2024/02/29 by Anjuli Webster · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories #South African History and Culture #Water Governance and Infrastructure
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0021853724000021
openalex publication_date 2024/02/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract How has water shaped the history of a region that is bordered by ocean, brimming with ephemeral rivers, and yet prone to drought? This article explores water histories in Southern Africa over the past two hundred years. Using oral traditions, epic poetry, archival sources, and secondary anthropological and archaeological literature, I examine how Africans and Europeans related to, claimed, and used different bodies of water. In the first section I discuss how water was central to isiNguni conceptions of social and political life. In the second section I discuss how European empires used water to enclose and dispossess African land and to build hydropolitical colonial orders over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I conclude by reflecting on afterlives of these water histories in the present.