Green Lands for White Men

Auteur

Meredith McKittrick is associate professor of history at Georgetown University. She is the author of To Dwell Secure: Generation, Christianity, and Colonialism in Ovamboland.

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"A compelling and timely history, Green Lands for White Men explores how white farmers in southern Africa grappled with arid environments and climate change as they sought to consolidate white dominance over the Black majority. In the early twentieth century, white southern Africans engaged in bitter disputes over the reality of climate change and its consequences. Many whites argued that rainfall was declining and that if they did not do something about it, the subcontinent would become a desert and white civilization in the region would collapse. The believers in climate apocalypse found their savior in Ernest Schwarz, a geology professor who promised that diverting rivers into the Kalahari would restore southern Africa's once-rainy climate, creating newly greened lands for the settlement of millions of whites and securing the future of a "white man's country" in Africa. Green Lands for White Men uses the story of this popular (though fortunately unrealized) attempt to engineer southern Africa's climate and racial order to examine the agrarian roots of apartheid in the mid-twentieth century. We live in a time of growing climate catastrophe, public mistrust of scientific experts, and emboldened white nationalism. In this book we witness this on another continent and in another century and see how these apparently unrelated factors came together to reinforce a worldview that proved highly resistant to argumentation and challenge by scientists"--