Nancy J. Jacobs

Scientific controversy and asbestos: making disease invisible.

Abstract Despite irrefutable evidence that asbestos causes asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma, asbestos mining, milling, and manufacturing continue. The authors discuss three scientific debates over the roles of fiber types, viruses, and genetics in the development of mesothelioma. While these controversies might appear internal to science and unconnected to policies of the global asbestos industry, they argue that scientific debates, whether or not fostered by industry, playa central role in shaping conceptualization of the problem of asbestos-related disease. In South Africa, India, and elsewhere, these controversies help to make the disease experience of asbestos-exposed workers and people in asbestos-contaminated communities invisible, allowing the asbestos industry to escape accountability for its practices.

The intimate politics of ornithology in Colonial Africa

A tendency in studies of science in colonial Africa is to focus on the “big politics” of resource extraction, environmental control, and the governmentality of subject bodies. As a result, we now recognize that colonial science was a highly political enterprise in which the pursuit of knowledge was infused with the dynamics of starkly exclusionary societies and extractive regimes. Scientific improvements in medicine and agriculture yielded benefits that underwrote colonial projects and the construction of authoritative knowledge in medicine, racial biology, and social science created disciplinary power over Africans as scientifically objectified colonial subjects. It has been observed that the failure of science to heed indigenous knowledge led to a “misreading” of the landscape and inappropriate intervention. Recently, some historians have attempted to mitigate overly stark depictions of colonial science, making good cases that the practice of scientific ecology, agronomy, and medicine in colonial Africa had motivations and effects beyond the service of extraction and governmentality. They have rightly informed us that the assessment of applied sciences in colonial Africa cannot be reduced to their role in European domination. Clearly, these are critical issues that merit attention. Yet the focus on ways science did (or did not) support various colonial agendas may have impeded the development of a more representative understanding of Euro-American scientific pursuits in African colonies.

The Flowing Eye: Water Management in the Upper Kuruman Valley, South Africa, c. 1800–1962

This paper considers the intensification of agriculture along racial lines in South Africa by looking at the history of one spring and nine miles of river valley. It illustrates how racial conflict included struggles over nature, and how whites and blacks had different perceptions and abilities regarding its exploitation. The ‘Eye’ of Kuruman is a large spring in a semi-arid region. Tswana herders originally used it as a water hole. Their food production system was extensive, making use of wide areas rather than increasing output in a limited area. Pastoralism was more important than agriculture. Irrigation, introduced by representatives of the London Missionary Society, was not widely practiced away from the missions until a subsistence crisis during the 1850s. It continued after the crisis passed. However, households continued to operate with the logic of extensive production, fitting irrigation into the pre-existing system. In 1885, tne British annexed the region as part of the Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland. They demarcated African reserves at springs and in river valleys, and grazing lands were opened for white settlement. The upper Kuruman valley was designated a Crown reserve and the Eye became a town site. Downstream were Tswana households which cultivated with less security than on a native reserve. Land alienation with rinderpest devastated stock keeping and caused a widespread famine at the turn of the century, yet Tswana cultivators did not greatly intensify their use of irrigable lands. More extensive methods endured and wage labor became the basis of support. In the twentieth century under Union government, use of the Eye intensified, and access to the valley became segregated by race. After 1918 the municipality of Kuruman operated a modern irrigation project, and in 1919, evicted black cultivators living at the Eye. Blacks continued to live and garden at Seodin, five miles downstream, but suffered water shortages which made even their casual irrigation impossible. Political expediency dictated against their pressing for water rights. In the 1940s the Department of Native Affairs drilled boreholes, but these were not sufficient to sustain cultivation. In 1962, the policy of Apartheid mandated the removal of blacks from Seodin. Despite state aid, the whites-only irrigation project never developed into a commercial success.

