1992) on the city of Chicago demonstrated that ‘an environmental history of a single city made little sense if written in isolation from the countryside around it’ (on cities, see also Brechin (2006) who spoke of modern cities as ‘inverted mines’ and Povinelli (2016) who politicised Brechin’s concept). This insight was developed by Morse (2003), who demonstrated that Yukon gold miners, through the material things they used and consumed, were inextricably bound up in a web of relationships that changed over time and were linked to the wider world. Thus, the consumption of a tin of ‘Van Camp’s Pork and Beans’ by miners on the Chilkoot pass linked them to pig farmers in Iowa, stock markets in Chicago, bean and tomato farmers in California, label makers, canners and so forth (Morse 2003: 9 and 144 ff). Curtis (2013) demonstrated that our lives and lifestyles are not separate from, but rather wholly of, the natural world, and thus, that the binary opposition between natural things and made things is artificial and obscures the natural origins of the products of mining (2013: 3). This echoes the views of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who, though being a child of the Enlightenment, saw the interconnected nature of the world and did not restrict himself to the compartmentalisation of the disciplines (Wulf 2016). His astonishing work foreshadowed contemporary understandings of the world, particularly that of James Lovelock (1972; 2014) and Bruno Latour (2017). Lovelock’s Gaia theory postulates that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet (Lovelock 1972; 2009; 2014). The Earth, or Gaia, as Lovelock would have it, is thus ‘a self-controlled, harmonic, and interactive complex of biological and nonbiological worlds on the planet’. It is within this context that all human activity, including mining, takes place (Aoki 2012).
2 Organic and Inorganic Agency
Neo-materialism seeks to move beyond the anthropocentric thinking that sets humans apart from, or against, nature. Instead (echoing Lovelock) it considers all organic and inorganic things as historical actors. The neo-materialist approach in history is consciously ‘Post Humanist’ (Haraway 2007), and in considering things as historical actors in their own right, builds on the concept of ‘Thing Power’ (Bennett 2010) and the Actor Network Theory (ANT) pioneered by Bruno Latour. Central to Actor Network Theory is its interdisciplinary approach to research in the social sciences, humanities, and technology studies. Studying copper mining in relation to, amongst others, cattle, humans, and silkworms, neo-materialist Timothy J. LeCain called for ‘a more humble view of the human place on the planet, one that gave more historical credit to a lively and intelligent material world of organic and inorganic things’ (2017: 329). Thus, for example, in describing copper smelting in the US, LeCain showed that ‘sulfur and arsenic became powerful historical actors in their own right’ (ibid.: 172). LeCain demonstrates that animals, plants, and minerals have agency in shaping our world, and argues convincingly that when we, as academics, recognise this, it will allow us to write more accurate and interesting histories. Looking at historical change in this way might allow us ‘to shepherd a more humble and just material and technological infrastructure into existence’ (ibid.: 339). In other words, acknowledging the agency of the non-human, could make for a better future for the planet as a whole.
The editorial committee noted that recent studies pay attention to how mining technologies cross boundaries between live and dead matter, e.g. the treatment of ore in flotation is based on chemical agents, which are co-constitutive and transformative of ore in ways that force us to reconsider how ‘matter’ is socially constructed in terms of assumptions and conceptualisations, and the agency of ‘natural’ elements (cf. Ureta and Flores 2022: 22). Moreover, anthropologists are teaming up with scholars in the fields of biology and natural history to show how the ruined landscapes resulting from mining can become the birthground for new lifeforms (Bubandt and Tsing 2018; Gan et al. 2018; Hoag et al. 2018; Tsing 2017).
3 Mining and Pollution
Mining is a physical process initiated by humans that has environmental consequences and takes place within a socio-political context. The extraction of materials from the earth that are valued by humans ‘turns the world inside out’, leaving mountains of mined and milled rock as waste that ‘melts into air, seeps into waterways, settles on soils and penetrates bodies’ (Berger 2021: website article). The detrimental effects of mining on the living environment of humans, plants and animals, is long known and long-lasting. Lead pollution in Arctic ice, for example, shows emissions from ancient lead-silver mining and smelting that reflect the rise and fall of the Roman Empire (McConnell et al.). In the 1550s, acclaimed mining engineer Agricola decried the ‘devastation of … fields, woods, groves, brooks and rivers’, and concluded that ‘there is greater detriment from mining than the value of the metals which the mining produces’ (Agricola 1950: 8). The irredeemable scarring of landscapes caused by mining similarly struck Williams, who wrote in the 1780s that ‘the old works now exhibit a horrid and frightful gulph of great length, and several fathoms wide’ (Williams 1789: 272). LeCain (2009) sees the waste and destruction wrought by mines as being an integral part of modernity, making up the trinity of Mass Production, Mass Consumption, and Mass Destruction. In southern Africa, Peša has shown that the slag heaps of mining were seen as monuments to technical modernity, but that water and air pollution were accepted as ‘negative externalities’ to copper production (2021b).
