Review: The Nature of Power: Cape Environmental History, the History of Ideas and

Neoliberal Historiography
Author(s): Lance Van Sittert
Reviewed work(s):
The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock and the Environment, 1770-
1950 by William Beinart
Social History and African Environments by William Beinart ; JoAnn McGregor
Environment, Power and Injustice: A South African History by Nancy J. Jacobs
Source: The Journal of African History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (2004), pp. 305-313
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4100469 .
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Journal of African History, 45 (2004), pp. 305-13. ? 2004 Cambridge University Press 305
DOI: Io.IOI7/Soo02853704009454 Printed in the United Kingdom

REVIEW ARTICLE

THE NATURE OF POWER: CAPE ENVIRONMENTAL

HISTORY, THE HISTORY OF IDEAS AND
NEOLIBERAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

BY LANCE VAN SITTERT

University of Cape Town

The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock and the Environment,
1770-1950o. By WILLIAM BEINART. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Pp. xxiii + 402. ?65 (ISBN 0-19-926151-2).
Social History and African Environments. Edited by WILLIAM BEINART AND JOANN
McGREGOR. Oxford: James Currey; Athens: Ohio University Press; Cape
Town: David Philip, 2003. Pp. xii+275. ?18.95,
?45 (ISBN 0-85255-95I-8);
paperback (ISBN o-85255-950-x).
Environment, Power and Injustice: A South African History. By NANCYJ. JACOBS.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xxi + 300. ?45; $65 (ISBN
0-521-81191-o); ?16.95; $24, paperback (ISBN 0-521-o01070-5).
KEY WORDS: environmental history, environment, historiography, South Africa.
FOR a region purportedly a backwater of South African environmental history
at the close of the twentieth century,1 the Cape has moved rapidly toward centre
stage at the start of the new millennium. It now boasts a wealth of literature in
international journals and last year saw the publication of the first book-length
environmental histories of the region, with the promise of still more to come, not
least from a strong crop of recently or nearly completed doctoral dissertations in
academies round the north Atlantic rim.2 The Cape owes this distinction to being

1 See P.
Steyn, 'A greener past? An assessment of South African environmental
historiography', New Contree, 46 (1999), 7-27, for this and other misconceptions
about South African environmental history.
2 For a sample of this scholarship from the last three years, see e.g. N. Jacobs,
'Grasslands and thickets: bush encroachment and herding in the Kalahari thornveld',
Environment and History, 6 (2000), 289-316; D. Nel, 'For the public benefit: livestock
statistics and expertise in the late nineteenth-century Cape Colony 850o-I9oo', in
S. Dubow (ed.), Science and Society in Southern Africa (Manchester, 2000), I00-15;
Archer and van Sittert in Special Issue: African Environments Past and Present, Journal
of Southern African Studies, 26 (2000); K. Brown,' The conservation and utilisation of the
natural world: silviculture in the Cape Colony 1902-1910', Environment and History, 7
(2001), 427-47; N. Jacobs, 'The great Bophuthatswana donkey massacre: discourse on
the ass, the politics of class and grass', American Historical Review, io6 (2001), 485-507;
K. Brown, 'Cultural constructions of the wild: the rhetoric and practice of wildlife
conservation in the Cape Colony at the turn of the twentieth century', South African
Historical Journal, 47 (2002oo),75-95; L. J. Mitchell, 'Traces in the landscape: hunters,
herders and farmers on the Cedarberg frontier, South Africa', Journal of African History,
43 (zoo002),431-50; J. Tropp, 'Dogs, poison and the meaning of colonial intervention in
the Transkei, South Africa', ibid. 451-72; L. van Sittert, 'Holding the line: the rural
enclosure movement in the Cape Colony i865-1910', ibid. 95-118; L. van Sittert, 'Our
irrepresible fellow colonist: the biological invasion of prickly pear (Opuntia fucus-indica)
306 LANCE VAN SITTERT