Collaborative Research, Participatory Solutions: Research on Asbestos in Kuruman, South Africa

Abstract The 1998 South African National Asbestos Summit proposed a post-apartheid asbestos policy for the country. In the areas of environmental rehabilitation, health care, and compensation, it envisioned connecting asbestos mitigation to participatory development. In 2001, the Asbestos Collaborative, an international and interdisciplinary team, conducted follow-up research on the recommendations of the 1998 Summit, researching environmental, health, and compensation issues through consultation of documents and interviews with officials in urban areas and with people in Kuruman, a former crocidolite-mining site with high rates of asbestos-related disease. In Kuruman, local opinion supported the recommendations of the Asbestos Summit, insisting that policies to mitigate the problem of asbestos must also address poverty. In the wake of the 2001 research, a new organization, the Asbestos Interest Group (AIG), has been founded to facilitate grassroots participation in asbestos issues. One success of the AIG has been the settlement of a lawsuit by former workers against the former mining company in Kuruman

Environment, Production and Social Difference in the Kalahari Thornveld, c1750–1830

This article considers the food production activities of people in the Thlaping and Tlharo chiefdoms in the present-day Northern Cape and North-West Provinces between c1750 and 1830. It considers food production methods, their environmental suitability and how food produtction related to social difference. It is arguted that the Tlhaping and Tlharo chiefdoms did not arise through the migration of agro-pastoralists, but that indigenous inihabitants began stock keeping and cultivating as the chiefdoms were established in the mid-eighteenth century. Thereafter food production remained extensive and the products of pastoralism – milk – provided the staple of the diet. Food production did not provide support for all people, and a significant class of foragers, who were not ethnically differentiated from other members of the chiefdons, lived at the bottom of the society and outside of the towns. It was possible for men to move between stock keeping and foraging in a process similar to the “ecological cycle” des...

Herding birds, interspecific communication, and translations

Robert Godfreys 1941 publication drawing on schoolboys’ essays, in Xhosa, Bird-Lore of the Eastern Cape Province described two species of birds as herding stock by whistling to them. These were the umcelu (wagtail species of the Motacilla genus) and intengu (fork-tailed drongos, Dicrurus adsimilis). It is possible to take this extraordinary claim about herding birds seriously. The birds have reputations throughout eastern and southern Africa for interactions with both people and stock. Vernacular and ecological knowledge provides a context for these claims: the honeyguide (Indicator indicator) and sentry birds – for example, the go-away bird (Corythaixoides leucogaster) – are widely recognized in Africa as effective interspecies communicators. Ecological studies of ‘heterospecific alarm calls’ have confirmed that birds and mammals communicate with each other. Research suggests, however, that if drongos and wagtails do whistle to herds and flocks, they seek advantages other than the safety of stock. Experimental research on this interspecies network would reveal more about participation by and affordances to stock, birds, and insects. But, what the boys say about their engagement with this network can be taken seriously. Social worlds theory, with its emphasis on collaboration without consensus and imperfect translations, supports a discussion of networks of interspecies communication.

Latitudes and Longitudes

This essay reviews connections between the environmental history of the Cape and similar cases along lines of latitude and longitude. It draws on many historical works, some explicitly comparative, some showing common processes in global or regional history, and some strictly local studies. More than offering a comprehensive survey of world, African, or Cape environmental history, it probes points of comparison and examines the links between the environmental history of the Cape and, on the one hand, settler societies in temperate zones and, on the other hand, tropical Africa.

Latitudes and Longitudes: Comparative Perspectives on Cape Environmental History

This essay reviews connections between the environmental history of the Cape and similar cases along lines of latitude and longitude. It draws on many historical works, some explicitly comparative, some showing common processes in global or regional history, and some strictly local studies. More than offering a comprehensive survey of world, African, or Cape environmental history, it probes points of comparison and examines the links between the environmental history of the Cape and, on the one hand, settler societies in temperate zones and, on the other hand, tropical Africa.

Latitudes and Longitudes: ComparativePerspectives onCapeEnvironmentalHistory

This essay reviews connections between the environmental history of the Cape and similar cases along lines of latitude and longitude. It draws on many historical works, some explicitly comparative, some showing common processes in global or regional history, and some strictly local studies. More than offering a comprehensive survey of world, African, or Cape environmental history, it probes points of comparison and examines the links between the environmental history of the Cape and, on the one hand, settler societies in temperate zones and, on the other hand, tropical Africa.