Reclaiming African Environmentalism: Ecological Struggles for wellbeing and habitability

African Doctoral and Masters researchers in Environmental Humanities, in the past 6 years, working in Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Burundi, Ghana, Tanzania, Lesotho, Kenya, and DR Congo have consistently and independently come up against a similar story: that struggles in rural Africa are against neoliberal ideas of market-driven development, and neoliberal notions of environmentalism, that have proven fundamentally at odds with both economic and ecological wellbeing. Building on Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (HSRC 2013; 275 citations to date), this volume develops an approach that identifies the ways in which environment and society is conceptualized by development “experts”, environmentalists and state officials, and contrasts those conceptualizations with understandings of ecology and wellbeing at ground level. No comparable work on this topic has been done across ten African countries. Drawing on in-depth field research by African graduates, many of whom have pursued field research in their home languages, the collection makes a sustained and powerful case that local people’s struggles for livelihood have intensified against globalized corporate extractivism across the continent. Individual papers describe struggles over soil, mining, water, seed, pastoralism, energy, technology, forestry, and carbon trading. Linking African strugglestoLatin American rejection of extractivism and South Asian resistance to industrial agriculture and monocropping, the collection will be the first of its kind to make the case that indigenous and other political minorities’ forms of relation to land are vital resources for the protection of African ecological wellbeing and that they define contemporary African environmentalism that makes a crucial contribution to rethinking and re-storying climate negotiations, conservation, and development.

Introduction

Part I Property and the Commons

1. Munene Mugambi Neoliberalism and Pastoralism: Two Competing Visions of the Same Land at a time of Climate Crisis, Kenya

2. Esther Sigauke When law and policy fail to meet reality: Exploring environmental conflicts in the utilisation and management of Marlborough wetland, Harare, Zimbabwe

3.  Moment Malandu and Frank Matose Contested Forests: Claims and meanings of property around Gwayi Forest, Zimbabwe

4. Anselmo Matusse Plantationocene in Lugela district: reclaiming nature, relations and personhood amid growing neo-extractive capture in contemporary Mozambique

5. Guy Dkamela Forest carbon conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Wildlife Works Carbon LLC vs. Ngongo Basengele community

Part II Extraction and Waste

6. Tafadzwa Mushonga State, NGOs and the extractive nature of the conservation industry in Zimbabwe

7. Koudjoe Tumawu Land transformation and dispossession: The case of farming and extractive gold mining in western Ghana

8. Samwel Moses Ntapanta Hacking Life: Electronic Waste Salvaging in Tanzania’s Digital Age

9 Michelle Pressend Windscapes: Frontiers of South Africa

10 Pierre du Plessis Fracturing Contested Landscapes: Resource Frontiers in the Kalahari, Botswana

Part III Grieving, Reclaiming and Defending Earthly Relations

11. Kefiloe Sello The Water Healer with No Water

12. Benjamin Klein Restoring the Earth: Literary Narrative and African Environmental Struggles

13. Nteboheng Phakisi “Technology changes everything” — herbicides and soil in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

14. Sinegugu Zukulu The battle for the soul of Xholobeni land, South Africa

15. Nikiwe Solomon The Paradox of Infrastructure: Technopolitics and time on the Kuils River in Cape town, South Africa Conclusion: Composing an African Environmental Humanities

Conclusion

Lesley Green is a Professor of Earth Politics and Director of Environmental Humanities South at the. University of Cape Town. She leads the Critical Zones Africa project, collaborating with African universities. A former Fulbright Scholar and Rockefeller Humanities Fellow, her research focuses on justice-based environmental governance in Southern Africa. She is a member of the Club of Rome and the Earth Humanity Coalition’s Steering Committee. Her book Rock | Water | Life won the 2023 Humanities Book Prize from the Academy of Science of South Africa.

Frank Matose is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town. His research focuses on the political ecology of people, rights and resources in Africa. He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of the Commons. His forthcoming works include Politics of Chronic Liminality(James Currey). He is a Fellow of the Rights and Resource Coalition (www.rightsandresources.org) and an advisory committee member of the Collaborating for Resilience (CoRe, www.coresilience.org).

Anselmo Matusse works as a Research officer at the Environmental Humanities South, Universityof CapeTown, within the Critical Zones Africa project funded by Science for Africa. His research interestsincludeplatformisation of environmental governance, higher education teaching and research, peacebuilding, andindigenous knowledge’s.

Nikiwe Solomon is an environmental anthropologist specializing in the intersection of science, technology, politics, and urban water management. Her PhD, The Kuils Multiple, explores the social, technical, and political entanglements of Cape Town’s Kuils River. She has experience in consultancy and academia, focusing on green economies and water governance. A former fellow in the Seed Box project, she has trained SMEs and taught courses on society, science, and politics in the Environmental Humanities at UCT.