Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to shed historical light on the alien species debate in contemporary South Africa. I will outline the discourses and practices in connection with the importation of eucalyptus trees from Australia to South Africa from the 1870s onwards.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa is in the middle of a heated debate on alien spices, which have spurred efforts to Africanize the landscape through removal of eucalyptus and other imported spices. The eucalyptus is blamed for exhausting the already meager supply of clean water. In this contemporary context, eucalyptus is equated with disease and poverty. However, the role of eucalyptus is not new.

In the late 1870's discourses on eucalyptus surfaced during 'a sanitation hysteria' that swept King William's Town, on the Eastern Cape. A key figure was J.P. Fitzgerald, who had previously worked as a doctor in New Zealand. He advocated the planting of eucalyptus to combat health problems. The non-European eucalyptus was thus central in South African efforts to domesticate the alien African landscape, and health and prosperity was the rationale. The focus on eucalyptus in efforts to form a colonial home, suggests that the European imagination was concerned with other issues than bringing a known landscape to Africa.

The paper will explore how the concept of 'performing nature' is suited to underscore the place eucalyptus trees occupy in efforts aimed at molding emotive connections and securing disjunctures to problematic aspects of the colonial and postcolonial life. I will suggest that the eucalyptus figures centrally in these experiences due to the trees' usefulness to reflect on, and negotiate, interracial spaces. The particular space eucalyptus occupied for the European settlers, and how it reemerges in post-apartheid imagination is thus intimately tied to identity politics during times of political unrest and uncertainties.