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An Empire of Rivers: The Scheme toFlood the Kalahari, 1919–1945Meredith McKittricka

a Georgetown UniversityPublished online: 27 May 2015.

To cite this article: Meredith McKittrick (2015) An Empire of Rivers: The Scheme toFlood the Kalahari, 1919–1945, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41:3, 485-504, DOI:10.1080/03057070.2015.1025339

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An Empire of Rivers: The Scheme to Flood the

Kalahari, 1919–1945

Meredith McKittrick(Georgetown University)

In 1919, a geology professor named Ernest Schwarz argued that the diversion of the Chobe

and Kunene Rivers into the Kalahari was necessary to avoid catastrophic desertification,

which threatened to force South African whites from the land. Despite being deemed

impractical by government scientists, his proposed ‘Kalahari Redemption Scheme’ was

supported by a broad spectrum of white farmers, academics, parliamentarians, and even

industrialists into the 1940s. The professor’s contentions about meteorology, climate change,

and geological history were subject to heated debate. But what was never at issue was the

notion that white South Africans had the right to divert rivers and flood land that they did not

formally possess, for the benefit of white South Africa itself. The discussions around

Schwarz’s scheme challenge the conventional notion that there was little popular support

within South Africa for South African expansion. This paper explores the origins of popular

support for ‘Greater South Africa’, contrasting the hopes and fears of white farmers with the

better-known territorial ambitions of Smuts and other statesmen.

Introduction

In his 1972 book, The Failure of South African Expansion, 1908–1948, Ronald Hyam asked

why South Africa’s 1910 borders remained unchanged, despite the fact that virtually

everyone involved in the process of union expected them to expand one day. The 1909 Act of

Union made provisions for the transfer of the three High Commission Territories –

Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland – to South African control. Southern Rhodesia’s

future was assumed to lay with its sister white-settler state to the south. And South Africa’s

entry into the First World War precipitated musings by both British and South African

officials about how the map of Africa might be redrawn to grant South West Africa or part of

Mozambique to South Africa. But while South Africa’s leaders sporadically pressed for

expansion over the next four decades, the British colonial office found reasons to stall and

deflect. Except for the contested claim to Namibia, no territory was transferred.1

In the half-century since Hyam’s book was published, few historians have sought to refine

or expand upon his conclusions.2 Some have asked whether South African expansion can be

said to have ‘failed’, given the degree of hegemony it came to exercise over the region.3 More

q 2015 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies

1 R. Hyam, The Failure of South African Expansion, 1908–1948 (New York, Africana Publishing, 1972).2 Exceptions are A. Booth, ‘Lord Selborne and the British Protectorates, 1908–1910’, Journal of African History,

10, 1 (1969), pp. 133–48; D. Torrance, ‘Britain, South Africa, and the High Commission Territories: An OldControversy Revisited’, The Historical Journal, 41, 3 (1998), pp. 751–72. Both articles deal with the positions ofleading British and South African officials, as well as the extent to which African pressure itself motivated Britishactions.

3 J. Crush, Struggle for Swazi Labour 1890–1920 (Montreal, McGill–Queens University Press, 1987). Thedependence of neighbouring territories on South Africa is noted in S. Rosenberg, Promises of Moshoeshoe:Culture, Nationalism, and Identity in Lesotho (Roma, National University of Lesotho, 2008); P. Bonner, Kings,Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth-Century Swazi State

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2015

Vol. 41, No. 3, 485–504, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2015.1025339

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recently, scholars have explored the means through which Smuts sought to enact his vision of

a Greater South Africa as territorial incorporation stalled.4 This article examines not the

outcome but the debate itself. Hyam argues that the matter of South Africa’s future borders

primarily concerned South African statesmen and British colonial secretaries, governors-

general, and high commissioners. The South African public had little interest in expansion, he

writes: ‘The problem was one which exercised South African ministers rather than their

followers. . . . there was probably at no stage any widespread public pressure in South Africa

for transfer’.5

No one has challenged this picture of the domestic dynamics of the incorporation debate.

But there was, in fact, widespread support within the white community for South African

expansion and empire. The extent of this popular enthusiasm is revealed in a cause that merits

a single line in Hyam’s book – the proposal by Ernest Schwarz to divert the Kunene and

Chobe rivers away from the sea and into the Kalahari, an issue given such cursory treatment

that Hyam misspells Schwarz’s name.6

Schwarz’s scheme to improve southern Africa’s climate, green the desert, and open

up vast new lands for settlement was not a passing fancy. When his book describing the

scheme was published in 1919, it was reviewed in publications in Britain, the United States,

and Rhodesia as well as South Africa.7 Whites across southern Africa discussed its merits

over three decades, and the South African government, responding to public pressure,

investigated it three times.8 Outside government circles, whites debated whether it was

feasible, who should pay for the scheme, what rivers it should include, whether constructing

irrigation channels would be more efficacious than creating ‘inland lakes’, and who should be

settled on all this newly watered land. But there was one issue that was not a subject of debate:

that South Africans had a political right, even duty, to divert rivers and flood land that they did

not currently possess.

What does it mean that discussions of the future extent of the South African state are

virtually absent from the voluminous archival record on the Kalahari Redemption Scheme?

This article argues that conversations about river diversion offer a window into popular

enthusiasm for empire in the decades between the formation of the Union of South Africa and

the 1948 election that brought the National Party to power. That the areas affected by the

Kalahari scheme lay completely outside South Africa was never seen as an issue – by

Schwarz’s supporters or detractors – reveals that a popular commitment to the notion of a

Footnote 3 continued

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983); C. Murray, Families Divided: The Impact of Migrant Labour inLesotho (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981); N. Parsons, ‘The Economic History of Khama’sCountry in Botswana, 1844–1930’, in R. Palmer and N. Parsons, The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central andSouthern Africa (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977), pp. 113–44.

4 Military power has been a particular focus of this work. See T. Dedering’s article in this issue, as well asJ. Hyslop, ‘Martial Law and Military Power in the Construction of the South Africa State: Jan Smuts and the“Solid Guarantee of Force” 1899–1924’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 22, 2 (2009), pp. 234–68. All of thisliterature takes Hyam as its foundation.

5 Hyam, Failure, p. 76.6 Hyam, Failure, p. 73. Schwarz’s scheme is most fully described in E.H.L. Schwarz, The Kalahari: Or Thirstland

Redemption (Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1919); see also E.H.L. Schwarz, ‘The Progressive Desiccation ofAfrica: The Cause and the Remedy’, South African Journal of Science, 14 (1919), pp. 139–78; E.H.L. Schwarz,‘The Kalahari Scheme as the Solution of the South African Drought Problem’, South African Journal of Science,20 (1923), p. 209; also reprints of several of his articles in various publications from 1919 on, in NationalArchives Repository, South Africa (hereafter NARSA), Papers of the Governor General (hereafter GG) 1305, fileseries 35.

7 A sampling of reviews includes, in 1920, African Affairs, Journal of the Africa Society, and Farmer’s Weekly(Bloemfontein); in 1921 it was reviewed in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society and, in theUnited States, in the Geographical Review. It was also reported upon in several South African newspapers.

8 In 1925, 1937, and 1945.

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‘greater South Africa’ was so pervasive that it required neither justification nor

acknowledgement.

Debates about river diversion also hint at the reasons behind the white public’s support for

expansion. The creation of a white supremacist society in South Africa in the first half of the

20th century was seen at the time as simultaneously a national and an imperial project, to a

much greater degree than has previously been acknowledged. As was noted 15 years ago in

Namibia Under South African Rule, South Africa’s conquest of Namibia was vital to the

creation of its own identity as a sovereign nation.9 But the dreams that white South Africans

directed beyond their borders were not limited to Namibia, and the dreamers were not just

statesmen. While South African leaders saw expansion as a quest for prestige abroad, white

unity at home, or Afrikaner power, popular support for South African empire rested on

something else entirely: a sense that the survival of the white race in southern Africa

depended on territorial expansion and the development of water resources beyond South

Africa’s borders.

