Natures of colonial change : environmental relations in the making of the Transkei / Jacob A. Tropp.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tropp, Jacob Abram.

Series:

New African histories series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnoecology--South Africa--Transkei--History.

Ethnoecology.

Colonies.

Landscape changes.

Forest ecology.

Indigenous peoples.

Social conditions.

South Africa--Transkei.

History.

Indigenous peoples--South Africa--Transkei--Social conditions.

Forest ecology--South Africa--Transkei.

Landscape changes--South Africa--Transkei.

Europe--Colonies--Africa.

Europe.

Transkei (South Africa)--Colonization.

Transkei (South Africa).

Transkei (South Africa)--Environmental conditions.

Africa.

Physical Description:

xiv, 268 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens : Ohio University Press, [2006]

Summary:

Since the formal unraveling of apartheid in South Africa, some of the nation's most persistent and intractable tensions have revolved around natural resources. In the territories formerly managed by successive colonial and white national governments as "reserves" or "homelands," resource allocation and conservation problems have been particularly acute.

In Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei, Jacob A. Tropp skillfully uncovers the roots of present-day environmental issues in the colonial history of one such region-the Transkei, subsequently the largest homeland during the apartheid era. In the late nineteenth century, as South Africa's Cape Colony completed its incorporation of the various African polities beyond the Kei River and began transforming the region into a labor reserve, it simultaneously restructured popular access to local forests, reserving those resources for the benefit of the white settler economy. This placed new constraints on local Africans in accessing resources for agriculture, livestock management, hunting, building materials, fuel, medicine, and ritual practices. In this groundbreaking study, Tropp explores negotiations between Africans and white settlers over the environment in the emergence of the colonial Transkei.

Natures of Colonial Change examines many important but underdeveloped fields in African history writing, such as how "customary" environmental practices and the meaning of environmental entitlements in the colonial era structured individual and collective rights and access to natural resources. Tropp's analysis thereby moves beyond simplistic and static renderings of gender and environmental relations often employed by state, NGO, and local actors.

Drawing from a diverse array of oral and written sources, Tropp reveals how bargaining over resources-between and among colonial officials, chiefs and headmen, and local African men and women-was interwoven with major changes in political authority, gendered economic relations, and cultural practices as well as with intense struggles over the very meaning and scope of colonial rule itself.

Contents:

Tensions in the colonial restructuring of local environmental authority, 1880-c. 1915

Environmental entitlements in the new colonial order, 1888-c. 1905

Shifting terrains of wood access in the early twentieth century, 1903-1930s

Remapping historical landscapes : forest species and the contours of social and cultural life

The python and the crying tree : commentaries on the nature of colonial and environmental power.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-261) and index.

ISBN:

0821416987

9780821416983

0821416995

9780821416990

OCLC:

70232299

Online:

Contributor biographical information

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