The future of the Karoo

Roelof Bezuidenhout spoke to Prof William Beinart about his fascinating book, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa, Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770-1950, and the current state of the Karoo.

- Prof William Beinart

From where does your interest in the Karoo and idea for the book stem?

Although my career as a historian has been in the UK, I was brought up in Cape Town in the 1950s and 1960s. As a child I travelled through the Karoo every year, by train to Pretoria. The landscape was foreboding but its starkness was appealing.

My research interest in the environmental history of the Karoo came by an unusual route. Trying to understand more about the history and experience of African people was a central project. I did my doctoral research in Mpondoland in 1976-7 when the government policy of betterment or rehabilitation was still an important issue. Government planned to move rural African people from their scattered settlements into villages to demarcate selected areas for agriculture and to fence the vacated pasture lands.

INTERVENTIONS

The plan was to cull cattle through enforced sales. These were the major interventions in African rural life. The motivation for this largely unpopular policy was officials believed that the Bantustans were overstocked, causing soil erosion that would destroy agriculture. They were determined to introduce a system of rotational grazing and to end the kraaling of livestock. For this they had to clear the scattered settlements, empty out the communal grazing lands and fence them into camps.

The origins of these ideas led me to the Karoo, a different world of large, privately-owned farms, of drought, sheep and jackals. The Drought Commission of 1923, chaired by HSD du Toit, a South African War hero and senior agricultural official, inquired into environmental degradation and soil erosion, which it saw as a national disaster, especially in the Karoo.