the oldest region of British missionary and imperial endeavour in the subcontinent,
guaranteeing extensive archives in the northern hemisphere and explaining both
the bias in the current scholarship towards the pre-I91o period and lack of a
comparable scholarship on any other part of southern Africa.3 This anomalous
florescence can also be read for likely future trends in a national historiography
otherwise unanimously deemed moribund if not actually in decline for the past
decade.4 What it reveals are two contending trajectories: the first a shift away
from political economy to the history of ideas and the other a fidelity to the late
twentieth-century radical social history tradition and its core theme of the social
relations of production.
The first trajectory has long been canvassed by William Beinart, one among
several who have laboured to establish Cape environmental history as a reputable
field of scholarly inquiry.5 In Social History and African Environments he and
JoAnn McGregor again suggested that, 'Whilst the labour regimes and dis-
possession that accompanied white settlement have quite rightly attracted much
attention ... there are new questions to be asked about environmental change and
environmental knowledge in the colonial period' (p. 4). Thus, although many
historians in Africa continue to emphasize 'political economy', Beinart and
McGregor maintain 'the field has moved on ... intellectual history and cultural
perspectives have become increasingly important' (pp. 9-Io). This is not the

in the Eastern Cape, I890-190o', Journal of Historical Geography, 28 (2002), 397-419;