Schwarz’s scheme and similar proposals to divert rivers underscore the extent to which

the water and land resources of Namibia and Botswana – and to a lesser extent Lesotho,

Zimbabwe, Swaziland, and the Portuguese territories of Angola and Mozambique – were

routinely incorporated into any answer to South Africa’s perceived environmental crisis and

‘poor white problem’.10 Popular support for schemes the government deemed impractical

reflected larger challenges to official views of what South Africa was and what it was

becoming. Despite the insistence of experts that rainfall had not declined, South Africa’s

white farmers were nearly unanimous in their belief that the country was ‘drying up’. The

resources of the wider southern African region became fair game for South African imperial

ambition in part because they promised to ‘redeem’ semi-arid environments and secure white

prosperity. The Schwarz scheme both reflected and nurtured these aspirations of regional

hegemony. This would be an empire woven from blue threads on a map – the rivers

themselves.

Neither Jan Smuts’ imagined ‘Greater South Africa’ nor Schwarz’s scheme came to pass.

But popular enthusiasm for hydro-imperialism laid the groundwork for the future expansion

of the South African state. Support for the large dam projects of the 1950s–1970s – some of

them in South African territory, and some of them on Portuguese soil –echoes earlier public

enthusiasm for river diversion. And the notion that the lands beyond the Union of South

Africa could legitimately be claimed and invaded in the name of perpetuating white South

Africa’s survival endured as well.

The Presumption of Empire

In 1919 Ernest Schwarz, a British-born geologist teaching at Rhodes University College,

proposed changing the courses of the Kunene and Chobe rivers – an act he said was necessary

to save the Union of South Africa from ecological and socio-economic catastrophe. Schwarz

claimed that in the recent past, rivers that had once flowed into southern Africa’s interior had

been ‘captured’ by more aggressive coastal rivers through headstream erosion, thereby

diverting their courses towards the sea. The resultant draining of the subcontinent was vividly

9 P. Hayes, J. Silvester, M. Wallace and W. Hartmann, Namibia Under South African Rule: Mobility andContainment, 1915–46 (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1998), p. 7.

10 Alternative diversion schemes can be found in NARSA, GG 1305, file series 35; there is a series of letters as well astwo pamphlets: C. Weidner, The Fallacy of Schwarz’s Kalahari Rain-Making Magic: The Actual Cause of OurInland Seas Drying Up; The Trans-African Rail and Water Way from Walvis Bay to Beira, which appears to havebeen self-published in 1925, and August Karlson, The Kalahari Problem (Johannesburg, Argus Co., 1919).

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described in his book, The Kalahari, Or Thirstland Redemption, as were its supposed results:

the disappearance of enormous lakes, which reduced the evaporation of water into the

atmosphere, which in turn decreased humidity and precipitation. For Schwarz, southern

Africa was locked in a downward desiccating spiral that would ultimately doom the region to

a waterless existence. White farms would become deserts and white civilisation on the

subcontinent would collapse.11

Schwarz argued that salvation lay in diverting the Chobe, a Zambezi tributary, into

various Kalahari depressions, and in diverting the Kunene into Etosha Pan. The evaporation

from recreated inland lakes would raise the humidity of the Kalahari, thereby restoring

southern Africa’s rainfall and greening the desert. Just as the process of desiccation was self-

perpetuating, so too would the process of adding water to the landscape lead to progressively

more rainfall.

Schwarz’s scheme was immensely popular among the white South African public, despite

the fact that three government investigations in as many decades declared it impractical.

Farmers, businessmen, government employees, and amateur scientists across southern Africa

expressed their support in letters to government officials and to newspapers. Schwarz died in

1928, but prominent farmers and academics formed the Schwarz Kalahari Thirstland

Redemption Society during the great drought of 1933 to advocate for fuller investigation of

his plan. They announced their new organisation in the pages of Farmer’s Weekly, the main

public forum for discussing Schwarz’s scheme.

Billed as the largest newspaper devoted to agriculture in South Africa, Farmer’s Weekly

in 1949 had a weekly circulation of 46,500 – almost twice that of its Afrikaans equivalent,

Die Landbouweekblad.12 Its readership seems to have been almost entirely white and, judging

from those who wrote letters to the editor, located across all four of South Africa’s provinces

and South West Africa, with a handful of readers in the Bechuanaland Protectorate and

Southern Rhodesia. As with most agricultural magazines, much of the space in Farmer’s

Weekly was devoted to the daily concerns of those who wrested a living from the land: pest

control, livestock breeds, the construction of boreholes and farm gates, and the state of the

markets. But broader concerns were aired in its editorials, in articles on the speeches of

politicians and farmers’ association leaders, and especially in its lively letters-to-the-editor

section. Farmers and others interested in agriculture, ranging from scientists and government

employees to professionals in the cities, penned letters on the issues of the day: the merits of

specific government agricultural policies, the need for farmers’ unions, and the supposed

problems of ‘native’ labour. They also debated Schwarz’s scheme and, more generally, the

future of both white farming and the region’s climate.

When it was published in 1919, Schwarz’s book caught the attention of the paper’s editors

and its readership, resulting in a flurry of letters over several years.13 Subsequently, through at

11 Desiccation narratives were a common feature of European discourse about Africa, paralleling largerdegradationist narratives about the African environment. See, for example, G.T. Renner, ‘A Famine Zone inAfrica: The Sudan’,Geographical Review, 16, 4 (1926), pp. 583–96, who blames what he sees as a desiccation ofWest Africa on the ‘wholesale denudation of the vegetative cover of the country’ (p. 589); see also J. Fairheadand M. Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest–Savanna Mosaic(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996); James McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: AnEnvironmental History of Africa, 1800–1990 (Portsmouth, Heinemann, 1999), especially pp. 55–107. Forsouthern Africa, see G. Enfield and D. Nash, ‘Missionaries and Morals: Climatic Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Central Southern Africa’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92, 4 (2002), pp. 727–42; G. Enfield and D. Nash, ‘Drought, Desiccation and Discourse: Missionary Correspondence and Nineteenth-Century Climate Change in Central Southern Africa’, Geographical Journal, 168, 1 (2002), pp. 33–47.

12 C.F.J. Muller, Sonop in die Suide: Geboorte en Groei van die Nasionale Pers 1915–1948 (Kaapstad, NasionaleBoekhandel, 1990), pp. 752–3.

13 Die Landbouweekblad, the Afrikaans-language equivalent of Farmer’s Weekly, had no letters to the editorsection until the mid 1930s, and then lacked the breadth of topical discussion in its letters until the 1940s.

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least the late 1940s, letters about the scheme and the region’s ‘desiccation’ appeared

sporadically. But during severe droughts – particularly in 1926, the early 1930s, 1945, and

1949 – discussion intensified so that letters about Schwarz’s scheme and the need to fix South

Africa’s climate appeared at least monthly. Often a single letter would set off a flurry of

debate about whether the problems facing South African farmers were the fault of the climate

or their farming practices. In the 1920s and again in the 1930s and 1940s, dozens of related

letters also discussed the causes of rain in the region and the possibility of either making rain

or divining underground water – in short, of ‘fixing’ the South African environment through

human intervention.

Evidence that these letters represent larger public sentiment is to be found in the words

and deeds of sceptical government officials. The 1925 ‘Kalahari Reconnaissance’, designed

to explore the feasibility of Schwarz’s scheme, was launched by the South African

government in response to public pressure – despite the fact that the expedition’s leaders

appear to have been unsympathetic to the scheme from the investigation’s inception. The

report of a 1945 investigation – launched again in response to public pressure – noted with

evident exasperation, ‘Recent challenges to the scientific basis of [Schwarz’s] theories appear

merely to have developed a measure of obstinacy in the public mind’.14 The prior year, a

Bechuanaland Protectorate official noted the high level of public support for diverting rivers

into the Kalahari, and worried that British claims to the Protectorates would be challenged by

South Africa on the grounds that Britain had allowed the Okavango’s water resources to ‘run

to waste’.15

Schwarz described an empire built on technology, modernity, and progress. The

schematic map at the front of his book includes the names of towns and cities, the region’s

major rivers and their tributaries, the courses of multiple dry rivers that had not flowed in

human memory, and extensive tracts of shaded areas that would be submerged. Notably

absent are any national or colonial borders (see Figure 1); indeed, the scheme even proposed

erasing the ‘natural’, riparian borders that existed – for example, the Kunene between Angola

and Namibia, whose course would be turned to inland South West Africa. But Schwarz was a

product of his time. His map represents the same kind of ‘imagined geography’ as the 1915

published cartoon described by Giorgio Miescher, in which a railway line joins together

South Africa and South West Africa, but broadens the scale. In both Schwarz’s map and the

cartoon, no borders are depicted, and empire is realised through linear human constructions.

