Conceptualizing Climate Change in Early Twentieth-Century Southern Africa: Race, Knowledge, and Contests over Expertise

In early 20^th-century southern Africa, both indigenous and white settler farmers were alarmed by what they understood as clear evidence of climate change. Droughts seemed to be increasing in frequency and severity, and ground and surface water resources were diminishing. In these arid and dryland environments, rainfall was the most important component of “climate” and declining precipitation was therefore equated with climate change. This paper considers how different communities understood the evidence for climate change and the causes of that change. What strikes a modern-day reader of these archives of climate distress is that it is African understandings of climate – dismissed by whites at the time as grounded in superstition and primitivism – that are closest to contemporary understandings of climate as both a physical and a socially constituted reality.

In debates over whether climate change was happening and what might be causing it, the various sides did not break down along the lines we might expect today. Government experts and scientists almost uniformly argued that the climate was not changing but was stable, and they grew increasingly exasperated with what appeared to be a pervasive belief among the white public that rainfall was in fact declining. Over three decades, government scientists launched commission and investigations and published multiple reports and monographs arguing that the climate was not changing. But these failed to persuade those who believed otherwise. White farmers and their allies spurned the pronouncements of experts, whom they claimed were “theoretical” men out of touch with the practical knowledge of those who made their living off the land. Those farmers met experts on their own conceptual terrain, offering detailed rainfall records to counter those of the government and reinterpreting and critiquing government statistics to support claims of climate change.

Rural African communities, too, reported that rainfall was declining. They had been doing so throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, invoking as evidence stories of rivers that no longer ran, shallow lakes and springs that had run dry, dramatic famines that had caused mass casualties, and changes in the species of wildlife that inhabited various locales. Because African farmers had lived in these places longer than many of the white farmers, their stories also became part of white farmers’ body of evidence for climate change, presented alongside their diaries of rainfall statistics in their arguments with government experts. Government scientists may have been exasperated by the entrenched beliefs of the white male citizenry. But they nevertheless treated that citizenry as equals - debating them, answering their letters, collecting their testimony during commission hearings, and otherwise engaging with their ideas. In other words white (and male) farmers, even the most uneducated among them, were treated as at least potentially belonging to the world of science. By contrast, the ideas of southern Africa’s black majority were dismissed as superstition – epitomized by the figure of the African rainmaker – and the knowledge claims of Africans were therefore ignored.

Beliefs about the trajectory of the climate were linked logically to beliefs about drought causality. White officials insisted that farmers, both white and black, were incurring greater losses from drought not because rainfall was declining but because they were behaving as irresponsible stewards of the land, damaging its vegetation and soils and thus leaving it more susceptible when rainfall was lower than normal. White farmers who believed rainfall was declining were divided on the cause. Some agreed with experts that farmers were damaging the land but drew different conclusions, arguing that land degradation directly shaped weather patterns because conditions on the land’s surface affected the behavior of the atmosphere. Others argued that climate change was being caused by larger changes that were geomorphological or atmospheric in nature and thus beyond human control.

African communities denied that climate change was linked to poor land use or to larger geophysical forces. Building on frameworks of causality and moral ecologies central to rainmaking practices, they argued that human actions toward one another were causing the droughts and famines buffeting the region. They suggested that the arrival of whites was at least partly to blame for the failure of the rains. And they asked not only why the rains were failing, but why some people seemed to be affected more than others. They were clear that the famines and other losses that resulted from declining rainfall were not inevitable consequences, but the result of choices made by people. In other words, they understood “climate change” as a social, as well as a physical, phenomenon.