Environment, Power, and Injustice

This book explores the environmental dynamic in the history of rural black South Africans. It historicizes food production and other environmental relations, over successive dispensations. But, class, gender and later race, determined the food production individuals practiced. Also, herders and cultivators faced drought, stock disease, bush encroachment, water shortages, and the high labor demands of irrigation. After the mid-twentieth century, the interventionist state, enforcing coercive conservation and segregation, became a partner in black people's relations with the environment. State intervention, as well as an increasing dependence on cash, undermined most food production by blacks.