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, t...

Spurred in part by the ongoing re-evaluation of sources and methods in research, African historiography in the past two decades has been characterized by the continued branching and increasing sophistication of methodologies and areas of specialization. The rate of incorporation of new sources and methods into African historical research shows no signs of slowing.This book is both a snapshot of current academic practice and an attempt to sort through some of the problems scholars f...