The railroad, Miescher argues, turned a war of conquest ‘into a mere project of technological

and infrastructural opening and development’.16 So, too, did Schwarz’s scheme offer a vision

of empire cloaked in a vast technological project ostensibly designed not to expand South

African rule but to save the southern African environment from itself.

Schwarz’s was only the most famous of several schemes that promised to solve South

Africa’s problems by re-routing the rivers beyond its borders. In 1918, a man named Ernest

Long wrote the Governor-General, proposing to divert rivers that ‘now run idly through

Swaziland’ and ‘the native territories of the Transvaal’, in order to diversify South Africa’s

industrial and agricultural base.17 Ferdinand Gessert, a farmer in Keetmanshoop, had

14 L.A. MacKenzie, Report on the Kalahari Expedition 1945 (Being a Further Investigation into the WaterResources of the Kalahari and their Relationship to the Climate of South Africa) (Pretoria, Government Printers,1946), p. 1.

15 National Archives, United Kingdom (hereafter NAUK), DO 35/1186, UK High Commissioner to South Africa toSecretary of State for Dominion Affairs, 29 August 1945.

16 G. Miescher, ‘Arteries of Empire: On the Geographical Imagination of South Africa’s Railway War, 1914/15’,Kronos, 11 (2012), pp. 23–46.

17 NARSA, GG 1305, file 35/28, Ernest G. Long to Governor-General, 19 August 1918; also undated (July 1918)and 23 August 1918.

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proposed during the German colonial period diverting the Kunene, and persistently wrote

letters throughout the 1940s advocating Schwarz’s scheme. Even many of Schwarz’s most

vocal critics were proponents of river diversion. Carl Weidner, a farmer irrigating the nearly

rainless lands along the lower Orange river, wrote a series of letters to Farmer’s Weekly over

more than two decades ridiculing Schwarz’s scheme. He none the less shared Schwarz’s

vision of redeeming South Africa by redeeming the rivers to its north. In a self-published

pamphlet, Weidner offered ‘a practical scheme’: connecting the Namibian and Mozambican

coastlines via a 600-mile waterway from the Namibian portion of the Kavango (at Popa Falls)

to Botswana’s Great Makarikari pan, with railways at either end stretching into Zambia and

Angola. He argued that ‘reclaiming these immense swamps’ – the Okavango Delta – ‘for

human habitation, from unhealthy and unproductive acres to healthy and productive

settlements’ was the duty of South African whites.18

An irrigation engineer named August Karlson also combined criticism of Schwarz with

an alternative proposal. In a series of letters to the High Commissioner and the Governor-

General, Karlson claimed that he had studied the possibilities of river diversion through the

Kalahari since 1912. Karlson argued that a farmer’s proposal, outlined in the Sunday Times,

Figure 1. The Schwarz scheme, captioned: ‘The Proposed Irrigation Schemes in the Kalahari, by which South Africa,the great Thirstland, may be redeemed’. Source: E.H.L. Schwarz, The Kalahari or Thirstland Redemption, p. xii.

18 NARSA, GG 1305,35/31, Weidner, Fallacy, p. 13.

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to run a canal from the Vaal river to Mafeking was ‘more or less chimerical’, while Schwarz’s

scheme was ‘entirely chimerical’. He proposed instead reservoirs in Angola and Northern

Rhodesia, extensive irrigation in Botswana and Namibia, and the construction of a railway

from Cape Town to Gibraltar. His project ‘would open up for settlement the biggest and most

suitable cotton and wheat country in the world with an abundant labour supply at hand’.19

In each case, the rivers to be diverted and the land to be submerged or irrigated lay beyond

the borders of the Union of South Africa. Neither supporters nor opponents saw this as an

obstacle. Schwarz viewed his proposal as primarily a South African affair, in that South

Africa would pay for, build, and benefit from his Kalahari scheme. The fact that land had not

been given to whites in the Bechuanaland Protectorate simply meant that ‘the negotiations

requisite for settlement will have to be very carefully dealt with’.20 A Farmer’s Weekly

editorial argued that the only benefit to South Africa would be the increased rainfall Schwarz

promised, and that his claims for such climate change were not supported by scientific

consensus.21 But the editorial did not point out the political implications of South African

engineers submerging non-South African soil with non-South African water. Alex du Toit,

head of the 1925 Kalahari Reconnaissance, launched by the South African government to

investigate the scheme, wrote a devastating critique of Schwarz’s plans, evidence, and

scientific assumptions. He did note that Schwarz’s scheme involved flooding areas now

inhabited by Africans and resettling South African whites into territories controlled by other

powers and currently used by African peoples, and re-routing rivers that traversed territories

controlled by still other powers.22 But this – unlike Schwarz’s science – was not a fatal flaw:

‘The question of water and other rights may for the moment be ignored, as such would require

to be handled diplomatically by the Administrations concerned’.23

Of course, the notion that South Africa would eventually come to include lands beyond its

1910 borders was hardly a novel one in the 1910s and 1920s. The 1909 Act of Union made

provisions for the three High Commission territories – Basutoland, Swaziland, and

Bechuanaland – to be incorporated into South Africa. This eventual outcome was

uncontroversial at the time except in its details.24 Thus the 1909 act, rather than creating a

stable entity called ‘South Africa’, constructed a new state whose spatial limits were

ambiguous and open to negotiation. When asked ‘What is “South Africa”?’ for purposes of

drafting legislation in 1911, Smuts replied, ‘South Africa as used in the Bill is a geographical

expression which we advisedly do not define. It would surely cover any part of the continent

of Africa south of the equator?’25 In 1915, South Africa invaded Namibia on behalf of Britain

and was ultimately awarded that territory under a Class C mandate.

The delay in incorporating the High Commission territories was built into the provisions

of the 1909 act by Britain. The subsequent machinations of Smuts and a handful of other

South African leaders who sought to have neighbouring territories transferred into the Union

have been widely recognised. Hyam and Torrance, the main authorities on the subject, agree

that expansion was primarily a concern of ‘professional politicians’ in general and Afrikaner

nationalists in particular.26 But the widespread support for Schwarz’s scheme challenges any

argument that expansionist dreams were limited to a tiny political clique. Support for river

19 NARSA, GG 1305, f 35/50, August Karlson to UK High Commissioner to South Africa, 19 September 1923.20 Schwarz, Kalahari, p. 157.21 Farmer’s Weekly, 23 June 1920, ‘Thirstland Redemption’, p. 2013.22 A.L. du Toit, Report on the Kalahari Reconnaissance of 1925 (Pretoria, Government Printers, 1926).23 Du Toit, Report, p. 13.24 Torrance, ‘Britain’, p. 751.25 Quoted in Hyam, Failure, pp. 25–6.26 Hyam, Failure; Torrance, ‘Britain’; see also Rosenberg, Promises, pp. 40–47.

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diversion was implicitly support for South African empire. The Union was to finance, design,

and build these schemes, and the results were intended to benefit whites in the Union.

Schwarz’s supporters were a diverse lot, united only by their race. Dozens of white

farmers from the Cape to the Transvaal, prosperous and otherwise, wrote in support of

Schwarz’s scheme – but so did residents of South Africa’s largest cities (including the son of

the explorer Charles John Andersson, living in Cape Town), the head curator of the National

Museum, university professors, white farmers in Botswana and Namibia, the famed Native

Commissioner of Ovamboland, and a German storekeeper in Outjo. These men – and they

seem to have been all men27 – had names that bespoke British, Afrikaner, and German

heritage. They, along with those who proposed alternative schemes, supported a massive,

state-run transformation of the natural world beyond South Africa’s borders to benefit the

cause of white civilisation across the region.

