5 - Environmental Trauma, Colonial Rule, and the Failure of Extensive Food Production, 1895–1903

Summary

I have to inform you that we are well, but we are in great straits through hunger. It is not hunger, it is death.

The environmental history of Kuruman reached a turning point in 1895. In that year, the Cape Colony annexed British Bechuanaland, and a period of critical change began. The nonhuman world and how people related to it are absolutely central to events of this period. However, the radical transformation did not result from simple environmental disaster. Before this time, people had suffered from, and coped with, drought and disease, sometimes compounded by violence. The difference now was that colonial rule interfered with the ability to survive environmental disaster. Moreover, the colonial state capitalized on developments to procure a labor supply for mines. The case of Kuruman may be exceptional in that the failure of extensive subsistence production can be dated to a few years at the turn of the twentieth century. There, a trauma between 1895 and 1903 was so severe that it claimed human lives and brought subsistence through extensive production to an end.

ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE OVER THE LONG TERM

Longer term environmental changes had been unfolding throughout the nineteenth century. These slow changes were not always evident, and it is difficult to assess their importance. Yet these changes set a new context for production and colonial rule. The first alteration was a relative increase in the amount of bush and a decrease in the amount of grass.