The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene

Michael Marshall, “The history of ice on the Earth,” New Scientist, 2010 →.

See “Climate Science of Methane,” Methane UK, Environmental Change Institute, 2009 →.

“Plate Tectonics,” Wikipedia →; “Pangaea,” Wikipedia →.

National Museum of Bloemfontein →.

Hillel J. Hoffman, “The Permian Extinction—When Life Nearly Came to an End,” National Geographic →; G. Philip Rightmire, “Homo erectus,” Encyclopedia Britannica →.

Shula E. Marks, “Southern Africa,” Encyclopedia Britannica →.

Robert Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871-1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, vol. 15, no.1 (2003).

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 42.

David Johnson, “'Rhodes said he would build UCT ‘Out of the Kafirs’ stomach,’” Varsity, August 30, 1967; Anne Harries, “Poo is appropriate choice of ammunition for Cecil Rhodes statue in South Africa,” The Guardian, April 14, 2015 →.

Connor Joseph Cavanagh and David Himmelfarb, “Much in Blood and Money: Necropolitical Ecology on the Margins of the Uganda Protectorate,” Antipode, vol. 47, no. 1 (2014).

Cecil Rhodes obituary, The Guardian, March 27, 1902 →.

Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: TCG Translations, 2002).

Bruno Latour, “The Recall of Modernity: Anthropological Approaches,” trans. Stephen Muecke, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 13, no. 1 (2007).

Created by artists Nathan Honey and Isa Marques in the Karoo in 2014, the Subterrafuge constellated a range of contra-fracking arguments as part of the AfrikaBurn event of 2014.

AfrikaBurn, modelled on the Burning Man festival in Nevada, attempts to offer participants the experience of a gift economy for a week. Not without its own struggles over capital, commodity, and race, AfrikaBurn is an important site in which to read emergent forms of environmentalism in South Africa.

Latour, “The Recall of Modernity.”

Francois Jullien, The Propensity of Things (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1999). See Lesley and David Green, Knowing the Day, Knowing the World (Tucson: Arizona University Press, 2014); Christopher Mabeza, The Marriage of Water and Soil: Adaptation to climate by a smallholder farmer in Zvishavane, Zimbabwe, PhD dissertation, School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Cape Town (2015).