This point was not made subtly. The farmer Weidner’s vision was explicitly regional,

with South Africa overseeing the creation of transportation and economic linkages among

whites in five different territories. He dedicated his self-published pamphlet to the prime

ministers of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, as well as the heads of South West Africa

and the Bechuanaland Protectorate. If this weren’t clear enough, he also referenced ‘our

YOUNG SOUTH AFRICAN COMMONWEALTH’ – in capital letters.28 John Owen-

Collett, first president of the Schwarz Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Society, wrote a year

after its formation, ‘To our mind we certainly should have control of the Native areas

[meaning the High Commission territories]. Our interests are identical economically and . . .

we should come under one Government’.29

But discussions of river diversion included lands well beyond those under official

discussion. Smuts may have dreamed of South Africa stretching virtually to the equator,

but by the 1920s South African leaders were pressing for little more than Swaziland and

Botswana and, implicitly, Namibia. Supporters of the Kalahari Redemption Scheme,

meanwhile, criticised Schwarz’s decision to exclude the Zambezi river – and thus

Southern Rhodesia – from his scheme (‘I have been advised that no meddling with

Victoria Falls would be allowed’, Schwarz wrote).30 Gessert, the German scientist–

farmer in Namibia whose support for river diversion predated Schwarz’s, wrote a letter

to Farmer’s Weekly urging that the scheme be expanded to include the Zambezi. ‘Who’,

he asked,

would not cheerfully renounce a few hours of delight afforded by Nature in order to be rid of thetormenting idea that by hindering the scheme he has contributed to the misfortune of thousands offamilies, who under most unfavourable climatic circumstances are gaining a scanty subsistencenot worth [sic ] a white man, and leading lives not much better than the life of a native?31

Another writer, from Queenstown, said, ‘Had I anything to do with the diverting of rivers,

I would have Lake Ngami and all the depressions in the Kalahari flooded instead of allowing

volumes of water to pour over the Victoria Falls as a theatrical display’.32

White Southern Rhodesians voted decisively against joining the Union in 1922, but

proponents of river diversion continued to advocate diverting the Zambezi into the Kalahari.

In 1923, an anonymous donor offered £1,000 for a preliminary investigation of the scheme –

27 The sole exception is Schwarz’s widow, Daisy Schwarz, who took up his cause after his death in 1928 but seemsto have remained peripheral in the public campaign for another investigation.

28 Weidner, Fallacy, p. 1. He also foresaw increased ties to Mozambique.29 Farmer’s Weekly, 23 May 1934, letter from J. Owen-Collett, p. 632.30 Schwarz, Kalahari, p. 103.31 Farmer’s Weekly, 14 July 1920, letter from F. Gessert, p. 2377.32 Farmer’s Weekly, 14 July 1920, letter from R. McKinnon, p. 2376.

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on the condition that it include the Zambezi.33 A decade later, Owen-Collett made the

construction of a dam and diversion channel at Katombora, 50 miles above the Victoria Falls,

his personal cause.34 Karlson’s proposal required South African expansion into Northern

Rhodesia and Angola – the only areas, he said, where sufficiently deep reservoirs could be

constructed. In his view, it was these two territories that posed the ‘political difficulty’ of river

diversion – not the lands adjacent to South Africa.35 Eliding the interests and identities of

South and southern Africa, Karlson argued that irrigation would permit European settlement

in South West Africa, Angola, Rhodesia, and the Union of South Africa, resulting in what he

described as ‘a South African Egypt’.36 And, like Smuts and other leaders, he emphasised the

geographic logic of this expansionism: ‘ . . . all this water is lost in the [Okavango] swamps

500 miles from Pretoria’.37

The Imperative of Empire

White southern Africans assumed that South Africa had a claim on territories well beyond its

1910 borders: the High Commission territories, South West Africa, Southern Rhodesia, even

lands beyond. But why did they feel compelled to make good on those claims at this time and

in this way?

Hyam argues that the quest for South African expansion was driven by concerns for

prestige or status: ‘South African interest in the Territories was more political than economic,

and more even than a desire to make the desert rejoice and blossom like a rose. Prestige

loomed prominently throughout’.38 No historian has challenged this claim. But for those who

advocated the diversion of rivers, the value of lands beyond South Africa lay precisely in the

possibility of making the desert bloom. They were far less concerned with global prestige

than with their own futures.

In the first decades of the 20th century, many doubted the survival of what was called

‘white civilisation’ in southern Africa. Severe droughts from the 1910s to the 1940s,

combined with global changes in the economics of farming, left white agriculture in a near-

perpetual state of crisis. One result was that white South Africans widely believed that the

region was ‘becoming a desert’. Another was greater attention to the ‘poor white problem’.

Whites who lost access to land drifted into unemployment and, often, to the economic

margins of urban centres. Their existence was a threat to the hardening racial order. Hydro-

imperialism was rooted in this widespread white anxiety over drought and the future of the

white race in the region.

Such concerns were of course not new. Arguments for a desiccating climate were a

century old and had gained traction as Lake Ngami, a substantial if shallow body of water

when Livingstone and his companions had seen it in 1849, gradually disappeared over the

course of the 19th century. ‘Poor whites’, meanwhile, had been a concern since at least

the 1880s. In the three decades after Union, multiple commissions were formed to consider

33 NAUK, DO 119/974, 12 April 1923, H.J. Stanley to J.C. Macgregor. The donor, a British industrialist namedCharles Markham, relented when Smuts informed him a power company had a 99-year lease on that stretch ofriver.

34 See, for example, Farmer’s Weekly, 9 May 1934, letter from J. Owen-Collett, p. 502.35 NARSA, GG 1305, f 35/50, August Karlson to UK High Commissioner to South Africa, 19 September 1923, p. 3,

emphasis in original. Karlson suggested that South Africa could perhaps offer railways in exchange forpermission to build the required reservoirs.

36 Karlson, Kalahari Problem, p. 18.37 NARSA, GG 1305, f 35/50, August Karlson to UK High Commissioner to South Africa, 19 September 1923, p. 4,

emphasis in original.38 Hyam, Failure, p. 73

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the problems of drought and white poverty. But historical studies of these topics suffer from

an official bias. Many rural whites did not trust the South African government and they were

inherently sceptical of state agricultural programmes and most government reports, even as

they demanded government assistance for agriculture. They also thought very differently

from bureaucrats about the causes of drought and white poverty, and the relationship between

the two.

While government commissions and scientists insisted from 1910 to the 1940s that the

climate was not changing and rainfall was not in a long-term pattern of decline, most of the

white public disagreed. Debates over river diversion are filled with assertions that South

Africa was ‘drying up’. The result was a sense of siege that extended well beyond poor

whites. Both editorial coverage and correspondence in Farmer’s Weekly demonstrate that

many white farmers worried about their future, even if they were not in imminent danger of

losing their farms. Drought endangered even financially stable farmers, threatening to turn

everyone into a ‘poor white’.

Schwarz understood this fear and promised that his scheme would end ‘the heart-breaking

succession of droughts, that make the farmers feel that no effort on their part is of any use, for

God, Nature, the country, and the Government seem to be banded against the wretched

farmer’.39 He argued that his plan would increase rainfall, thereby stabilising South African

settler agriculture and allowing its expansion into arid lands. It would thus solve what many

whites regarded as the most pressing problem of the time – the faltering agrarian base of

white South Africa.

Discussions of what a stable white society would look like rested on a shared belief that

white power had to consist of more than burgeoning cities fuelled by mineral wealth and

surrounded by rural black communities. Rather, whites needed to occupy the landscape

physically and make the land productive.40 Although later hydro-imperialism focused on

electrification, its early version was rooted in this agrarian vision. River diversion’s

popularity stemmed from a pervasive sense that the white presence on the land was threatened

and that maintaining it was vitally important. A farmer in Pondoland who did not agree with

Schwarz’s climate claims none the less supported South African expansion via river

diversion: ‘ . . . the only real solution to this question is an amalgamation of all the South

African [sic ] states, which would open out a great amount of land for colonisation’.41 Owen-

Collett, the president of the Kalahari Redemption Society, also expressed hope that river

diversion would increase the ‘carrying capacity’ of both South Africa and Southern

Rhodesia.42 Like others, he argued that the stability of white agriculture rested on its

expansion: ‘We are looking for land . . . Some of us have to shift’.43

The most fundamental threat, then, was to the very existence of whites in southern Africa

– an existential danger that drove commitments to other forms of expansion as well.44 But for

supporters of river diversion, it was their relationship to the land that would determine the

future of white supremacy. Hyam fleetingly acknowledges this crucial point, noting that

segregation ‘could not work without more land’.45 It was widely understood among

39 Schwarz, Kalahari, p.160.40 Hyam, without elaborating, notes this ‘basic urge to acquire land’ as a consistent motive for empire. Failure,

p. 73.41 Farmer’s Weekly, 21 April 1937, letter from O.W. Webber.42 Farmer’s Weekly, 23 May 1934, letter from J. Owen-Collett, p. 632.43 Farmer’s Weekly, 29 March 1933, letter from J. Owen Collett, p. 86.44 Oswald Pirow, ‘How Far is the Union Interested in the Continent of Africa?’, Journal of the Royal African

Society, 36, 144 (July 1937), pp. 317–20. Pirow, as Minister of Defence and founder of South African Airways,was, Dedering writes elsewhere in this issue, motivated by ‘the lingering question of how white rule could bemade safe’.

