Part of review forum on “Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid”

Finishing Green Lands for White Men in the general isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, I occasionally found myself wondering what people were going to make of it. A book about a fantastical scheme that never got built always struck me as a bit odd, and I was the one who decided to write it! So it’s been gratifying to see the many different lenses through which people read Green Lands for White Men, and I am deeply grateful for the time the respondents took to write these thoughtful and perceptive comments.

The reviewers all recognize my attempt to keep the book deeply rooted in southern Africa even as I take readers on excursions around the world. I struggled with this balance, knowing I couldn’t ignore the way similar schemes shared an obsession with whiteness and climatic apocalypse. This back and forth between the local and the global made the issue of scale very messy and raised the question of which global comparisons are most appropriate. I tried to follow my subjects’ leads in answering this question, either by looking at antecedents around the world or by writing about the places they also wrote about. That’s why both the Great Plains (where people thought settlement would improve the climate) and California (which Schwarz and his supporters wrote about in ways both envious and critical) make an appearance. Robert Lee Zeinstra III notes the similarities between the dreams of white southern African farmers and the Israel state’s quest to “make the desert bloom” and asks why I don’t mention it as a comparison. The main reason is simply that, at least as an organized movement, it postdates the movement to build Schwarz’s scheme. When I drew comparisons, it was mostly to give readers a window into the world inhabited by Schwarz and his supporters. But Israel is evidence for the continued salience of Anjuli Webster’s observation: Hydrological fantasies—and techno-utopianism—are integral to twentieth-century settler colonialism.

I think most writers need to feel some sense of connection to their subjects, and sometimes it was hard to feel much sympathy for the white men who complained about getting a raw deal while Black South Africans were enduring the tightening vice of white supremacy. My path to some understanding of their fears and frustrations was through the one noted by Zeinstra—the sheer arrogance of experts who were sometimes right and sometimes wrong, but always convinced that they were right. Mikhail Moosa notes the similarities with the way the state treated the knowledge of its Black subjects. Colonial experts’ disdain for African knowledge (even when that knowledge helped create colonial science) is a major theme of the environmental history literature. The debate over the trajectory of southern Africa’s climate and environment suggests that the primary tension Webster identifies, between scientific expertise and local knowledge grounded in direct experience, transcended racial lines in some (although not all) cases. And yet, as Webster notes, both local and expert knowledge in this case were harnessed to the cause of white supremacy.

The problem of Black erasure, raised by Moosa and Zeinstra, was one of the most difficult I faced as I tackled this project. Indeed, given my historical training, I wondered if the project was worth doing if I couldn’t find Black “voices” anywhere in this debate. Was it ethical to write a book about whites arguing amongst themselves about the future of lands that were occupied by Black southern Africans—arguments that, by and large, never even acknowledged the existence of those Black residents? Here perhaps my position as an American was helpful. US historians seem much more comfortable with the idea that white Americans historically have been able to do and say all kinds of things without taking account of Indigenous or Black populations—even when anxiety about those populations sits at the root of what they are doing or saying. The invisibility of Black people in the debate over the Kalahari Scheme taught me that invisibility is always manufactured, not a natural byproduct of population demographics.

Moosa asks an important, and related, question about what African elites made of the Schwarz Scheme and other white “rainmakers.” This is something I really wish I knew. I am deeply familiar with the archives of northern Namibia and I’ve conducted a lot of interviews in the area over the years. There is no evidence that the people who resided in the “lost lake” that constituted one-half of Schwarz’s Scheme had any idea what he was proposing, even though Schwarz actually visited the region in 1918. Still, I hope that someone who is familiar with the languages and archive of South Africa’s Black progressive farmers and literate intellectuals will someday find evidence that Schwarz’s scheme was known and discussed in those circles. If you end up being that person, dear reader, please let me know what you find!