NALSU Labour Studies podcast/video: Jacklyn Cock: "Writing the Ancestral River: A biography of the Kowie"

NALSU NEWS: Labour Studies podcast/video: Professor Jacklyn Cock | "Writing the Ancestral River: A biography of the Kowie"

 

TOPIC: The story of the Kowie River in the Eastern Cape opens up the story of South Africa, and raises larger questions about colonialism, capitalism, "development," and ecology. These issues are at the heart of Professor Jacky Cock's book, "Writing the Ancestral River: A Biography of the Kowie," the basis of this seminar. There is, of course, a natural history of this tidal river and its catchment area, where dinosaurs once roamed, and where cycads still grow. But the Kowie also runs through a formative meeting ground of peoples who shaped South Africa: Khoikhoi herders, Xhosa pastoralists, Afrikaner trekboers, and British settlers. Their direct descendants in the area still interact in ways decisively shaped by this shared history. The natural world of the Kowie, too, has been shaped by human settlement and stratification. This is strikingly illustrated through the development, and deleterious effects, of building a harbour at river mouth in the 19th century, and of a marina in the late 20th century. "Writing the Ancestral River" asks us to reconsider the connections between social and environmental processes and injustices, and argues that grappling with the past, and with inter-generational inequalities, damages, and denials is necessary for any shared future.