Public Lecture in Garden and Landscape Studies

In this talk, historian Meredith McKittrick examines how southern Africa’s land- and waterscapes were imagined and engineered in the service of white supremacy. Ideas brought from Europe shaped how the whites who settled South Africa and Namibia’s arid lands in the nineteenth century understood “normal” landscapes. These colonists built dams and reservoirs on their farms, driven by the belief that holding water on the land legitimated their territorial claims and laid the foundation for prosperous neo-Europes. In the early twentieth century, this preoccupation with surface water helped generate a populist movement to divert rivers into the Kalahari in order to create massive lakes. People argued that the evaporation from these new bodies of water would increase rainfall and open up vast new lands for white settlement. The scheme had counterparts in zones of white settlement around the world, revealing how aridity posed conceptual and physical challenges to the project of European settler colonialism.

By the 1950s, popular enthusiasm for climate engineering had faded, but enthusiasm for hydrological engineering had not. The state assumed responsibility for reshaping southern Africa’s waterscapes in order to secure white dominance. South Africa’s apartheid government built hydroelectric dams, irrigation schemes, and water diversion canals within South Africa and beyond its borders. These infrastructure projects followed the racial logics of separate development. The resulting waterscapes were both symbolic and material manifestations of apartheid’s white supremacist ideology. White minority rule ended in the 1990s, but many of these racialized waterscapes endure today.

Meredith McKittrick is Professor of History at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on African and environmental history. Her research interests center on the intersection of race, colonialism, and the environment in southern Africa, and she is particularly interested in dryland environments and water resources. Her most recent book, Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid (University of Chicago Press, 2024), won the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History. Dr. McKittrick has also published on industrial agriculture, rainmaking, Christianization, and gender and generational relationships in the colonial era. She is now working on a long history of the Cuvelai River, a seasonal and endoreic river on the Namibian-Angolan border.