L. van Sittert, 'From mere weeds and bosjes to a Cape floral kingdom: the re-imagining
of indigenous flora at the Cape c. 1890-1939', Kronos, 28 (2002), I02-26; Beinart, Jacobs
and van Sittert in S. Dovers et al. (eds.), South Africa's EnvironmentalHistory : Cases and
Comparisons(Athens OH, 2002); K. Brown, 'Political entomology: the insectile challenge
to agricultural development in the Cape Colony, I895 to 1910', Journal of Southern
African Studies, 29 (2003), 529-49; D. Gilfoyle, 'Veterinary research and the African
rinderpest epizootic: the Cape Colony 1896 to 1898', ibid. 29 (2003), 133-54; J. Tropp,
'Displaced people, replaced narratives: forest conflicts and historical perspectives in the
Tsolo District, Transkei', ibid. 29 (2003), 207-33; E. Green Musselman, 'Plant knowl-
edge at the Cape: a study in African and European collaboration', International Journal
of African Historical Studies, 36 (2003), 367-92; and Beinart and Wotshela, Brown,
Gilfoyle, Green Musselman, Jacobs, Roche and van Sittert in Special Edition:
Environmental History, Kronos, 29 (2003).
3 See e.g. Special Issue: African Environments Past and Present, Journal of Southern
African Studies, 26 (2000); Dovers et al. (eds.), South Africa's Environmental History;
Special Issue: Environmental History, Kronos, 29 (2003); and Special Issue: Landscape,
Politics and the Historical Geography of Southern Africa, Journal of Historical Geogra-
phy, forthcoming.
4 See e.g. Alan Cobley, 'Does social history have a future ? The ending of apartheid and
recent trends in South African historiography', Journal of Southern African Studies, 27
(2001), 6 13-26, for the crisis in South African academic history post-1994.
5 See W. Beinart, 'Soil erosion, conservationism and ideas about development: a
southern African exploration, 1900-1 960', Journal of Southern African Studies, I I (1984),
52-83; W. Beinart, 'Environmental destruction in southern Africa: soil erosion, animals
and pastures over the longer term', in T. S. Driver and G. P. Chapman (eds.), Time-
Scales and Environmental Change (London, 1996), 149-68, and M. Leach and R. Mearns
(eds.), The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment
(London, 1996), 54-72; W. Beinart, 'Vets, viruses and environmentalism at the Cape',
Paideuma, 43 (1997), 227-52, and in T. Griffiths and L. Robin (eds.), Ecology and
Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Pietermaritzburg, 1997), 87-Io;
W. Beinart, 'African history and environmental history', African Affairs, 99 (2000),
269-302; and W. Beinart, 'South African environmental history in the African context',
in Dovers et al. (eds.), South Africa's EnvironmentalHistory, 222-6.
 THE NATURE OF POWER 307
familiar post-independence call to abandon class struggle for nationalist cant, but
rather a reflection of detachment from both sources and local social reality born
of the intellectual diaspora and discourse theory. The first fruits of such an
approach are now available with the publication of the Beinart and McGregor
collection and Beinart's magnum opus.
Like all conference collections, Social History and African Environments is a
curate's egg, with as much old-style political economy in evidence as the nouveau
intellectual and cultural approach espoused by its editors. It suggests that
'African', like Cape, environmental history is strongest on the late colonial period
and for the same reasons: accessible metropolitan archives and active agricultural
departments. Soil conservation looms large in this official record and hence in the
historiography too and the reader may be forgiven for thinking that British im-
perialism north of the Zambesi was motivated solely by an obsession with contour
terracing.
The collection is broken down into three parts. The first - 'African environ-
mental ideas and practices' - comprises pieces by Kreike on fruit trees in Namibia
and southern Angola; Middleton on prickly pear in Madagascar; Pikirayi
critiquing environmental determinist arguments for the demise of the medieval
Mutapan state; Ranger on women in 'ecological religion' in Zimbabwe and
McGregor on the Zambezi River in northwest Zimbabwe - and duly demonstrates
the nowadays hardly controversial proposition that indigenous agency was im-
portant in shaping African environments. Part two - 'Colonial science, the state
and African responses' - has both period and a ubiquitous preoccupation with
soil conservation in common, featuring Tilley on the African Survey; Carswell
on Kigezi, Uganda; McCracken revisiting the 'Dead North' and Yngstrom on
Dodoma, Tanzania. The final section -'Settlers and Africans: culture and
nature' - as its omnibus title suggests, is a hold-all of remainders whose only link is
a common focus on South Africa; Bunn writing on wildlife photography in the
Kruger National Park; Swart on Eugene Marais and termites; Gordon on dogs in
Namibia and Carruthers on San dispossession in the Kalahari Gemsbok National
Park.
As this inventory suggests, the wide range in time, place and topic encompassed
by the collection implicitly raises, though never explicitly addresses, the vexed
question of what exactly constitutes 'African environmental history' as a field. To
judge by the offerings here the answer would appear to be anything that chooses to
go by that name; the simple fact of appearing on the same conference programme
and now between the same covers being what defines this cabinet of curiosities as
contributions to the putative new field. Social History and African Environments
is thus less showcase than wunderkabinet. However - as James McCann's recent
African environmental history and the growing Cape scholarship suggest - the
field is more usefully conceived within far narrower space and time frames.6 The
generic 'African environmental history' espoused by Social History and African
Environments is in danger of becoming a flag of convenience for contraband cargos
and unseaworthy tramps fit only for the breakers yard to ply the intellectual sea
lanes with impunity.
The true proof of the culturalist pudding, however, is Beinart's The Rise of
Conservation in South Africa. This is a big book; twenty-five years in the making
and four hundred pages in length, it comprises no fewer than eleven chapters (only
two of which have previously appeared in print). The vast and ambitious terrain
encompassed by the title, however, is immediately substantially reduced by the

6
See J. McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An EnvironmentalHistory of
Africa (Oxford, i999).
308 LANCE VAN SITTERT

