Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid

How an audacious environmental engineering plan fanned white settlers’ visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and gave rise to the Apartheid state.

In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t di...