Joint Booklaunch: Future Rural Africa & University of Namibia

Windhoek, Namibia I TUE 28 February 2023   

We are thrilled to announce the launch of two books based on research carried out in the Collaborative Research Centre Future Rural Africa.

Conservation, Markets & the Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa is the result of a joint CRC & UNAM workshop conducted in 2019.

“Shaping the African Savannah: From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia” is authored by CRC-TRR 228 speaker Michael Bollig (Project A04 Future Conservation).

“Conservation, Markets & The Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa: Commodifying the ‘Wild’ ” is co-authored by Michael Bollig in collaboration with Selma Lendelvo, Alfons Mosimane and Romie Nghitevelekwa, our partners from the University of Namibia and researchers in CRC Project A04. The latter publication is the culmination of a CRC funded joint workshop with the University of Namibia (UNAM) at UNAM Katima Mulilo Campus in September of 2019.

Abstracts:

Conservation, Markets & The Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa: Commodifying the ‘Wild’

Conservation, Markets & The Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa: Commodifying the ‘Wild’. Boydell & Brewer.

At a time of profound anxiety about the impact of human activity on nature and the catastrophic effects of climate change, the “sixth mass extinction”, invasive species and rapidly expanding zoonotic diseases, this volume engages with the practices, discourses, and materialities surrounding the commodification of “the wild”.

Focusing on the relationship between commodification and wilderness, the contributors pay particular attention to commodification’s newer iterations in which human management plays a significant role, such as wildlife-park tourism, trophy-hunting, and trade in herbal medicines, perfumes and luxury exotic food items.

Dominant neoliberal approaches have aimed to address global environmental challenges through the commodification and marketization of nature: by valorizing nature, they claim, biodiversity can be safeguarded and “wild” landscapes protected. This, it is thought, will not only open up a new frontier of sustainable, non-exploitative, participatory capitalist expansion, but invigorate rural livelihoods, reduce poverty, and add important assets to otherwise vulnerable rural economies. This important book challenges this future trajectory. Investigating a broad range of cases across southern and eastern Africa, from the illegal sandalwood trade to legal trade in devil’s claw and honeybush, to trophy-hunting and wilderness safaris, the contributors reveal the pitfalls and challenges of commodification, what this means for the continent and beyond.

Shaping the African Savannah: From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia

Shaping the African Savannah: From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia by Michael Bollig. Cambridge University Press.

The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an ‘Arid Eden’ in recent literature, as one of Africa’s most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a ‘last frontier’ by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia’s Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this ‘Arid Eden’ came into being, how this ‘last frontier’ was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.