45 Hyam, Failure, p. 104.

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supporters of river diversion that complete racial separation in the rural and urban areas

would require sufficient – and sufficiently productive – land to keep Africans from migrating

permanently to the cities, and – especially – to maintain a prosperous and large white

farming class. Since much of the land beyond South Africa’s borders was semi-arid, water

was a necessary component to any expansion.

Landless or land-poor Africans were conceptualised as ‘surplus populations’ who

threatened the success of white society. Karlson argued that his scheme would ‘save the

industrious Ovambo race’ in northern Namibia.46 Smuts long held out hope that Kalahari

irrigation might provide a new homeland for residents of Basutoland.47 These ideas were not

motivated by sentiment: overcrowding in Lesotho was commonly blamed for soil erosion that

affected South Africa, and the Ovambo were South West Africa’s primary labour force.

African farmers were also blamed for white poverty through what many whites portrayed as

unfair competition. In 1935, a man complained to Farmer’s Weekly, ‘No other country

occupied by a larger number of White farmers has to contend with internal competition from

a large section who have no capital outlay and no rent to pay’. This competition was ‘turning

of the majority of our Europeans into a poor white population’. His solution was ‘the

incorporation of the Protectorates, and the development of the Bechuanaland Protectorate for

. . . redundant tribes’ – an eventual population of 4–5 million Africans.48

White supremacy was also threatened by demographics. Implicit in the most ambitious

riparian schemes was not only a desire to make the region’s white population more secure on

the land, but also to increase its numbers. Urban dwellers shared this agenda. As a Durban

man wrote in 1945,

If we are to continue to own and enjoy this delectable country of ours . . . we must occupy it andwork it and take care of it in the broadest sense of the word, farm it intelligently and efficiently.To do that we will probably need another 20 millions of a virile White race.

He argued that ‘The land, now a desert’, was a barrier to this future; water, ‘intelligently

applied, would turn it into a smiling paradise’.49

River diversion proponents tapped directly into these sentiments, promising demographic

as well as ecological change. Karlson wrote in 1919, ‘We shall . . . be able to open the

Kalahari for the white man by abolishing a great part of it’.50 He argued that the

demographics of the Union boded ill for whites there, predicting a ‘native and coloured

majority’ of 8 million by 1946. Including Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa in his

population figures – again without needing to justify these borders – he argued that, with

extensive irrigation and the industry that robust agriculture would nurture, ‘the European

population could be 6,000,000, and almost be equal to the native population’.51

Schwarz, meanwhile, proposed that 15,000–20,000 families, ‘of a type that likes tropical

conditions, and is not afraid of malaria’, could settle in newly watered land around

Grootfontein in Namibia. He argued that ‘natives’ should have the first claim on irrigated land

46 Karlson, Kalahari Problem, p. 13. Schwarz’s scheme would actually have submerged most of Ovamboland.47 NAUK, DO 35/1189, ‘Notes on a Conversation with Lord Harlech, 30 June 1943’.48 Farmer’s Weekly, 14 August 1935, letter from J.C. MacBeth, p. 1609. Karlson included in his proposal a plan to

settle 1 million Africans in Bechuanaland, although on vastly less land that what he proposed to make available towhites. But most of these schemes involved depriving Africans of land rather than giving it to them. Schwarzproposed turning much of Ovamboland, where most of Namibia’s African migrant labour force resided, into avast lake by diverting the Kunene into the Cuvelai floodplain – thereby simultaneously depriving Himbapastoralists of crucial riparian resources. His scheme also would have drained the Okavango Delta, whichsustained most of north-western Botswana’s population, and would apportion out to white emigrants from SouthAfrica and Europe huge tracts of the Kalahari that were home to forager–hunter groups.

49 Farmer’s Weekly, 6 June 1945, letter from W.H. Pilkington, p. 611.50 Karlson, Kalahari Problem, p. 13.51 Ibid., p. 19.

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in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, but claimed that so much land would be available – in

blocks of 1,000 square miles, or 640,000 acres – that there would be plenty of room for white

settlement as well, so much space that black settlements ‘need not come in contact with the

white settlements at all’.52 A greened Kalahari, in other words, was the perfect laboratory for

segregation. Schwarz also promised that some of the diverted water would make its way into

South Africa via ancient riverbeds. There would be 750 square miles of irrigated land

available to resettle most of the country’s poor whites, and another 1,000 square miles open

for purchase and settlement. In short, his scheme promised irrigated land to any white farmer

who wished to take it up.

Empire and the White Imagination

These ideas were not so far from government policy. The case of Namibia hints at the

complex relationship between official thinking and the popular white imagination. South

Africa saw Namibia as valuable primarily because it promised a solution to white poverty

within South Africa itself. But the number of settlers coming into Namibia was never

sufficient to make a dent in white landlessness in South Africa, even if every immigrant white

farmer had proved a financial success. The impact of land settlement policies on black

Namibians may have been ‘phenomenal’, as Allan Cooper has argued, but its impact on white

South Africans – tens of thousands of whom were poor and landless by the 1930s – was

negligible in real economic terms.

What Namibia offered instead was symbolic: the promise that controlling new lands

beyond the Union would diminish the troubling contradictions of the racial order within.

Namibia helped to cement Afrikaner political power in South Africa not only by augmenting

the ranks of the white electorate favouring the National Party, but also by offering a rallying

point for white expansionist sentiments.53 But this imperial dream had mobility: if Namibia

could help to solve South Africa’s twin problems of drought and white poverty, so too could

Botswana, or Zimbabwe, or other neighbouring territories.

Conversations about river diversion make explicit the widely shared fantasies embedded

within much government policy. The notion that all of southern Africa was properly South

African territory was implicit in writings on the Kalahari scheme. As ‘a sufferer from

drought’ in Vryburg, Cape Province, wrote to Farmer’s Weekly in 1921, ‘Now we must

preserve moisture by . . . filling up the pans and Lake Ngami. Don’t talk about other

countries; try to make South Africa as it formerly was’.54 The frequent conflation of ‘South

Africa’ as both the region and the nation in the early 20th century was partly linguistic

convention. But it was also political optimism: the elision of South and southern Africa

allowed for a larger South Africa to be imagined. Alex du Toit, in his 1925 report debunking

most of Schwarz’s scheme, called the Kavango river ‘the most remarkable river in South

Africa’.55 Smuts, committed to an expansionist vision, transposed ‘South Africa’ and

‘Southern Africa’ throughout his life. Similarly, the Vryburg writer’s insistence that he was

speaking only of one country – South Africa – while he spoke of filling Lake Ngami,

hundreds of miles across the border, demonstrates the implications of this common elision.

People could simultaneously see ‘South Africa’ as a political unit and as a larger region that

included three to five territories beyond the border. It was a small step for the political and

52 Schwarz, Thirstland, pp. 156–8.53 A. Cooper, ‘The Institutionalisation of Contract Labour in Namibia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 25, 1

(1999), p. 126.54 Farmer’s Weekly, 23 February 1921, letter from ‘A Sufferer from Drought’, p. 3146.55 Du Toit, Report, p. 25.

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geographical entities to merge in the popular imagination, becoming a single unit for

purposes of engineering nature and shoring up white domination.