Preface and Introduction, revealing the actual focus to be 'largely on the livestock
farming districts of the semi-arid Karoo, or midland Cape, and the eastern Cape
grasslands' (p. xiii) during the years c. i88o-I 940 (p. 20). This much more modest
frame is the by now familiar heartland and heyday of anglophone progressivism in
the Cape and the staple of much of the region's recent environmental history
scholarship. It is here too that Beinart's corrective project - redeeming the region's
settler pastoral economy from the condescension of Randcentric radical history
and green politics - is securely located.7
This involves recentring national historiography - which has long overlooked
that 'Ovine accumulation, land, and knowledge were an important nexus of power'
(p. 19)- on to the Cape pastoral economy in general, and 'The influence of self-
consciously progressive farmers in the midland and eastern districts, many of whom
concentrated on pastoral production' in particular (p. 19). In addition, it seeks to
rescue this group from the stock charge of environmental degradation routinely
levelled at European settlers in Africa by revealing the 'deep history' of their
' conservationist ideas' (p. 390). It explicitly excludes any consideration of either (i)
blacks, women, Afrikaners or underclass whites (p. xviii) in favour of the small
clique of white, male, Anglo-Saxon, rural capitalists who espoused and practised
progressivism; or (ii) of political economy (the stolen land and coerced labour on
which commercial pastoral production might more plausibly be assumed to have
rested) for a smorgesbord of 'environmental concerns' (p. 19) bundled under
Beinart's own term 'conservationism', amelioration of which, he suggests, was the
real wellspring of the anglophone pastoral elite's prosperity. More generally, but
no less controversially, he suggests, the solutions to these various environmental
problems were the means through which progressive Eastern Cape pastoralists
were able to achieve a 'stabilization of the veld' (p. 380) characterized by its en-
hanced 'biodiversity' (p. 26). The notion of 'stabilization' contradicts the 'radical
rangeland theorists' Beinart elsewhere quotes with approval, while no evidence is
offered for the claim of enhanced 'biodiversity' which also contradicts recent
scientific assessments.8 Beinart nonetheless insists that the progressives' environ-
mental legacy, contra the greens, is one of 'improvement' rather than 'degra-
dation' and one moreover imperiled by the post-1994 preference for communal
tenure over 'constrained exploitation under systems of private tenure' (p. 389).
As befits such a revanchist project, the awkward matter of political economy is
swiftly dispensed with inside the first twenty-five pages via a series of graphs
mutely plotting gross stock numbers, output and value, against price, purportedly
to reveal a poor fit between production shifts and market signals, which is then
ascribed to hidden environmental factors. Having thus established the pastoral
economy's significance to GDP and sensitivity to the invisible hand of environ-
ment rather than the market, the book devotes two chapters to proposals by the
usual travellers and early colonial scientists for improving settler agriculture, be-
fore launching on an extended inventory of post-I86o debates on the key natural
hazards menacing Eastern Cape commercial stock farming: pasture degradation,
pathogens, drought, predators and weeds. This is followed by a case study of the
'model farm' (p. 305) of Wellwood and its proprietors the Rubidges, whom Beinart
lauds throughout the book as the embodiment of Eastern Cape progressivism and
its conservation ethos, and a postscript reflecting on post-I950 debates about the
region's environment. Two incongruous chapters on the Union-era Afrikaner

7 See n. 2 above, especially the work of Brown, Gilfoyle, Tropp and van Sittert, for
Cape environmental history's preoccupation with late colonial progressivism.
8 See e.g. Beinart 'Environmental destruction', and W. R. J. Dean and S. J. Milton
(eds.), The Karoo: Ecological Patterns and Processes(Cambridge, 1999)-
 THE NATURE OF POWER 309

technocrat H. S. du Toit and the Eastern Cape African reserves are intended
to suggest that conservation appealed more widely than just to the anglophone
gentry. These fail to convince, however, not least because of their resolutely official
perspective and disregard for popular Afrikaner and African opposition to Anglo
agricultural improvement.9
So how important were Eastern Cape progressive pastoralists and their ideas in
South African history? The answer, after four hundred pages, is that we are none
the wiser, primarily because of Beinart's failure to 'systematically build in political
economy, the history of ideas, as well as ecological change' (p. 389). By persistently
fudging the first and resolutely focusing only on the latter two, he imputes to
progressives an importance unsubstantiated by any empirical evidence as to their
number, capitalization or political organization. This is no accident, for when this
detail is added, Cape progressivism stands revealed for what it was, the Walter
Mitty daydreams of a small, scattered and politically impotent Eastern Cape Anglo
rump. Hardly the breakers and makers of worlds as Beinart would have us believe.
Although quite prepared to count sheep, the only head count of progressives
Beinart offers is an oblique inference from an unreferenced and undated Agricul-
tural Journal circulation of 'about 6,ooo' (p. 155). The only published circulation
figure, however, is for a print run of 5,000 copies in 1899, two-fifths of which were
in Dutch.1o This leaves an English distribution of just 3,000 copies (or half
Beinart's figure) and - ignoring that the journal was widely distributed within the
civil service and to institutions - suggests anglophone progressives constituted, at
the very most, less than 8 per cent of the total number of settler farm heads.n Nor
does Beinart make any effort to use the census data disaggregated by division to
compare improvements (dams, fences, boreholes), stocking levels, production,
yield per animal, etc., in the progressive's Eastern Cape heartland with other re-
gions. This is particularly surprising as such an approach has a long pedigree
in South African historical geography and has been employed to map the spread
of enclosure in the Cape.12 Finally, it is nowhere explained that a 'pro-
gressive' government only held office for just five out of the sixty years in Beinart's
core period.'3

