Geography

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, botanists in South Africa’s Western Cape felt hard pressed to popularise and protect the unique indigenous Fynbos flora of the region. They saw themselves ranged against the extensive transformations of the landscape being undertaken by farmers and foresters, the expansion of urban areas and infrastructure, and the depredations of flower pickers. The introduction of a suite of invasive alien plants into the region in the nineteenth century, notably a range of Australian species well suited to the poor nutrients and rainfall and fire regimes of the region, presented a physical but also a symbolic focus for their advocacy. In the early twentieth century this was played out in the context of political attempts to build unity among the English and Afrikaner populations after the South African War ended in 1902. The new science of ecology was consciously used as an integrative influence. However, the ecological theory imported with the experts arriving from Britain in the period of reconstruction, as influential a biological invasion as the earlier wave of alien plant imports, had unfortunate consequences for scientifically informed research and management of the local flora.

""In the early twentieth century, botanists in South Africa’s Western Cape sought urgently to popularise and protect the region’s unique indigenous Fynbos flora. Plants imported from the 1840s, some of which proved invasive, became a physical and symbolic focus for their advocacy. The botanists’ efforts resonated with political attempts to forge a common white South African national identity that drew on notions of landscape and the indigenous flora for symbolism and that consciously exploited the politically integrative potential of the new science of ecology. Introduced by overseas-trained experts, ecological theory was, however, inappropriate for the local flora, and had unfortunate consequences for the scientificallyinformed research and management particularly of the fire-maintained Fynbos. While botanists and conservationists were united in defending the local flora against invasive introduced plants, they drew distinctions between what was ‘indigenous’ and what was
‘natural’ that further complicated their attitudes to the local flora. These historical debates illuminate agendas and policies on introduced (‘alien’) and indigenous flora in the region today.""

The first decade of Dutch VOC occupation of South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope has been ill served by environmental historians. An examination of the daily journals covering the first decade of settlement proves fruitful for historians interested in the origins of European exploration, exploitation and conservation of natural resources at the Cape. This settlement is moreover a unique example of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers establishing a cornucopia of food plants in the absence of indigenous agriculturalists, experimenting with species imported from the VOC’s many bases. The difficulty of establishing what they may have learned from the indigenous peoples is addressed.

Saul Dubow’s A Commonwealth of Knowledge focuses primarily on the development of science and sensibility among English-speaking settlers in the Cape Colony from 1820, through union (of South Africa) in 1910, up to the victory of the Afrikaner nationalists in 1948 – examining how this shaped ideas about national identity among the country’s white (European) population. The latter part of the book brings the story up to 2000, a period that saw the decline of the liberal ‘South Africanism’ developed in the preceding period.
Dubow’s grasp of the historiography and his deft use of archival and secondary sources make this an invaluable book for intellectual historians. More broadly, he is illuminating on the ways in which science has been used by successive colonial and post-colonial elites to establish, assert or bolster their identities and authority, and as in his previous book Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (2005), shows there is much exciting work to be done on the history of science in the region.

In South Africa, with its scarce and slow-growing natural forests, the most obvious and visible environmental effect of state forestry was the creation of plantations of introduced exotic species of timber trees. State foresters were variously accused of ruining landscapes aesthetically, drying up water supplies, and creating a fire hazard. However, in addition to establishing plantations, from the 1930s state foresters were also responsible for managing extensive ecologically sensitive mountain catchment areas. Initially focussed on water and soil conservation, their research on the indigenous vegetation of South Africa’s unique Fynbos Biome resulted in the creation of a dedicated programme of conservation research and management, and the department became far the most important agency for environmental management of fynbos. By the late 1970s their fynbos research programme would place South African forestry researchers in the first rank of international fire research on Mediterranean-type ecosystems. The department’s approach to wildfire in fynbos gradually shifted from fire suppression to prescribed block burning. A tightly coupled programme of research and management prevailed until the Apartheid state and with it state forestry began to collapse in the late 1980s. This paper recovers this little known story, and explores the consequences of the Department’s management interventions, and of its demise.