Hydro-imperialism’s promise to transform nature also resonated powerfully within the

white imagination. The idea that southern Africa’s rainfall could be ‘restored’ to a prior

Edenic state evoked not only narratives of environmental decline that were a century old but

also narratives of the conquest of nature that were older still. Schwarz’s contention that

flooding the Kalahari would restore South Africa’s climate to a previous pluvial golden age

gave South Africans a moral claim on other lands. Owen-Collett blamed the ‘apathetic state

of the [Bechuanaland] Protectorate’ for the plight of white farmers in South Africa. In 1910,

German scientists, he said, ‘told us this country if not taken in hand would become a desert’,

yet ‘the British Government never moved, except to clear the debris in the Okavango [Delta],

not even to stop some of this river’s water escaping to the Zambesi’.56

As Karlson, the irrigation engineer, wrote to the British High Commissioner from his

home in South Africa, ‘Nature has given us these equatorial Rivers and it is our duty to see

and examine in which way we can make the best use of them’.57 A decade later, as the ‘Great

Drought’ of 1933 unleashed its full wrath, a farmer calling himself ‘Mokalahari’ wrote to

Farmer’s Weekly that the location of the land in Schwarz’s scheme was not a pressing

concern: ‘ . . . most of the land in the Bechuanaland Protectorate which would be flooded and

used for irrigation and ranching, is brown-lands. So there would be no trouble there’.58 In

other words, this was land that was currently unused for productive agricultural purposes and

was therefore available for the taking by enterprising whites. Mokalahari’s language evokes

earlier justifications of Afrikaner expansion into areas depopulated by the mid 19th-century

mass expulsions known as themfecane, and his chosen pen name indicates that he had already

laid claim to the region. By virtue of being white – and willing to ‘use’ resources that

Africans had supposedly failed to use – these writers and their audiences asserted

ownership over water catchments beyond the Union’s borders.

Race is largely implicit in these discussions of South African expansionism. Yet it runs

throughout the entire enterprise. The mere fact of not having to verbalise questions of race,

like not having to verbalise assumptions about empire, is revealing in itself. The rare

moments when race is explicitly invoked demonstrate its role within popular enthusiasm for

hydro-imperialism. Take, for example, Carl Weidner’s explanation of the disappearance of

Lake Ngami, which most government scientists attributed to tectonic activity, and which

Schwarz attributed to the diversion of rivers toward the coasts and a subsequent (and related)

decline in rainfall.

Perhaps unusually for a white farmer, Weidner agreed with the official conclusion that

South Africa was not ‘drying up’ and that rainfall had remained stable. But he also agreed with

Schwarz that Ngami and theMakarikari pans had recently constituted ‘three great seas’, ‘along

the banks of which many Natives, tillers of the soil, lived in opulence from the fruits of their

agricultural enterprise’. In a typical telescoping of African historical time, he argued that a

mere 40 years before, ‘maraudingBechuanas’ had arrived at Ngami’s shores and begun seizing

the local population to sell to ‘Arab slave hunters’. Meanwhile, Boer hunters were decimating

the region’s game. (In the minds of many pro-British South Africans, of whomWeidner seems

to have been one, Boers managed their environment nearly as thoughtlessly as Africans.59)

56 Farmer’s Weekly, 23 May 1934, letter from J. Owen-Collett, p. 632. He is referring to a project, in the 1930s, toopen up channels in the Okavango Delta that had been blocked by clusters of papyrus, on the theory that thiswould restore older drainage patterns into Ngami and elsewhere.

57 NARSA, GG 1305, f 35/50, A. Karlson to UK High Commissioner to South Africa, 19 September 1923.58 Farmer’s Weekly, 19 April 1933, letter from ‘Mokalahari’, p. 254.59 Weidner, Fallacy, p. 11.

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Moremi, ‘Chief of the Natives north of Lake Ngami’ – Weidner appears unaware that

Moremi himself was one of the ‘marauding Bechuanas’ – sought to preserve his autonomy

and drive out the interlopers. Weidner argued that Moremi had trees felled in order to dam the

Kavango river above Ngami, thereby cutting off the water supply. Moremi succeeded in his

goal of driving the outsiders away, Weidner said, but inadvertently flooded his own area,

turning ‘a once flourishing and productive countryside into what it is today – an unhealthy

and miserable swamp’.60

The notion of poor custodianship is crucial to this imaginative reconstruction of the past –

one surely drawn from popular settler discourse – billed in Weidner’s pamphlet as the ‘actual

history’ based on ‘the actual knowledge of [unnamed] local inhabitants’. Moremi, with no

thought for the future, impulsively blocked the Kavango river and destroyed his own society’s

resource base.Weidner may have thought Schwarz’s schemewasmere ‘rain-makingmagic’ –

another invocation of race, since ‘rain-maker’ to most whites would have denoted an African

charlatan. But he shared the notion that whites had a legitimate right to this distant river: it was

‘unquestionably the “White” man’s duty to repair the harm done by Chief Morimi’ [sic ].61

Weidner’s theory demonstrates the complexity of indigenous knowledge circulationwithin

white society. A man who self-identified with government scientists and bureaucrats, who

advocated irrigation and ‘progressive farming’, and scoffed at popular opinion about climate

change, did not merely repeat the ‘rational’ western science highlighted by historians such as

WilliamBeinart and Saul Dubow.62 Instead, his writings represent amelange of on-the-ground

environmental observations, allegiance tomodernity and progress, settler historical narratives,

white vernaculars, and – always – deeply rooted ideas about race.63 This trove of ideas cannot

be separated from popular support for South African expansion, even if we can only rarely

glimpse the connections between them.More often, we simply see the outcome: a presumption

that ‘natives’ should rightfully have no say in the fate of the rivers running through their lands,

or indeed, in the terrestrial consequences of hydraulic engineering.

Those ‘natives’ were presumably largely unaware of the details of these conversations

taking place in periodicals and self-published pamphlets, to which they had virtually no

access. But many knew about the broader debate over annexation, and protested

vociferously.64 And at least some in the region heard about Schwarz’s scheme. In the only

letter penned by an African that I’ve found in Farmer’s Weekly, a man named John Kolobe

Phoks wrote from Ngamiland in 1933. Phoks claimed that he remembered Schwarz’s 1925

visit and stated what few others bothered to state: that the river systems ‘are not situated in

any part of the Union of South Africa and therefore the control of such waterways would not

be in the hands of any Union department’. ‘The Natives of Ngamiland’, Phoks insisted,

‘would require to be consulted before anything could be done, so that their water rights would

be safeguarded’.65

60 Weidner, Fallacy, pp. 12–13. The Okavango Delta is considered today one of the most ecologically rich wetlandsystems in the world.

61 Weidner, Fallacy, p. 13.62 W. Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770–1950

(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008); S. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, andWhite South Africa 1820–2000 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006).

63 L. van Sittert, ‘The Supernatural State: Water Divining and the Cape Underground Water Rush, 1891–1910’,Journal of Social History, 37, 4 (2004), pp. 915–37, explores this hybrid knowledge in the realm of ‘hydraulicengineering’ within South Africa.

64 Hyam, Failure, pp. 76–82, 143, 181–82. In July 1920, Schwarz supposedly visited the Colonial Office inLondon, requesting a concession for a ‘Kalahari Development Company’, in order to create white settlements inareas already occupied by Africans. Reports of his request later argued that local officials and Africans, ‘alarmedat the proposed cession of their territories’, seemed to have lobbied against the scheme and he was turned down.Du Toit, Report, pp. 8–9.

65 Farmer’s Weekly, 3 May 1933, letter from J. K. Phoks, p. 366.

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Phoks then challenged the knowledge claims of Schwarz and his supporters, noting that

without exception they had only skirted the region’s margins. Whites who had written in

support of the scheme and claimed to be residents of the region were not known to local

people, he said, implying that they were not as embedded in the community as they claimed –

that, in essence, ‘Mokalahari’ was not a person of the Kalahari. Further, there was no

evidence that the scheme would work, based as it was on a faulty presumption: ‘Anyone with

elementary knowledge of geology can say that the so-called Lake Ngami is not a lake but

simply a pan or depression’.66

Phoks sought to undermine the authority claims that formed the basis for popular hydro-

imperialism, but Schwarz’s supporters discounted any possibility of African expertise. As the

Schwarz Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Society’s president wrote the following year,

It is claimed that the Natives must be consulted. I ask you, are they capable to judge thesematters? Have they not been allowed to steep in their ignorance long enough? . . . Here we aresandwiched between Native areas over which we have no or very limited say. Basutoland andBechuanaland Protectorate may be likened to an indolent old man who has a beautiful river ofwater passing his fertile lands, yet prefers to sit, sit, sit.67

Attitudes toward the views of (white) Rhodesians were markedly different. One man wrote, ‘I

don’t for a moment think Rhodesia would allow tributaries of the Zambesi to be tampered

with, as this would affect the Falls’.68 Such opposition had to be taken seriously, whereas

African opposition could be written off as a rejection of progress.

