Arid Waters: Environment and Sovereignty in Southern Africa Restricted; Files Only
Webster, Anjuli (Spring 2025)
Abstract
In Southern Africa, human, animal, and plant life share a common challenge – making life with little water. As a dryland, the region loses more water to the sun than it retains in its ephemeral rivers, wetlands, and deltas. Historically, aridity shaped mobile and flexible indigenous political forms among Khoe-San, Nguni-Tsonga, and Sotho-Makua-Venda- speaking peoples, shifting access to common lands and waters, and diffuse settlement patterns. From the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, Portuguese, Dutch, and English sailors, settlers, and colonists dispossessed coastal enclaves and set out across the arid interior to explore and map regions unknown to them; to trade, to hunt and to proselytize; in search of areas for farming cattle, sheep and crops; and eventually in search of fortunes in diamonds and gold.
This dissertation narrates how these various groups searched for, related to, claimed, managed, and contested fresh water. The following seven chapters chronicle how indigenous communities across language groups lived in dynamic relation with rains and rivers, how settlers worried constantly about water, how traders and republics made transport routes across lands with no flowing rivers, and how colonial states remade regional ecologies towards agricultural and industrial production and profit, with new kinds of water technologies from pipes to concrete arch dams, and new languages of water law. Using archaeological, ecological, and anthropological scholarship and sources from eleven local and national archives in South Africa, Mozambique, England, Portugal, and Holland, it examines how colonialism, which sought to dominate and control indigenous populations and the environment, grappled with the material realities and challenges of an arid land. In trying to control water on the earth’s surface, falling from the heavens and rising from beneath the ground, communities molded their ideas about water’s value and proper form to the variability of dryland environments, and in so doing were themselves remade.
Table of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1
Chapter One: Sacred Waters, 1500-1900............................................................................. 32
Chapter Two: Profane Waters, 1652-1998 .......................................................................... 60
Chapter Three: Earthly Waters, 1720-1850 ......................................................................... 81
Chapter Four: Borders From the Sea, 1820-1880 ................................................................ 99
Chapter Five: Waterless Connections, 1840-1900............................................................. 131
Chapter Six: Hydraulic Waters, 1890-1940 ...................................................................... 153
Chapter Seven: Containing Water, 1930-2022 .................................................................. 170
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 192
Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 199
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File download under embargo until 22 May 2031 | 2025-04-03 13:26:09 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 May 2031 |
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