9 For Cape Afrikaner opposition see M. Tamarkin, 'Flock and volk: ecology, culture,
identity and politics among Cape Afrikaner stock farmers in the late nineteenth century',
paper presented at African Environments Past and Present conference, St Antony's
College, Oxford, 5-8 July 1999; and Nel, 'For the public benefit'. For African opposition
in the Cape see P. Scully, 'The 1914 dipping disturbances: an analysis of the effects of
the East Coast fever regulations on East Griqualand society' (Honours dissertation,
University of Cape Town, 1984); and C. Bundy, 'We don't want your rain, we won't
dip: popular opposition, collaboration and social control in the anti-dipping movement,
1908-I6', in W. Beinart and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics
and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape 1890o-930 (Johannesburg,
1987), 191-221. 10 Cape of Good Hope, House of Assembly Debates (1899), 582.
1 Cape of Good Hope, Census i904, 342-4, for settler heads of farms calculated from
Class 4, Order 7, Suborder I, Items 141-7 and 150 for 'European or White Persons'. This
yields a total of 38,391 rendering a notional 3,ooo anglophone progressives a minority of
per cent.
7"8 See
12 e.g. A.J. Christopher, Studies in Historical Geography: Southern Africa
(Chatham, 1976); and van Sittert, 'Holding the line', for such an approach to the Cape
census data. The latter ironically also confirms that enclosure originated and was the most
advanced in the Eastern Cape midlands by the end of the colonial period.
13 See K. Brown, 'Progressivism, agriculture and conservation in the Cape Colony
c. 1902-1908' (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, zooz), for a detailed history of this
administration and its environmental interventions.
310 LANCE VAN SITTERT

Nor does the history of state implementation of progressives' pet projects

suggest that a sympathetic bureaucracy enabled them to exercise an influence
massively disproportionate to their number and political power.14 As Carswell,
McCracken and Yngstrom amply demonstrate in their contributions to Social
History and African Environments, the number and quality of state functionaries on
the ground was a crucial determinant of success, even under the most favourable
circumstances, where improvement could be imposed on African subjects rather
than having to be sold to citizen settlers. The Cape colonial-cum-provincial
state was understaffed and underfinanced throughout the period, its efforts at
agricultural improvement token and its commitment governed by financial not
ideological considerations. Here, too, Beinart fails to provide any systematic
budgetary or staffing information for the agricultural civil service or comment on
the often strikingly brief Cape careers of the progressives' supposed bureaucratic
champions.
Even the chapter devoted to the 'specific history' (p. 331) of Sidney Rubidge's
tenure at Wellwood confirms rather than refutes suspicions that Beinart has made a
mountain of a molehill. Only here, three-quarters of the way through the book,
do we belatedly discover just how unrepresentative Wellwood was of the mid-
lands - being bigger, better capitalized and more developed than the average - and
that Sidney Rubidge was both a hamfisted politician and a dubious conservationist,
not least in his massive overstocking of the farm in the I930s.15 Rather than their
embodiment of a chimerical progressive conservationism the disproportionate
attention paid the Rubidges is due to Wellwood's rare farm archive, the very
existence of which proclaims them an exception rather than the norm. Progress-
ivism, in short, was so much sound and fury, signifying very little, even at the
height of its always ephemeral powers.
The tendency to disregard context has plagued Beinart's project from the start.
In a 1984 article he argued for a southern African conservationist ethos, but aban-
doned the idea after it was criticized by Phimister for Southern Rhodesia.1" The
book, however, perpetuates the practice of overgeneralizing with its claim to
encompass 'South Africa' when in reality its reach is at best the Eastern Cape
midlands. The failure to specify context - the actual capacity of either progressives
or the state in a specific time and place to grasp in reality the terrains they
could so effortlessly command in their imaginations- produces the effect of
the autonomy of ideas. Thinking (or more correctly writing) something becomes

