Johannesburg from the Riverbanks: Navigating the Jukskei
Mehita Iqani and Renugan Raidoo
As humanity faces impending global environmental challenges and intensifying inequality in cities around the world, the task of assessing our relationships to urban rivers like the Jukskei, and the nonhumans that inhabit it, takes on renewed urgency. Johannesburg from the Riverbanks: Navigating the Jukskei is the first book to critically look at the role of the Jukskei River in the cultural, social, political and scientific life of the city of Johannesburg.
This unique book brings together a wide range of disciplinary perspectives to examine the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, relationships that Johannesburg has to one of its key rivers. This treasure trove of a book tells stories of how Johannesburg and the Jukskei River make each other. A sparkling compendium of chapters and images by artists, activists, scientists, urban planners and historians will make you think about the river in new ways.
– Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor Emeritus, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
A fine example of the power of critical interdisciplinary studies, not only of the Jukskei River itself, but also how we are able to see and understand Johannesburg in refreshing ways. This book is a critical intervention in the increasing importance of studies on the preservation, restoration and sustainability of rivers as important sinews of urban, social, artistic and environmental cultures, as well as existence. An invigorating read for anyone interested in understanding the nature-urban interaction.
– Mucha Musemwa, Professor of History and the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
This book exposes how the processes of modernisation – mining, industry and urbanisation – have poisoned this historic waterway, and highlights how its banks, from the inner city to the plush northern suburbs, reflect the city’s stark inequalities. Johannesburg from the Riverbanks also offers hope: artists, activists and ordinary citizens are shown to work tirelessly and imaginatively to reconfigure people’s interaction with the river. By centring the wellbeing of the Jukskei, this important and timely book makes a crucial contribution to current conversations about the environmental crisis, especially Johannesburg’s water catatsrophe.
– Noor Nieftagodien, Head of the History Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Full title: Johannesburg from the Riverbanks
Subtitle: Navigating the Jukskei
Editors: Mehita Iqani and Renugan Raidoo
Publication: HSRC Press
ISBN: 978-0-7969-2688-3
Format: 240mm x 168mm
Extent: 260pp
Price: R299
Reclaiming African Environmentalism: Ecological Struggles for Wellbeing and Habitability
Editors: Lesley Green, Frank Matose, Anselmo Matusse and Nikiwe Solomon
African Doctoral and Masters researchers in Environmental Humanities, working in Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Burundi, Ghana, Tanzania, Lesotho, Kenya and DR Congo in the past six years, have consistently and independently come up against a similar story: that struggles in rural Africa are against neoliberal ideas of market-driven development, and neoliberal notions of environmentalism, which have proven fundamentally at odds with both economic and ecological wellbeing.
Building on Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (HSRC 2013) with 275 citations to date, this volume develops an approach that identifies the ways in which environment and society is conceptualised by development “experts”, environmentalists and state officials, and contrasts those conceptualisations with understandings of ecology and wellbeing at ground level.
No comparable work on this topic has been done across 10 African countries. Drawing on in-depth field research by African graduates – many of whom have pursued field research in their home languages – the collection makes a sustained and powerful case that local people’s struggles for livelihood have intensified against globalised corporate extractivism across the continent.
Individual papers describe struggles over soil, mining, water, seed, pastoralism, energy, technology, forestry and carbon trading.
Linking African struggles to Latin American rejection of extractivism and South Asian resistance to industrial agriculture and monocropping, the collection will be the first of its kind to make the case that indigenous and other political minorities’ forms of relation to land are vital resources for the protection of African ecological wellbeing, and that they define a contemporary African environmentalism that makes a crucial contribution to rethinking and re-storying climate negotiations, conservation and development.
Full title: Reclaiming African Environmentalism
Subtitle: Ecological Struggles for Wellbeing and Habitability
Editors: Lesley Green, Frank Matose, Anselmo Matusse and Nikiwe Solomon
Publication: HSRC Press
ISBN: 978-0-7969-2690-6
Format: 168mm x 240mm
Extent: 304 pp
Price: R450
For more information about these books, please contact: skhan@hsrc.ac.za
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