Meanwhile Britain, which insisted on maintaining control of these territories and thereby

prevented the creation of South Africa’s riparian empire in favour of safeguarding the land

rights of those ‘indolent natives’, was equally culpable. For Owen-Collett and other hydro-

imperialists, it was not just African indolence but also British neglect that justified South

African expansion. Referring to the High Commission territories as the ‘native areas’, he

wrote, the ‘British Government has done very little towards the development of its Native

areas’. It had made ‘no attempt to investigate and find what Nature has hidden’.69

These charges struck their intended target. British officials sought to deflect Schwarz and

his supporters, at least to a point.70 But they worried that the charges of neglect offered an

opening for South African land claims. In 1945, as South Africa prepared to send yet another

expedition into the Kalahari, the High Commissioner wrote a confidential memo expressing

concerns that South Africa would use British inaction on the Kavango and adjacent rivers to

justify its demands for the incorporation of the Bechuanaland Protectorate – a memo which

reveals the extent of continued public support for river diversion.71

Most of Professor Schwarz’s theories have been disproved, yet many South Africans still believein them and there is in fact a Schwarz Society. In short the Ngamiland water has politicalimportance. The Union Government may well ask us what we intend to do to bring into use thewater which now runs to waste.72

British officials were only too aware of the potency of the charge that they were allowing

rivers to ‘run to waste’ – a phrase that appears constantly in white public discourse on

drought and agricultural crisis. When Charles Markham, director of a British coal and iron

66 Ibid.67 Farmer’s Weekly, 23 May 1934, letter from J. Owen-Collett, p. 632.68 Farmer’s Weekly, 12 April 1933, letter from N.H. Ogilvie, p. 200.69 Farmer’s Weekly, 23 May 1934, letter from J. Owen-Collett, p. 632.70 In the 1920s, they rejected Schwarz’s request for a concession in the area.71 NAUK, DO 35/1189, Harlech to Machtig, 25 August 1945.72 NAUK, DO 35/1186, UK High Commissioner to South Africa to Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, 29

August 1945.

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company that had expanded into chemical manufacturing, anonymously offered £1,000

for the 1925 investigation of the Kalahari scheme, he offered it to Smuts, not the High

Commissioner or Rhodesian governor, who had formal control of the lands the scheme

covered. Markham and his partner Kenneth Quinan, an American-born chemical engineer

who had established a large munitions plant in South Africa, wanted to incorporate Victoria

Falls into

a vast industrial project, involving the utilisation of the waters of the Zambesi which now run towaste, for the generation of power, so essential to industry and also possibly for agriculture orgrazing in the – at present – dry land of the Kalahari Desert.73

The two manufacturers had markedly different goals from the agrarian populists who were

the core of Schwarz’s support. But they shared in their disquiet at Britain’s failure to stop its

rivers from ‘running to waste’. As Karlson wrote ominously, ‘South Africa cannot afford to

lose this water’.74

These ideas were entrenched across white, rural South Africa. Irrigation and the

conservation of water resources had been central to white settlement schemes since the late

19th century.75 Until the 1920s, most dam-building and irrigation projects were carried out by

individuals on a relatively small scale, often with government support in the form of loans.76

But advocacy for large-scale government projects predated Union. A Midlands livestock

farmer summarised this sentiment in 1883, arguing that ‘no dam should be constructed unless

it was of such an extent as to be a national work, similar to those in India’.77 By the 1920s,

suspicion of the government and a vague support for water conservation on a grand scale co-

existed uneasily among many, of not most, rural whites. The belief that conserving water was

crucial to the future of white agriculture had deep roots, and it united government officials,

‘progressive’ farmers, and Schwarz supporters.

In the minds of white South Africans, allowing rivers to run to the sea did not just

squander the region’s precious water resources; it also squandered its soil resources. Soil

erosion was another subject of heated debate in the decades that the Schwarz scheme was

discussed, and most river diversion schemes promised to remedy both soil erosion and

drought. In 1945, a farmer in the northern Transvaal wrote,

In view of the vast damage already done by erosion . . . it will be a crime if our Government doesnot take ample steps forthwith to take this monstrous bull by the horns and commence dammingrivers and vleis and creating lakes to keep our annual rain-water here in our midst instead ofallowing it to rush down to the sea together with our valuable soil.78

The aversion to letting rivers ‘run to waste’ had deep roots. German scientists and farmers

had speculated during German colonial times on the possibility of diverting the Kunene river

into the Etosha Pan of South West Africa, and had proposed a number of irrigation schemes

on Namibia’s seasonal rivers.79 Dams to conserve water in seasonal riverbeds for livestock

73 National Archives of Namibia, South West African Administrator, 598, K.B. Quinan to Smuts, 28 May 1923.74 Karlson, Kalahari Problem, p. 19.75 W. Visser, ‘White Settlement and Irrigation Schemes: C.F. Rigg and the Founding of Bonnievale in the Breede

River Valley, 1900–c. 1953’, New Contree, 68 (2013), pp. 1–28.76 The history of irrigation and dam building prior to the 1920s, albeit with a focus on official and progressive-farmer

thinking, is covered in Beinart, Rise of Conservation, pp. 158–94; see also C.O. Linscott, ‘A Short History ofIrrigation Development in South Africa’, South African Irrigation Department Magazine, 3, 2 (1924), pp. 50–62.

77 Quoted in Beinart, Rise of Conservation, p. 160.78 Farmer’s Weekly, 28 February 1945, letter from W.P. Pohl, p. 1234.79 F. Gessert, ‘Uber Rentabilitat und Baukosten einer Kunene-Ableitung’, Globus, 85 (1904), pp. 338–41, 348–52.

The hydraulic engineer Theodor Rehbock wrote of SouthWest Africa, ‘Storage dams of massive capacity have tobe constructed to collect the water which otherwise runs unused into the sea’, quoted in B. Lau and C. Stern,Namibian Water Resource and Their Management (Windhoek, National Archives of Namibia, 1990), p. 27. It isunclear whether Schwarz drew his idea from German South West Africa or came up with it independently.

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were a backbone of settler agriculture in South West Africa. South Africa, too, had proposed

several government-supported irrigation schemes by 1910. Over the course of the next four

decades, it built not only a number of irrigation settlements and smaller diversion and dam

projects, but more substantial dams as well.

The contention that transforming nature justified imperialism was couched in global

terms. Whereas Hyam views most of the South African electorate as too parochial to be

concerned with issues of territorial expansion, the supporters of river diversion saw

themselves as part of a shared global community of colonisers and conquerors struggling

to make semi-arid lands productive. They sought examples of civilisation surviving in

hostile lands. Karlson dreamed of creating ‘a South African Egypt’ – a place where water in

the desert miraculously allowed the flourishing of civilisation at the borders of barbarism.80

Those who debated whether Schwarz’s scheme would improve the climate invoked the

Aral, Dead and Salton seas, the USWest, the American Great Lakes, and Australia to support

their claims.

These comparisons were not only ecological. They were racial and imperialist, framed in

terms of a transnational whiteness. Each example represented the expansion of European

society into lands seized from indigenous people, who had supposedly failed to make them

productive. Sometimes the comparison was overt. Take, for example, the opinions of the

Namibian farmer Gessert, who wrote admiringly of ‘Russia’s redemption of her Asiatic

deserts’. He continued,

Russia did not conquer Asia’s deserts for cotton for individual purposes, but in pursuing herimperialistic aims. . . . Therefore the question of blocking up the Orange, the Cunene and theZambesi . . . is not of secondary, but of highest world-wide importance.81

Conclusion

In their study of what they call South African ‘hydro-hegemony’, Anthony Turton and Nikki

Funke argue that ‘the interesting period starts in 1948’, with the National Party victory. They

date the ‘birth of the aggressive hydro-hydraulic mission’ to the Orange River Project in the

1960s.82 But this periodisation assumes that such ideas originated within government

departments. Looking at popular opinion changes both our time frame and our understanding

of hydro-hegemony’s origins. The notion of using water resources beyond South Africa was

born of the hope that the redemption of the Kalahari could be the redemption of South Africa,

a means to increase its white population and its agrarian security. Hydro-imperialism was

embraced by the white public well before it became official government policy.

