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tracking in game trails: LOOKING AFRESH AT THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY IN SOUTH AFRICA
JANE CARRUTHERS
ABSTRACT
This essay identifies the major trends and theoretical underpinnings of South African environmental history, and places them within the context of recent political, social, and economic developments in the post-apartheid era. Skeptical about Western conservation models, attentive both to the concerns of local communities and to transnational themes, and alert to issues of power, space, agency, and identity, this new historiography has reconfigured the colonial past in environmental terms and set an ambitious agenda for future research.
| IN THE LATE 1980s southern African environmental history could be described as a field "virtually totally neglected," but since then a rich literature on a variety of environmental issues—biodiversity conservation, eco-justice, colonial agricultural policy and science, and landscape heritage among them—has developed.1 Not surprisingly, environmental history first took root in South Africa as the end of the apartheid era loomed. Two factors were mainly responsible. The first was the rich tradition of social history that began in the 1970s when, in opposition to the prevailing Afrikaner Nationalist and Liberal historiography, a younger generation of radical scholars employed a Marxist paradigm of class relations to explain African dispossession, capitalist industrialization, the disruption of indigenous lifestyles, and African strategies of resistance to oppression in South Africa.2 This social history was overtly politically activist and it resonated with environmental themes that emerged as increasingly relevant when a nonracial democratic society seemed imminent.3 |
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The second factor underlying this attention to ecohistorical themes during the early 1990s was the development of environmentalism as an international political movement. In the South African situation of that time, this translated into robust debates around environmental justice within an anticipated socialist order. These debates focused on "brown" rather than "green" issues: demands for clean water and less industrial pollution, worker safety, and land for housing and subsistence farming. The popular literature that emerged in this period was thus closely allied to ecosocial history, while more activist in tone than its academic counterpart. Using slogans like "apartheid divides, ecology unites" and "the greening of our country is basic to its healing," environmentalism rode a wave of euphoria. The expectation was that after a divided political past, all South Africans, regardless of race, class, or age, would care for the physical environment because—unlike authoritarian apartheid—environmentalism was grass-roots mobilization for "our future and for our children" within a united democratic nation.4 Saliem Fakir, a land activist at that time and currently a board member of the South African National Biodiversity Institute, recently acknowledged that the "one great window of opportunity ... was the roaring 1990s."5 |
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