Part of review forum on “Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid”

In Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid, Meredith McKittrick tells the story of a popular but fantastical scheme to flood the Kalahari Desert that never happened. This innovative environmental history approaches early twentieth-century southern Africa from an array of new directions, from the subterranean to the atmospheric, from the Karoo to the Caprivi, and with a new set of terms including “folk hydrology” and “pan-settler southern Africa.” Across eight chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, and drawing on archival sources in English, Afrikaans, and German, McKittrick traces the changing nature of support for and critique of the scheme, exploring a well-studied era of South African history in novel and often surprising ways.

The book “asks how a place like southern Africa—where 99 percent of the land is classified as drylands or hyperarid, and where Black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of three to one—could conceivably be imagined as a lushly greened land of white yeoman farmers” (17). It does so by exploring the wider networks and contestations over geologist Ernest Schwarz’s plan to flood the Kalahari Desert by diverting the Chobe and Kunene Rivers to make green lands across arid Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa. Schwarz was not alone. He channelled and expanded the ideas of other settlers, geologists, and farmers who also hoped to geoengineer more rain and to expand white settlement and agriculture across dryland southern Africa.

It is a story about water, about race, and about settler colonial aspirations to disappear indigenous populations while “redeeming” white futures. Focusing on the relationship between racial and environmental fears and imaginaries in twentieth-century South Africa, and the scientific and settler revolutions which shaped them, the book is more expansive both spatially and temporally, than it might appear at first. Reaching far beyond southern Africa, and far deeper than the twentieth century, McKittrick makes connections with emergent ideas about geology, geography, and hydrology in the US West, the Brazilian Sertão, the Gobi Desert, and the Australian drylands. She insists, however, that despite its global counterparts, the Kalahari imaginary was primarily fed through “local roots” (213).

Schwarz was born between two revolutions which shaped his scheme—the first was a “transformation in scientific understandings of the planet’s geological and climatic past; the second was a ‘settler revolution’ that drew large numbers of Europeans and their descendants into the world’s arid lands” (20). It is these two processes which shape the different timescales of the story, including historical and geologic time. In Chapter Two we learn of “The decoupling of historical and geological time, as scientists came to accept that the earth was much older than once thought, [which] opened up new possibilities for understanding the origins of aridity as something ‘independent of the will of man’” (63–64). It is interesting, then, that “Schwarz’s published textbooks referenced the geological epochs that were his profession’s accepted chronological framework. But when he wrote about southern Africa’s desiccation, he shifted to historical time, situating major geological changes in the recent past” (47).

McKittrick carefully traces connections between settler ideas about race and the environment, while exploring tensions and conflicts between scientific “expertise,” state bureaucracy, and local and popular settler opinion and experience. Whatever the conflicts between ways of thinking about aridity, “Both state-sanctioned and white vernacular knowledge were embedded in a larger context of racial power that rested on claims to rationality and modernity” (81). We learn that Schwarz’s vision to flood the Kalahari was popular in part because it was “remarkably low-tech” (158). In Schwarz’s estimation, and that of many others, irrigation was expensive, mostly benefitted richer farmers, often failed, and left poorer farmers in debt (159). Indeed, Schwarz positioned himself as “a scientist who was standing up to an unresponsive and hidebound club of government experts” who were not in tune to peoples’ frustrations (164). McKittrick argues that “ecological affiliation” rather than ethnic or party affiliation shaped support for Schwarz’s scheme—farmers who lived in dry regions like the Karoo and Northern Cape were especially dedicated to the idea of redeeming the Kalahari (167).

Other scientists were frustrated by the popularity of Schwarz’s thirstland redemption, and decried the fantastical claims that Schwarz made. Alex Du Toit expressed “the frustration scientists had felt collectively during the years in which Schwarz’s scheme had enchanted an adoring public,” referring to the “deplorable lack of evidence” and “outrageous” and incorrect presumptions about rainfall and atmospheric circulation that it depended on (196–97). Even after farmers moved away from Schwarz’s particular scheme they “continued to embrace something more fundamental in his imagined future: the dual promise of environmental security with white prosperity” (209), ideas consistent with a “growing techno-utopianism around water within the state bureaucracy” in the 1940s (223).

In tracing the life of Schwarz’s scheme—the rise and fall and rise again in its popularity, its reception and rejection among different groups of people from farmers to scientists, to prime ministers, and in exploring the many afterlives of the scheme, McKittrick is able to tell the story of early twentieth-century southern Africa anew, beyond the well-trodden path of industrialization, world wars, and the path from union to segregation to apartheid. Thinking historically with water, McKittrick shows us how settler colonialism and white supremacy were secured not only through law, politics, and racial capitalism, but also through hydrology, geology, and fantasies about how the earth should look and the proper ways for rain to fall.