14 See e.g. van Sittert, 'The seed blows about', and van Sittert, 'Our irrepresible fellow
colonist', for the Cape colonial state's record on weed eradication. Gilfoyle, 'Veterinary
research', argues that it was more effective in veterinary emergencies, but see C. B.
Andreas, 'The lungsickness epizootic in the Cape Colony, c. 1853-1857' (Honours
dissertation, University of Cape Town, 2000); L. van Sittert, 'Class and canicide in Little
Bess: the 1893 Port Elizabeth rabies epidemic', South African Historical Journal, 48
(2003), 207-34; and N. Madida, 'A history of the Colonial Bacteriological Institute'
(M.A. thesis, University of Cape Town, 2003); for contra examples in this area too.
15 Also compare e.g. E. A. Host, 'Capitalisation and proletarianization on a Western
Cape farm: Klaver Valley 1812-1898' (M.A. thesis, University of Cape Town, 1992),
with W. Dooling, 'The decline of the Cape gentry', Journal of African History, 40 (1999),
215-42, for the very limited value of'specific histories' of individual progressive farms
versus those of regions in tracing the development of commercial agriculture in the Cape.
16 Compare Beinart, 'Soil erosion', with I. Phimister, 'Discourse and the discipline of
historical context: conservationism and ideas about development in Southern Rhodesia
1930-1950', Journal of Southern African Studies, Iz2(1986), 263-75. Beinart finds the
space to reprise that argument here (pp. 333-4), but without any mention of Phimister's
critique in the text, footnote or 'select' bibliography.
 THE NATURE OF POWER 311

misconstrued - via the elision of context - as tantamount to doing it. Nor is this a
failing of Beinart's alone. Helen Tilley's attempt in Social History and African
Environments to rehabilitate the interwar Africa Survey as having 'progressive and
liberalising effects, relieving rather than concentrating inappropriate technologies'
(p. 130) flies in the face of her own admission that
Despite lofty rhetoric and ambitious plans, many proposals that would have
coupled science and colonial development more concretely were unable to find
their way into official policy, and several were in fact rejected outright. Even
those that were approved often remained only partially implemented for want of
funds (p. 114).
To practise this kind of socially disembedded history of ideas, in which thought
acquires an agency of its own, is of course also to resurrect an older liberal his-
toriography founded on the ideas and archives of great (states)men. Both Tilley
and Beinart offer comparable lists of scientists, civil servants and settlers for
canonization, including, in the latter case, yet another misleading appreciation of
that overrated and unimportant colonial botanist, John Croumbie Brown (a cult
started and one would have hoped by now exhausted by Richard Grove).1 Indeed,
Brown, another legend in his own mind, could be the poster child of Cape pro-
gressivism (albeit not in the sense imagined by his latter day hagiographers).
Arrogant, ill-informed and isolated, his tenure lasted a bare four years (1863-6)
and culminated in the abolition of his post which was not resuscitated again until
I88.x18 As with Wellwood, Brown's real attraction is not his contemporary im-
portance, but his prodigious output in vanity publishing, moving Beinart to lament
that 'the termination of his contract, whatever its results for the colony at the time,
undoubtedly deprived historians of what could have been a major collation of
material on environmental history' (p. ioo). Thus, a quarter century after the
radicals put liberal historiography to the sword, the history of ideas brings us full
circle to venerate once again the scribblings of dead white males.
Proof of the poverty of such an approach to Cape environmental (or any other)
history is already to hand in the form of Nancy Jacobs, Environment, Power and
Injustice. While Jacobs's narrative encompasses an even more ambitious sweep of
time than Beinart, taking in the last three centuries, it is confined in space to 'one
South African region, the Kalahari Thornveld' (p. 21) around Kuruman in the
northwestern Cape. Here she meticulously plots the trajectory of the extensive

