Part of review forum on “Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid”
Meredith McKittrick’s Green Lands for White Men is a history of the future. The book’s subject, Ernest Schwarz’s Kalahari Thirstlands Redemption Scheme, never came to fruition and failed at every turn, yet the ideological and intellectual underpinnings of the scheme came to define South Africa and contemporary settler colonies’ approaches to water, land, and race throughout the twentieth century. The book tackles several major themes: climate denialism and expert arrogance; declensionist and dessicationist narratives of environmental change; control over nature; and the corresponding construction of a white, settler identity. To connect the intertwined histories of race and nature, McKittrick quotes W.E.B. Du Bois in saying that the “new religion of whiteness” was underpinned by “ownership of the Earth forever and ever, Amen!” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1920, 6).
McKittrick’s narrative forces the reader to confront each of these subplots at once. There are many moments where, despite the professed white supremacy of these landscape visions, I felt empathy for the “folk hydrologists” who were disregarded and condescended by government experts. I began to wonder if McKittrick would introduce a plot twist where this version of whiteness, founded in a non-elite or less-elite form of settler colonialism, effectively contested hegemonic white supremacy in southern Africa. This twist never arrives, but the way in which whiteness was constructed in South Africa not in opposition to the native population, like in other settler colonies, but in rhetorical erasure of the black majority, makes this story of race-making as unique as it is comparably the same as the story of global whiteness.
While I was pulled into empathy for this Kalahari Thirstlands Redemption Scheme, or at least for its anti-elitist origins, I was simultaneously convinced that the plan to bring rainfall to the desert by diverting already unstable rivers truly seemed foolhardy, especially given the consistent declensionist vision, where the proof for the projects’ success lay in river beds from the past which were said to have only recently dried up due to native mismanagement. But then I learned what Schwarz’s audience learned, at what felt like a similar pace: (1) A version of this hydrological scheme was first envisioned by David Livingstone himself—Livingstone was not a hydrological expert but spent much more time embedded in central and southern Africa’s inland river systems than most, and Schwarz’s followers were understandably influenced by the inclusion of this Victorian-celebrity cachet; and (2) These two rivers did not even reach the Orange River. They were already, through a series of sandy dunes, naturally dammed. On rare occasions these rivers back flooded and were thick with fish despite never reaching the main river. With this information, I wondered if Schwarz and his thousands of followers could have been correct about being able to capture this infrequent backflow for use in the dry season and in drier years.
McKittrick’s narrative relies on an understanding that race-making was integral to the global environmental history of settler colonies, and vice versa. This is convincing, but the potential comparisons are vast and diverse. At first I was drawn to a comparison with California, despite McKittrick’s early attempts to guide the reader to the Great Plains and the disastrous water management schemes best discussed by Donald Worster. It was difficult to fully embrace this comparison to the Plains, though, because those are much wetter grasslands than the Kalahari, so I returned to California’s Central Valley and the controversial water diversion that allowed for it to flourish. In the decades since the centralization of water in California, though, the water table visually receded, wells dried, wildfires raged without water to fight them, and entire towns became water deprived. If implemented, the Kalahari Thirstlands Redemption Scheme could look a lot like California today. But the connection between the production of whiteness in South Africa and California is rocky, at least because California was once Mexico, its land-tenure system was a product of that history, and because California agriculture had many actors who denied the coherent production of whiteness around settlement and cultivation—black, Italian, and Japanese farmers, for example, upset this coherent identity production, at least until Internment and the theft of Japanese farmland.
My California comparison quickly became distracting, and perhaps that is why McKittrick shifted to Australia as her go-to comparison. But then, I wondered, why not Israel? As the book shows, settlers around the world, in the interest of defining whiteness and legitimating settlement, have tried to bring water to drylands much longer than the existence of the Israeli state, but in no context is the phrase, “make the desert bloom,” more often repeated. As I felt myself becoming distracted yet again by another dryland comparison of my own choosing, I realized that this is the most effective feature of this book. Green Lands for White Men is about early twentieth-century southwest Africa, and McKittrick does a great job at keeping the story founded in this place and in this time. And yet, this is also a story about the global production of whiteness, founded materially in the defensive posture of being settlers, minorities who owned most of the land and still sought control of even more. McKittrick leads readers through this particular southern African example, lets the reader’s mind wander and make connections, but then pulls the reader back to southern Africa to stress its peculiarities, again and again.