4 Mining Within a Socio-Political Context
That mining is able to have such a devastating impact on the environment is often ‘naturalised’ (Peša 2021), which is to say, taken as a given and considered inevitable. However, the devastation caused by mining is never inevitable, for mining always takes place within a socio-political context which either allows, or seeks to limit, its detrimental effects. Recent work has sought to explore the socio-political context within which environmental destruction is allowed to occur. Seow (2021) outlines the interplay between mining and political power at the Fushun colliery in China, demonstrating how political structures were formed to facilitate industrial mining at the cost of environmental and human concerns, in what he called ‘Carbon Technocracy’. This echoes the work of LeCain (2009) who showed how political power was used to install legislation that facilitated extraction. For South Africa, this idea was developed by Hecht (2023), who describes the racial contract that underpins the southern African context. Hecht argues that this contract is technopolitical, ‘the purposeful design of artifacts, machines, and technological systems to enact political goals’, and notes that ‘some of the most powerful expressions of the racial contract in South Africa are the colossal wastes – social and sedimentary – created by its mining industry’ (2023: 3). Central to the technopolitical project, according to Hecht, is Residual Governance, ‘the governance of waste and discard … that is purposefully inefficient, and … treats people and places as waste and wastelands’ (ibid.: 6). Liboiron makes no bones about it in his book Pollution Is Colonialism (2021), which ‘assumes access to Land as a sink’ (ibid.: 135). In the southern African context, it is precisely this aspect, that the land and all those who live there are seen as the just purview of the coloniser, that allows for the violence of mining. Armiero (2021: 427) puts it succinctly: ‘In effect, some people and places have been transformed into dumping sites, sacrifice zones for the well-being of others and the purported common good of the nation.’
5 Long Term Transformation
Perniciously, although landscape scarring is immediately apparent, the long-term negative effects of breathing air, eating food and drinking water, all of which may be contaminated, take more time to become manifest. The studies in Toxic Timescapes (Müller and Ohman Nielsen (eds) 2023) underscore the longstanding temporal aspect of environmental destruction and the socio-political context that allows for this. Nixon (2011: 2) defines this as ‘slow violence … which occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’ Furthermore, slow violence is ‘incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales’ (ibid.). In the context of southern Africa, it is precisely these long-term transformations that are of importance; what has been destroyed cannot be restored.
6 Beyond the Catastrophe
Concentrating on what damage has been done and what has been lost can prevent one from seeing what may have emerged. Although landscapes may have been scarred and transformed, life continues to move forward through time. Anthropologist Tsing takes as a given that we are living in times of ‘capitalist ruin’ (Tsing 2015: 211). Focusing on Matsutake mushrooms Tsing eloquently describes life that thrives in ‘disturbance based ecologies’ (ibid.: 5), namely the ruins of capitalist timber forests in Oregon, USA. Taking Matsutake as a focus, Tsing explains the ‘world-building work of fungi’ (ibid.: 139) as dynamic participants in the life of the planet, more so than ‘human bias’ (ibid.: 155) conventionally allows. In so doing Tsing demonstrates how Matsutake forests emerge from collaborations between mushrooms, trees, and humans. Tsing thus moves away from anthropocentric views of the world, while not shying away from the violent controversy of global capitalism and its aftermath. Through looking at life in capitalist ruins, and noticing multispecies entanglements and collaborative survival, Tsing provides inspiration for further research to be conducted in southern Africa in the aftermath of industrial mining.
Heeding Ingold, to consider landscape temporally, as a process that is constantly transformed by the activities of matter and living organisms (1993), Gaping Holes asked its contributors to immerse themselves in the landscapes that they intended to write about. Robinson’s concept of ‘deep mapping’, which focuses on a specific point ‘through a range of disciplines from geology, archaeology, and botany to the imaginings of faith and folklore’ (Thubron 2020: no page, online article), suggests an approach that is eminently suited to the project. O’Gorman and Gaynor advocate a similar blurring of boundaries, and an emphasis on the ‘more-than-human’, which can ‘challenge human exceptionalism … situating humans as participants in manifold ecologies, with histories of, and possibilities for, becoming-with nonhuman beings shaped by our changing, diverse, and entangled lives’ (O’Gorman and Gaynor 2020: 712). Crumley’s The Last Wolf (2010) underscores the importance of walking the landscape in order to arrive at historical insights. Similarly, it was through ‘walking the land’, that Tsing gathered the material to describe the end of capitalist progress and the concomitant ecological collapse, but also discovered the concept of ‘third nature’: that which continues to exist despite capitalism (Tsing 2015; see also Luning and Pijpers 2022).
