Paper short abstract:

Drawing the concept of a ‘resource frontier,’ this paper will analyse the socio-environmental impacts of historical and contemporary transformations of land use in the Karoo, including mining, renewable and non-renewable energy, astronomy, and biodiversity conservation and wildlife farming.

Paper long abstract:

Historians of the Karoo have drawn attention to the culturally hybrid and politically contested character of the 19th century Northern Cape colonial frontier (Legassick, 1969, 2010; Penn 2005). Drawing on the concept of a ‘resource frontier,’ this paper will analyse the socio-environmental impacts of transformations of land use in the Karoo, including the consequences of the discovery of copper and then diamonds. This was followed by asbestos mining and, in more recent years the mining of iron resources and rare earths, which is a major contributor to the GDP of the Northern Cape Province. Far from being a “boom to bust” story, mining in the Karoo continues to have a very long shelf-life - as is evident with new applications for shale-gas exploration, diamond and heavy mineral sand mining, uranium and base metals such as zinc, lead, and copper (Walker and Hoffman, 2023; in press). The paper will examine how, in the aftermath of mining histories of enclosure, dispossession and extractivism, the Karoo has once again become a resource frontier where new forms of extraction include technoscientific megaprojects involving renewable and non-renewable energy (wind, solar and possibly shale-gas) and massive investments in astronomy (the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope) and biodiversity conservation and wildlife farming (see Walker and Hoffman 2023). The paper will also investigate whether these interventions conform to a “boom and bust” narrative, i.e., another promise of ‘development’ that is unable to meet the needs of residents in desperately poor towns in this drought-prone and overheating semi-arid region.