My PhD dissertation, ‘Arid Waters,’ explores how water shapes the history of Southern Africa - a region that is bordered by ocean, brimming with ephemeral rivers, and yet prone to drought.

By exploring how African peoples made life in arid landscapes, and how European colonization dealt with the region’s dryness and hydrology, I show how water was an important historical site and agent in early colonial southern Africa.

Since time immemorial, isiNguni- and seSotho-Tswana-speaking communities fashioned ecologies in dynamic relation with rains and rivers. Regional networks were characterized by an inland dynamism connected to, but not overdetermined by the sea. However, from the 17th century oceanic forces increasingly shaped the region’s history. From the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, multiple empires, traders, and settlers expanded frontiers of conquest, enslavement and dispossession, forming the foundation for the military, and political economic consolidation of conquest in the late nineteenth century. Over the twentieth century, colonial regimes continued to expand their power through hydrological technologies of domination.