| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History. Nancy J. Jacobs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xxi + 300 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.00.

Nancy Jacobs's work is a long-awaited study of environmental change in northwestern South Africa. She writes of the area around the small town of Kuruman. The town lies on a spring, the Eye of Kruman, which has served as an important water source in the generally arid region of northwestern South Africa for many years. She charts the changes of the landscape from the nineteenth century, when the area was home to Tlhaping chiefdom of the Tswana people practicing extensive agro-pastoralism, to Kuruman becoming the center of mission activity because its spring allowed for irrigation, through the process of turning the area into a labor reserve for white employers on mines and white-owned farms, ending with its incorporation into the homeland of Bothuthatswana, and finally the liberation of South Africa from minority rule. While Jacobs clearly defines this work as one of environmental history, concerned with the changing ways human communities have wrung a living out of the land and the effects these actions have had on the landscape, she also has written a social history of the region. The book easily could serve as a model for monographs seeking to intertwine environmental and social history.

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