17 See R. Grove, 'Early themes in African conservation: the Cape in the nineteenth
century', in D. Anderson and R. Grove (eds.), Conservationin Africa: People, Politics and
Practice (Cambridge, 1987), 21-39; R. Grove, 'Scottish missionaries, evangelical dis-
courses and the origins of conservation thinking in southern Africa', Journal of Southern
African Studies, 15 (1989), 22-39; and R. Grove, 'Scotland in South Africa: John
Croumbie Brown and the roots of settler environmentalism', in Griffiths and Robin
(eds.), Ecology and Empire, 139-53. For the best appraisal of Brown see P. J. Venter, 'An
early botanist and conservationist at the Cape', Archives Year Book for South African
History, 15 (1952), 281-92.
18 Predictably, the new incumbent in I881, another Scotsman, Peter MacOwan, who
held the post for a quarter century until his retirement and its recession induced abolition
in 1905, has attracted absolutely no attention in the metropole despite his infinitely longer
tenure, far greater understanding of the Cape environment and demonstrable influence on
official policy, solely because he produced no comparable published reports and is hence
invisible to metropolitan historians viewing the Cape past largely through the holdings in
the PRO and Rhodes House. See 'Peter MacOwan', South African Journal of Science, 7
(1909), 71-9; D. W. Kruger (ed.), Dictionary of South African Biography, II (Cape Town,
I972), 423-5; and van Sittert 'The seed blows about'.
312 LANCE VAN SITTERT

production practised by the region's black inhabitants across three great divides:
the frontier (both precolonial and colonial), colonialism and segregation. The
result is a richly textured and beautifully written history full of surprising revisions
to conventional wisdom.
Like Beinart, Jacobs follows current form in refusing 'declensionist' (p. 17)
readings of the historical Cape environment, but in preference for its social history
rather than its 'stabilization' by elite ideas. At the heart of Jacobs's analysis is the
simple suggestion that 'Even in this challenging environment, the difficulties
people have had supporting themselves have more to do with injustices among
humans than with deficiencies in the nonhuman world' (p. 16). Indeed, an
unfashionable fixation with social relations of production is a hallmark of the
Cape environmental history scholarship emanating from the American academy,
of which Jacobs has now established herself as the foremost exponent.19
She compellingly demonstrates how a system of extensive production both
evolved in the arid thornveld environment and endured through the mid-twentieth
century thanks to innovative underclass borrowings from missionaries (irrigation)
and selective engagement with colonialism ('extensive' wage labour as maize har-
vesters in the Free State or asbestos gatherers in the thornveld). The long-assumed
tipping point of indigenous agro-pastoralism in the calamitous I89os (rinderpest,
rebellion and retaliatory land seizures) is shown to have had a class and gender
dimension. While the I89os did indeed mark the end of a cattle-based economy
presided over by a gerontocracy of male chiefs a new underclass agro-pastoralism,
based on donkey keeping and subsidized by wage labour, gradually (and painfully)
emerged in its wake. The state and its betterment practice were crucial to the
ultimate demise of the latter. Here Jacobs draws on Mamdani to affirm the acute
vulnerability of tribal subjects under communal tenure not only to summary
dispossession but also to draconian direct interventions to dictate land use. Con-
servation in the northwest is shown, contra Beinart, to have been a crude gloss on
racially motivated social engineering uninformed by any real understanding of or
even interest in the thornveld environment. In the service of separate develop-
ment, it was ultimately deployed as a class weapon by chiefs to resuscitate the cattle
economy and destroy the popular agro-pastoralism of commoners in the 1983
Bophuthatswana donkey massacre.
Jacobs opens and closes her history with C. S. Lewis's observation that 'What
we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men
over other men with Nature as its instrument' (p. 31 and p. 219) and throughout
consciously eschews a history of ideas about the environment for a sustained
interrogation of the ways in which class, race, gender and the state structured
and restructured people's relationship with the thornveld. Power, for Jacobs, is the
real topic of environmental history.
Concentrations of power create structured inequalities between people in different
racial, class and gender categories, and ... the inequalities between these categories
are fundamental to the ways people relate to the environment. Thus power is a
necessary consideration in environmental history, and in order to understand the
historical dynamic between people and the biophysical environment, it is necessary
to identify influence, authority and material advantages in society. However, the

