Environment, power, and injustice
Subtitle: a South African history
By: Nancy J. Jacobs.
Series: Studies in environment and history
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 300
Subjects: Human ecology -- South Africa -- Kuruman -- History; Kuruman (South Africa) -- Social conditions; Kuruman (South Africa) -- Economic conditions
Description: "his book presents the socio-environmental history of black people around Kuruman, on the edge of the Kalahari in South Africa. Considering successive periods--Tswana agropastoral chiefdoms before colonial contact, the Cape frontier, British colonial rule, Apartheid, and the homeland of Bophuthatswana in the 1980s--Environment, Power and Injustice shows how the human relationship with the environment corresponded to differences of class, gender, and race. While exploring biological, geological, and climatological forces in history, this book argues that the challenges of existence in a semidesert arose more from human injustice than from deficiencies in the natural environment. In fact, powerful people drew strength from and exercised their power over others through the environment. At the same time, the natural world provided marginal peoples with some relief from human injustice."--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.