GREEN LANDS FOR WHITE MEN, desert dystopias and the environmental origins of apartheid

321pp., paperback, illus., maps, paperback, First SA Edition, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2024

ISBN: 9781776149513

First published in the USA in 2024.

A history of the 1918 Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme.

“As some commentators seek to dismiss the idea of settler colonialism as nothing more than an academic fad, McKittrick’s wonderful new book reminds us of the idea’s historicity and political cost; more importantly, Green Lands for White Men exposes the hubris and the fundamentally white supremacist underpinnings of that idea. As McKittrick shows so well in this well-researched and powerfully-argued study, apartheid did not come out of nowhere; it grew out of dystopias that not only misread colonized habitats but also effaced the indigenous inhabitants of those places. But this timely book is more than an exposé of terrible ideas. It is, above all, environmental history at its best: historical in its grounding, meticulous in its use of sources, sophisticated in its analysis, alert to the ethical stakes of its argument, and refreshingly bold in its approach to South Africa’s place in global networks of ideas and practices. Jacob Dlamini, author of The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s insurgents, collaborators, and the security police

“The high modernist fantasy to divert rivers, flood the Kalahari, and create rain - with hopes of settling three million white people - was impossible. But to farmers fearing failure in a drought-prone majority-Black land, it promised redemption. Encompassing their precarity, vernacular ecological knowledge, and racial identity, Green Lands for White Men is an unparalleled environmental history of twentieth-century white South Africa.” Nancy J. Jacobs, author of Birders of Africa: History of a network

Meredith McKittrick is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. She is the author of To Dwell Secure: Generation, Christianity, and Colonialism in Ovamboland.