Shaping the African Savannah

From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia

Michael Bollig

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781108488488
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108809900
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an 'Arid Eden' in recent literature, as one of Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a 'last frontier' by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia's Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this 'Arid Eden' came into being, how this 'last frontier' was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 The Evolution of Pre-Colonial Environmental Infrastructure
• Part 3 Encapsulation and Pastoralisation, 1900s to 1940s
• Part 4 The State, Intervention, and Local Appropriations between the 1950s and 1980s
• Part 5 Dynamics of Social-Ecological Relations between the 1990s and the Present
• Part 6 Theorising Time, Space, and Change in a Pastoral System
• Bibliography
• Index