19 See e.g. N. Jacobs, 'The flowing eye: water management in the upper Kuruman

Valley, South Africa', Journal of African History, 37 (1996), 237-60; N. Jacobs, ' Environ-
ment, production and social difference in the Kalahari thornveld, c. I750-1830', Journal
of Southern African Studies, 25 (i999), 347-73; Jacobs, 'The great Bophuthatswana
donkey massacre'; Jacobs, 'Grasslands and thickets'; Mitchell, 'Traces in the landscape';
Tropp, 'Dogs'; and Tropp, 'Displaced people'.
 THE NATURE OF POWER 313

consideration of power is more than a historical exercise; it is a moral process,

involving reflection about how humans should live on this earth (p. 2 I ).
And yet Jacobs is also a prisoner of the radical social history tradition. Her
advocacy of a 'moral ecology' (p. 2 3) - echoing the anti-apartheid social historians'
'moral economy' - apparently does not encompass whites, who are an entirely
anonymous presence in her history, purportedly surviving the arid thornveld
environment by massive state subventions alone. As Beinart incontrovertibly
demonstrates, settlers like indigenes, where they endured, closely adapted their
farming practice to specific environments and to imply, as Jacobs does here, that
midland progressives and thornveld Boers were effectively interchangeable be-
cause they were white is an unfortunate lapse into crude stereotype for a historian
so closely attentive to every nuance and subtlety of African identity and expression.
Not that the neoliberals fare any better. While Conservation in South Africa ignores
all 'others', Beinart and McGregor acknowledge 'It is a weakness of past writings
that indigenous and scientific, African and settler ideas are often considered
separately' (p. 3), but then reproduce rather than resolve the problem by relegating
indigenous/African and settler/scientific to separate sections of Social History and
African Environments.
Environmental history at its best - melding political economy, culture and eco-
logy - has no need of the name. Jacobs on the thornveld or Karen Middleton on the
ironies of invasive species in Social History and African Environments are simply
good 'historical storytelling', passing Cronon's test to keep 'us morally engaged
with the world by showing us how to care about it and its origins in ways we had
not done before' (quoted in Jacobs, p. 218). And who would think to call The Seed
is Mine environmental history or Charles van Onselen an environmental his-
torian ?20Conversely the variant of environmental history infected with the conceit
that text is the only reality and reality only a text, when practised on the marches
of the old empire, produces a profoundly reactionary effect. This is particularly
acute in those regions, such as southern Africa, where European colonialism was
spearheaded by white settlers. In an environment in which indigenous societies
and knowledge systems have been violently disintegrated and texts monopolized
by the colonizers, a straight exegesis of ideas will not do and risks reiterating
and intellectualizing the violence of the original erasure. As Jacobs reminds us,
'It is necessary to read outsider sources on two levels: for their context and pre-
judices and for evidence about people operating within their historic environ-
ments' (p. 25). Simply serving up the 'ideas' of Anglo pastoralists or Africa(n)
Survey(ors) disembedded from their context blunts all critical edges and confirms
rather than contests the prevalent metropolitan nostalgia for a colonial Merrie
Africa, where the benign base knew best and the 'boys' and 'girls' were grateful.21

20 C. van Onselen, The Seed is Mine: The Life of a South African Sharecropper

1894-i985 (New York, 1996).

21
See e.g. P. Chabal, 'The African crisis: context and interpretation', in R. Werbner
and T. Ranger (eds.), Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London, 1996), 37-8; and E. Said,
'Always on top', London Review of Books, 25, 6, 20 March 2003, 3-6.