Methodologically, these approaches fit the threefold perspective that O’Gorman and Gaynor have called for in what they call ‘more-than-human’ histories. These histories emphasise ‘co-constitution; the pre-presencing of multiple species and multiple voices; and situated politics and ethics’ (2020: 713). Examples of studies that have actively sought to do so include Jacobs (2021), who recently published an article dealing with the relationship between the Grey Parrot and people, in which she drew ‘on ecological, ethnographic, historical, and ethological evidence to construct a more-than-human narrative of the past’ (Jacobs 2021: 648). Glover’s Leiden thesis (2021), a cattle-centred history of colonialism in southern Africa, is another example of this approach. Hartigan’s Shaving the Beasts (2020), eloquently argues for, and illustrates, the desirability of conducting academic research that consciously takes more-than-human perspectives into account. Miller’s Radical Land (2018) has demonstrated that it is possible to write a beautiful, yet academically sound radical history that focuses on trees instead of people. Demuth’s Floating Coast (2020) is groundbreaking in its interdisciplinarity and more-than-human approach. Within the context of southern Africa, it is the animal-centred histories of Swart (2023) that draw most attention. The methodology developed in these works, specifically the conscious decentring of the human, and the active search for sources and insights from disciplines that are often seen as distinct from history have been an inspiration for Gaping Holes.
With the intricacies mentioned above in mind, the workshop organisers called for contributions that acknowledged and took into account the role of animals, plants, geology and geography as Actants, within the context of the history of mining in southern Africa. That is to say, they called for papers that actively attempted to tell a new version of history in which humans no longer took central stage, and to concentrate instead on the hidden and obscured histories of others without whom human history would not have been possible. By their very nature such contributions would have to draw on multiple disciplines.
In the event, they were not disappointed, and between the 1st and 4th of June 2022 the organisers welcomed no less than twenty speakers to Leiden. Unfortunately, four of the speakers were unable to actually make it to Leiden on account of the excessively strict visa requirements that exist for people seeking to enter the Netherlands from outside of the Schengen Zone, and from Africa in particular.7
In the follow-up to the conference, the editorial committee, in their exchanges with the various contributors, continued to put the focus on multi-species and more-than-human approaches to mining (cf. O’Gorman and Gaynor 2020). The chapters presented in this edited volume recognise this and attempt to foreground a more-than-human and multispecies perspective on mining in southern Africa. Following this introductory chapter, which is devoted to reviewing the existing literature, situating the submitted papers, and indicating further avenues of research, this volume is divided into three sections, each containing two to three chapters and covering the pre-colonial, colonial and contemporary context.
Part 1 Pre-colonial Contexts
1) Jan Jansen and James R. Fairhead: Teaming Up with Termites – towards a Multispecies History of Earth Technologies in West Africa
2) Ettore Morelli: Into the Black Hole: Life, Death, and the Python in Central Southern Africa
Part 2 Colonial Contexts
1) Jan-Bart Gewald: Quaggas and Diamonds: the Possible Relations between Diamond Mining and Species Extinction
2) Sandra Swart: ‘Jaws Full of Nails’: How South Africa’s Mines Invented the World’s Most Terrifying Police Dog
Part 3 Contemporary Contexts
1) Joseph Mujere and Innocent Dande: Diamonds, Animals, and Miners: towards a Multispecies History of Artisanal Diamond Mining in Chiadzwa, Zimbabwe
2) Jabulani Shaba: Tracing Gold Mining and multispecies assemblages in Mazowe, Zimbabwe
3) Iva Pesa: A History of the Copperbelt through Plants
We have chosen to end this edited volume with the poem maple leaf (esdoornblad), by Dutch poet Saskia Stehouwer. We decided to include this poem because we believe that it clearly brings to the fore the relationship between perception, life, time, and the earth. As Gaping Holes shows, mining and resource extraction have had an enormous, and in some cases disastrous, impact on the world in which we live, yet life and time continue, and our perceptions of mining are so much the richer when we take into account the lives of others, be they humans, plants or animals.
The contributions to this book have sought to deal with the mining in southern Africa within the context of history and anthropology in which humans do not take centre stage. In each contribution the authors have brought to the fore examples of mining histories and contexts in southern Africa that highlight the role of organic actants, both sentient and none sentient. In their contributions the authors have extended their analysis far beyond what has long been the norm in academic literature dealing with mining in southern Africa. The editors believe that these contributions show a possible way forward for further research in southern Africa and beyond.
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With generous funding from Leiden ASA, for which we are very grateful.
For an overview of the Manchester School see Schumaker 2001; Ferguson 1999; 1990a; 1990b. For an overview of the Race and Class debates, Saunders 1988; Johnstone 1976; O’Meara 1983; Innes 1984); Clarke 1978; Posel 1983.
Greenpeace.
A selection of William Beinart’s work: Empire, hunting and ecological change in southern and central Africa, Past & Present, 1990; The night of the Jackal: Sheep, pastures and predators in the Cape, Past & Present, 1998; African History and environmental history, African Affairs, 2000; Beinart and Coates (2002) Environment and History: The taming of nature in the USA and South Africa; The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770–1950 (2008); Beyond the colonial paradigm: African history and environmental history in large scale perspective, The Environment and World History, 2009; Prickly Pear: A Social History of a Plant in the Eastern Cape (2011); An overview of themes in the agrarian and environmental history of the Karoo since c.1800, African Journal of Range & Forage Science, 2018.
The following speakers from Africa were unable to make it to the conference on account of the Schengen Zone restrictions: Dr. Innocent Dande, Dr. Joseph Mujere, Ms. Kopo Oromeng, and Professor Sandra Swart.