In Graeme Wynn, Jane Carruthers, and Nancy J. Jacobs edited volume Environment, Power and Justice: Southern African Histories, the editors pull together an exceptionally diverse group of scholars to historicize the understanding of environmental justice in Southern Africa. The book reveals the contestation and struggles over time and across space around growing environmental problems in a region where inequalities of class and race intersected and amplified injustices.
The edited volume begins with a valuable introduction to the overarching dynamics of these debates in Southern Africa over time, and then is divided into two parts, each with four chapters. In a provocative twist, Part One includes work focused on the more contemporary period of “new histories” in the postapartheid era. Then, Part Two shifts to “decolonial histories” of environmental justice in the region. The aim is to bring to the fore older knowledge systems that predate colonial rule and challenge the colonial categories and dominant narratives of the evolution of environmental justice.
To provide some important global context for the histories of environmental justice that follow in the book, the coeditors discuss how the very idea of environmental justice spread around the world and then developed in the region of Southern Africa. The editors highlight how these concepts of environmental justice as articulated by such familiar figures as Rachel Carson and Cesar Chavez in the Global North may have been slower to take off in Africa but then the fight for reparations of the environmental harms intensified from the 1980s. The book emphasizes how the understandings of environmental justice were shaped in Southern Africa both by the legacies of racial segregation and persistent colonial rule as well as precolonial cultures and institutions.
In Part One, the authors draw on original fieldwork to uncover struggles for environmental justice in postapartheid South Africa. Drawing on powerful interview data and photos, Mary Galvin argues that residents’ experiences of injustices and systemic corruption with water supply and sanitation in three provinces of South Africa make democracy seem empty to the people. Cherryl Walker uncovers environmental injustice in the siting of the world’s largest radio telescope in the Northern Cape Karoo that threatens livelihoods by excluding local residents from farming. Matthew Schnurr turns to the changing contours of debates on genetically modified maize in South Africa and exposes the complex winners and losers from the introduction of these new agricultural technologies. Sarah Ives then examines the impassioned debates around invasive versus indigenous plant species and challenges how simplistic binary categories may reify existing racial inequalities.
In Part Two, Admire Mseba analyzes how environmental discourses around droughts were shaped by power struggles between local social groups before and then during the early years of colonial rule in Zimbabwe. Christopher Conz focuses on the role of James Machobane, who worked in the 1940s and 1950s for food justice for women and the poor in Lesotho, but also did not fully recognize the structural roots of poverty in colonialism and land dispossession. Muchaparara Musemwa examines the importance of shared water access, and not just land, as an anti-segregationist issue in Southern Rhodesia and a basis for environmental justice in postcolonial Zimbabwe. In the book’s penultimate chapter, Marc Epprecht reflects on the Edendale History Project, initiated in 2017, as an effort to redress environmental injustices in Natal from the 1840s. Finally, in a provocative Afterword, Graeme Wynn uses the insights generated about environment, power and justice from the contributors to call for sustained attention to the histories of injustices in order to “build our better worlds” (328).
One of the strengths of this edited volume was the diversity of the contributors and their topics. The contributors all focused on history but from a wide range of disciplinary lenses, including African history but also geography, anthropology, gender, international development studies, Black studies, and social justice activism. The authors employed varied methodologies and types of original evidence and brought diverse professional perspectives as award-winning academics but also development practitioners, policy advocates, government officials, nongovernmental organization leaders and community activists. Although this level of diversity can challenge the coherence of an edited volume, the editors effectively showcased in the introduction and afterword the major themes that were woven through all the chapters.
While the edited volume put a spotlight on environmental justice in southern Africa, the idea of climate justice was touched upon in a few of the chapters examining more contemporary histories in the region. Let us hope that the insights garnered from this volume will help activate and strengthen the push for climate justice for a better future in this and other regions in Africa.
