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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.
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| 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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Jacobs's central argument is that over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the extensive production system of the Tlhaping Tswana of the area was destroyed. Tswana communities had combined stockkeeping with long fallow cultivation to survive in their semi-arid environment. Livestock ownership stratified their communities with "chiefs" controlling the most cattle and small stock. Poorer households survived through more reliance on agriculture and a substantial class of dependent laborers existed. Communities remained mobile in the face of periodic drought; although permanent water sources like the Eye of Kruman served as centers of settlement. In the early nineteenth century, the London Missionary Society created a settlement at the Eye and sought to promote intensive agriculture using irrigation. The practice became common in the river valleys of the region by the 1850s. Likewise, the expansion of commerce, especially after the discovery of diamonds just to the south of the area in Kimberly, presented opportunities for people to sell wood and game. However, Jacobs argues that "[c]ommerce in natural products was not sustainable, and the paradox of irrigation in a basically extensive system would not survive under European rule" (p. 75). Intensive production added a niche within the system, but did not have the opportunity to transform it. She clearly shows how social stratification shaped the response of Tswana people to new techniques and opportunities. |
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The creation of modern South Africa with its policies of segregation and apartheid deprived communities of land that had made the system viable in this arid region. Although local communities had access to tools of intensification such as irrigation and plows, they could not take them up in any major way. During the twentieth century the area became a labor reserve for a variety of employers in the area and a center of cattle production. Jacobs makes clear that this failure came from the policies of white dominated South Africa; however, she is careful to show exactly how the constraints of forced removals, lack of access to the little water in the region, and the omnipresent demands for labor made intensification impossible. |
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By the 1970s, the region broadly became incorporated into the nominally independent homeland of Bothuthatswana. Here too, Jacobs shows great sophistication in her analysis of relations between different strata in local communities and the land. A central event in the 1980s was the "massacre" of donkeys in the region by the paramilitary forces of the state. She argues that this event occurred because the homeland administration was dominated by a small elite, most tied to the apartheid state, that had invested in commercial cattle raising. During a drought, donkeys, used mostly by poorer people for transport and, in an emergency, food, were seen as causing the loss of grazing for the cattle. In her handling the donkey massacre becomes a central metaphor for the effects apartheid not just on the people but on the land itself. |
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The volume concludes with a few thoughts on alternatives in the past and future. The rise of a "peasant option" that the creation of the labor reserve system in South Africa foreclosed would have required intensified production that Jacobs seems to think would not have been viable anyway in this area. The myth that Tswana communities could be "self-sufficient peasants" was only half-believed by the officials of the former South African government itself in the past, and is not really what she reports her informants as desiring for the future. |
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Gregory H. Maddox is an associate professor of history at Texas Southern University. |
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