Editorial

Abstract

A common theme across the four general articles in this issue is how diverse locations – a Zimbabwean forest, South African township developments, an imperial troopship, and Swedish universities and diaspora organisations – acquire sets of meanings and attachments for southern Africans. Each has political significance extending beyond the banal materiality of trees, homes, boats and offices. Using different methods and approaches from environmental history, architecture, literature and political science, the four authors examine the relationships between people and their association with places. As the papers are ordered in this issue, these places range from a distinctive African socio-nature to a distant non-African post-modernity. In the first article, autochthons make claims to land and related resources on the basis of indigeneity. Noel Ndumeya examines how the biophysical landscape of the Chiranda forest in eastern Zimbabwe provided a setting for contestations between the Forestry Commission and many of the surrounding communities between 1980 and 2000. This rich, recent socioecological history provides a fascinating example of what might otherwise be termed a political ecology: the study of how political, economic and social factors interact with environmental issues. Here Ndumeya considers the political continuities between the colonial and post-colonial state, the economic opportunities presented and denied to local communities and the social and cultural effects on livelihoods, which included subversive behaviours, as communities sought to maintain their relationships with landscapes ‘conserved’ by government. Ndumeya’s landscape was organic, living and somewhere that reflected a long association between people in place. In the second article, by contrast, Hannah le Roux examines how a designed urban development had agency over black lives in apartheid South Africa and would later forge new relationships through its use. In the 1950s, creative architects at the National Building Research Institute drew upon diverse social and cultural experiences to inform their work. The architectural outcomes reflected the vision of not only white designers, but also white bureaucrats and black leaders, although black bodies, the landscape, and the contribution of indigenous culture were relegated to the background. This work challenges perceptions of the associations between people and places under apartheid. Le Roux argues that it ‘complicates the narrative that apartheid housing was solely a mode of creating passive and modern bodies’. Intriguingly, African agency was referenced within the original housing designs, which challenges existing discussion of Africans’ reactions to the received forms of dwelling. The planned township formed containers for black bodies and continues to mark presentday landscapes. SS Mendi was a vessel for carrying Africans, and the tragic loss of 607 lives that accompanied its sinking in 1916 has left scars on the national consciousness. Ships are temporary homes during voyages, but the wrecking of SS Mendi has meant that it has a tragic permanence as a reminder of the black South African role in the First World War, a contribution that was, until recently, barely memorialised in official discourse. In the third article, Neville Smith discusses two works of literature written a century apart, S.E.K.