Leonard Guelke

Landscape of conquest: frontier water alienation and Khoikhoi strategies of survival, 1652–1780

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European settlers ousted the Khoikhoi and San from much of the land they inhabited in south‐western Africa using a strategic combination of technology and bureaucracy. The settlers possessed a powerful new fighting technology in the form of firearms and horses that enabled them to hold and defend lands taken from the Khoikhoi. The Dutch East India Company legitimised settler occupation of Khoikhoi land by granting them exclusive use of lands they acquired in freehold or on loan. The settlers took advantage of this permissive policy and their connection to the Cape Town bureaucracy to acquire choice watered land in the interior. These lands and the water resources and pasture they contained were denied to the Khoikhoi pastoralists who found it increasingly difficult to sustain themselves in a land in which access to limited water resources was necessary for survival. In a slow, non‐catastrophic process the Khoikhoi were gradually squeezed out of the lands they ha...

The Role of Laws in Human Geography

‘Do geographers seek to describe individual cases or formulate general laws?’ When Hartshorne ( I 959) raised this question it was a matter of considerable debate among geographers. This debate, however, rapidly lost its momentum as increasing numbers of geographers accepted the view of geography as a law-seeking science. In spite of the occasional dissenting view the law-seeking or nomothetic approach has remained the generally accepted or basic paradigm of geography up to the present time. But today, perhaps, more than at any other time since Hartshorne wrote Perspeche on the nalure of geografihy, doubts about the viability of the nomothetic approach are beginning to voiced. This development is to be welcomed as it makes possible a reexamination of some basic issues in geography free of the ‘bandwagon’ atmosphere which engulfed the discipline in the 1960s.

Nietzsche and postmodernism in geography: An idealist critique

The suitability of a new philosophical paradigm for geography needs to be assessed in the context of the questions it was designed to address and on the basis of clearly articulated criteria. Postmodernism, the latest contender for the attention of geographers, is here assessed in relation to Collingwoodian idealism. As an intellectual movement postmodernism arose in the unique circumstances of academic life in post Second World War France. In this rigidly structured academic environment a new generation of French scholars, well schooled in the philosophies of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger and the ideas of Marx and Freud, discovered the radical nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and drew upon his ethical and philosophical writings to address contemporary issues of power, knowledge, truth and modernity. All the central anti-humanist ideas of what was to become postmodernism are to be found in Nietzsche: a distrust of science and knowledge truth claims, the notion of multiple interpretations and the subordination of knowledge to power. This situated knowledge, set in the traditions of Continental thought, is not easily incorporated into the empiricist philosophies that have hitherto defined the mainstream of Anglo-American science and humanist scholarship including geography. Geographers need to retain a commitment to the foundational value of science, recognize human agency in the form of the conscious, thinking individual, and continue to affirm the empirical nature of human geographical research.

On the role of evidence in physical and human geography

Abstract While physical geographers are united in a commitment to the scientific method with its emphasis on quantitative evidence, human geographers face a dilemma in deciding whether to adopt a scientific or humanistic approach in their research. The scientific approach offers a more secure, objective knowledge, but limits the scholar to a relatively narrow range of topics. The humanistic approach allows the scholar to explore a wide range of human experiences, but it lacks rigorous procedures of objective verification. The difficulty of the application of theoretical ideas to human societies can, to some extent, be avoided by adopting an historical approach, with an emphasis on the empirical investigation of human activity as a reflection of ideas. As long as human geographers have a commitment to basing their interpretations of geographical phenomena on objective evidence the possibility of a profitable co-operation exists among proponents of different philosophical approaches. A unified human geography embracing scholars of diverse views depends for its success on the identification of geographical problems that transcend philosophical and theoretical points of view.

The origin of white supremacy in South Africa: An interpretation

White supremacy in South Africa had its beginning in the initial Dutch colonial settlement of the Cape. The first Dutch settlers brought with them a vision of colonialism in which Europeans were superior to non‐Europeans, and could behave in colonies in ways that were not tolerated at home. The colonial idea of racial slavery corrupted early Cape officials before there were any slaves, and made the introduction of slavery inevitable. Marriages between white men and non‐European women were tolerated at the Cape as elsewhere in the Dutch colonial realm, but raciallymixed couples were not welcome in the Netherlands. The racial exclusivity of the Dutch home community gained ground at the Cape as its European settlers began to see themselves as a home community away from home, and sought to emulate home standards in so far as this was practicable in an overseas colonial setting.