Member of the Land Portal local knowledge engagement team developing country profiles for Southern, Central and Eastern Africa - developing country narratives and historical timelines for Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia ,Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Senior Research Associate with Phuhlisani NPC.
Curator of specialist Southern African land news and analysis website https://knowledgebase.land
Land linked Twitter account https://twitter.com/KnowledgebaseL
Urban Planning in the Global South (2018) co-authored with the late Vanessa Watson addresses the on-going crisis of informality in rapidly growing cities of the global South.
Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton write how the ecologically sustainable, communally managed subsistence pastoralism in Somalia has been displaced by militarised extractive ranching. Challenging mainstream accounts of the “drought” Duffield and Stockton argue the current crisis is the result of decades of bad development and relief interventions that have promoted impoverishment and hunger.
Cyclone Cheneso smashed into northeastern Madagascar 10 days ago, bringing strong winds and triggering downpours that have caused extensive flooding.
Sixty years after they were forcibly removed to Gugulethu by the apartheid regime in terms of the Group Areas Act some families are returning to Simon’s Town, while others haave accepted compensation.
In December, Botswana’s Court of Appeal denied a Bushmen family the right to bury their elder, Pitseng Gaoberekwe, on his ancestral land in the Kalahari Desert, from which the community has been evicted to make way for the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). Gaoberekwe died in December 2021 but remains unburied after the Botswana government denied the family access to the diamond-rich land.
In response to allegations of companies polluting rivers, the Liberian government has conducted assessments, sometimes imposed fines, and re-affirmed its commitment to ensuring a clean and safe environment. However, its fines have always been lenient and insufficient to lead multi-million-dollar firms to significantly rethink their practices.
Msgr. Nestor-Désiré Nongo Aziagbia, Bishop of Bossangoa and President of the Episcopal Conference in the Central African Republic, calls for a revision of the land law, without which, he stresses, "Central Africans run the risk of becoming foreigners in their own country".
The government of Tanzania is further escalating the pressure on the Maasai to forcve them out of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area by seizing their cattle. Once captured, the cattle are auctioned off and exported from the area, unless the owners manage to get it back by paying a ransom to the authorities.
Pastoralists and other livestock keepers are too often pitted against conservationists. Parks are sometimes created to keep livestock and people out, and there are frequent stories in the media about pastoralists invading conservation areas during drought, sometimes resulting in conflict and violence. Pastoralism is of course not compatible with a style of conservation that encloses and excludes, but extensive livestock-keeping can be central to more people-centred conservation approaches.
Debates about the role of livestock in wider landscapes have come into sharp focus around the idea of ‘rewilding’, linked to plans for ‘ecosystem restoration’. Rewilding Britain defines rewilding as “the large-scale restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature is allowed to take care of itself. Rewilding seeks to reinstate natural processes and, where appropriate, missing speciesi .” The big question, though, is: what is ‘natural’ and what is defined as ‘missing’, over what timescale?
In recent years there have been devastating wildfires across the world. Wildfire incidence is increasing with climate change, and wildfires are predicted to increase by 50% by the end of the centuryi . Such intense, uncontrolled wildfires are massively damaging to environments and to people, involving multiple deaths – including among firefighters - and widespread destruction of property.