River diversion garnered popular support because it tapped into widespread white anxiety

about climate change and its links to drought, economic upheaval, and white poverty. If the

well-being of the environment and the white race were intertwined, so too were white

supremacy and white expansion. Discussions around the Schwarz scheme demonstrate that

all of southern Africa was already ‘white man’s land’ in the white imagination. Almost never

did any of the participants – for or against the scheme – acknowledge that they were

discussing the seizure of large tracts of African-occupied land. In most cases, it is not so much

that whites openly advocated further disenfranchising Africans as that they did not think of

them at all. The majority of the population had been conceptually erased from the landscape.

80 Karlson, Kalahari Problem, p. 18.81 Farmer’s Weekly, 11 April 1934, letter from F. Gessert, pp. 232–33. Gessert also expressed admiration for

Japanese imperialism.82 A. Turton and N. Funke, ‘Hydro-Hegemony in the Context of the Orange River Basin’, Water Policy, 10,

Supplement 2 (2008), p. 53.

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Schwarz’s ghost cast a long shadow. Two decades after du Toit criticised his scheme as

unworkable, Schwarz’s ideas continued to shape the geopolitics of southern Africa and white

South Africans’ conceptions of how their place in the region might be secured for the long

term. The 1945 expedition, launched in response to pressure from the Schwarz Society and

other supporters of river diversion, reached the same conclusions as the 1925 expedition had.

But the views of the parliamentarians who accompanied the surveyors and scientists were

notably different. One, J.M. Conradie from Rustenburg, noted that Schwarz

did not make it sufficiently clear to the public that practically everything depended uponincorporation of Bechuanaland Protectorate and South West Africa in the Union, or the closestco-operation between them, before anything important could be tackled. . . . The position simplyis, that without incorporation or the closest co-operation of the two territories and, to a lesserdegree also of Angola and Southern Rhodesia, it would really be a waste of energy and money forthe Union because the territories which would draw the greatest benefit . . . would be the CapriviStrip, the BP and SWA.83

But this was not a dismissal of Schwarz’s scheme; it was a plea for incorporation. In March of

the same year, the same MP urged the House of Assembly to prioritise incorporation, noting

that by developing the Kavango river, ‘we could . . . create a new province of South Africa

out of the desert-like Kalahari’.84 While others were more restrained, most spoke of the

possibility of extensive irrigation and timber exploitation in the Caprivi strip and, in some

cases, irrigation in northern Botswana.

By 1945, the chances that any territory would be transferred to South Africa were

increasingly remote. Namibia was becoming a subject of international contestation, and

South Africa was soon to implement the policies that eventually made it an international

pariah. Why then did the South African government continue to study the development of

rivers hundreds of miles beyond its borders? The answer lies at least partly in the popularity

of hydro-imperialism as a proxy for South African expansion. Schwarz had been dead for 17

years, but people continued to debate the merits of seizing control of the region’s rivers for

the benefit of white South Africa. The initial advocates of the scheme were elderly by this

time, but a new generation of men penned letters extolling the virtues of expansionism and

riparian development as a solution to continued challenges to white supremacy at home.

The concerns of British officials indirectly reflect the scale of support for river diversion.

As the High Commissioner wrote in 1945, ‘A vague hope that the surplus native population of

the Union could one day be settled on land irrigated from that water is at the back of many

minds’.85

By the late 1940s, a shift was occurring: the popular visions of empire were merging with

official analyses of South Africa’s future needs. In 1949, as drought again ravaged South

Africa, the son of one of the Schwarz Society’s founders announced that he was reviving the

defunct organisation. But rather than advocating taking control of the lands beyond, as his

father had done, John G. Collett proposed negotiations: if the governments of Angola and

Rhodesia were ‘agreeable’, teams of engineers and scientists would be sent to investigate the

possibilities of river diversion.86

The Farmer’s Weekly staff had recently declared heated debates over the efficacy of

water divining and the existence of underground ‘veins’ of water, which had peppered its

letters pages for months, to be ‘closed’. Letters on the Schwarz scheme and the causes of

83 MacKenzie, Report, p. 25.84 Quoted in R. Hyam and P. Henshaw, The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 108.85 NAUK, DO 35/1186, 29 August 1945, UK High Commissioner to South Africa to Secretary of State for

Dominion Affairs.86 Farmer’s Weekly, 24 August 1949, letter to the editor from John G. Collett, pp. 50–1.

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changing rainfall took their place among a drought-weary readership. Typical is the Farmer’s

Weekly issue of 21 December 1949, when a man in Natal argued that ‘every farmers [sic ]

association in the country’ should support the scheme, while another in the northern Cape

ridiculed it and concluded, ‘We have enough hay on our forks to conserve the lands of the

Union, which we have made a mess of, before launching out into the Schwarz Scheme’.87 Yet

in the same issue, the Farmer’s Weekly staff – no fans of the Schwarz scheme – reported a

proposal for an ‘inter-territorial survey’ of the ‘Upper Kalahari lakes’ and the Chobe,

Zambezi, and Okavango river systems. The article stated as fact that ‘the area has gradually

been drying out since long before Livingstone first set eyes on Lake Ngami’, and said that

even experts critical of the Schwarz scheme ‘believe that progressive desiccation of the

Kalahari could at least be arrested’, while ‘authorities . . . have indicated their conviction that

huge irrigation projects are feasible in this area’.88 The British High Commissioner mirrored

these sentiments: acknowledging that Schwarz’s idea that lakes could change the climate was

incorrect, he none the less stated, ‘If nothing is done I foresee nothing but further desiccation

of the area and the gradual but steady advance of desert conditions’.89

Notions of Kalahari desiccation, diverted rivers, and redemption had thus become part of

official as well as vernacular discourse by the late 1940s. Thoughts of territorial control had

ceded, however, to inter-territorial co-operation. In 1949, the year that the Schwarz Society

was reborn, D.F. Kokot, the chief engineer of planning in the Irrigation Department, wrote

that South Africa proper offered only ‘meagre’ possibilities for irrigation or hydroelectricity:

‘I have therefore included the rivers of our northern neighbours, namely the Cunene, the

Okavango, and the Zambesi’ in his planning. DesmondMidgeley, another water engineer and

a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, similarly wrote in 1969, ‘There is little doubt

that throughout the Southern African sub-continent larger and larger quantities of water will

have to be conveyed over greater distances’.90 Both men expected foreign water to be

necessary for irrigation and hydroelectricity. But officialdom in this case was simply

following decades-old popular enthusiasm for claiming rivers beyond South Africa’s borders.

The need to create regional water and power relationships, with South Africa in a leading

role, was increasingly framed through a lens of saving the subcontinent from communism, but

the idea was far older than this bogeyman.

Schemes to transform nature in southern Africa were intended to benefit white South

Africa, understood as a regional, not national, entity that encompassed whites currently

farming in Namibia and Botswana as well as the hundreds of thousands who would join their

ranks once the desert was ‘abolished’, to use Karlson’s language. Supporters of hydro-

imperialism were not political theorists. They didn’t dwell on what sort of regional political

relations would be required to realise this transformation, nor on the precise territory it would

need to encompass – which presumably depended on which rivers were diverted – any more

than they dwelt on the meteorological and engineering problems that Schwarz’s most

prominent critics cited. But support for Schwarz’s scheme presumed not just South African

hegemony in the region, which was real enough, but actual direct and permanent political

control of South West Africa and the Bechuanaland Protectorate. In descriptions of riparian

development schemes and in letters supporting those schemes, there is a sense that vast,

empty, and under-utilised spaces were there on the map, to be claimed and redeemed.

Ownership should rightfully be transferred from those who could not or would not make them

87 Farmer’s Weekly, 21 December 1949, letters to the editor from P. Townshend and H. Christie, pp. 38–9.88 ‘Inter-Territorial Survey of Zambesi Urged’, Farmer’s Weekly, 21 December 1949, p. 73.89 NAUK, DO 35/1189, Harlech to C.R. Attlee, MP Dominions Office, 27 May 1943.90 Both quoted in R. Christie, ‘The Political Economy of the Kunene Hydro-Electric Schemes’ (MA dissertation,

University of Cape Town, 1975), p. 120 fn 19.

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productive – whether African or British – to those who would. Those who argued against the

scheme did so on many grounds, but left these fundamental assumptions unchallenged. These

ideas were those that had motivated the conquest of South African territory over the course of

a century and more, and they remained salient long after the Union was proclaimed.

MEREDITH MCKITTRICK

Department of History and Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, 601

Intercultural Center, Georgetown University, Washington DC 20057, USA. E-mail:

McKittrick@georgetown.edu

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