Seminar: The War Ate the Rains: Transnational Civil War and Environmental Destruction in Southern Africa, 1960s-1990s

The 1960s-1990s Southern African ‘Thirty Years War’ was protracted and highly destructive in social, economic, humanitarian and environmental terms. This regional war was not only a Cold War proxy and a war of liberation and decolonization (against Portuguese metropolitan and local South African, Rhodesian and South West African minority white-settler colonialisms) but was also a civil war. Much of the destruction and displacement that caused the collapse of the environmental infrastructure that sustained rural populations was not caused by white or black strangers but by local partisans of opposing movements. The wars turned neighbours and even brothers against each other as some joined forces that supported or were allied with the colonial regimes (Battalions 32 and 101, the Ovambo Home Guard, Koevoet, UNITA, RENAMO) while others enlisted in liberation movements or were recruited in local militias.

The environmental dimensions of three decades of warfare in Southern Africa have received little attention, although some studies have identified a link between the war and famine, and others have documented the widespread poaching that financed covert operations. I will argue that the causal link between warfare and environmental degradation is critical to understanding Southern Africa’s environmental woes. Indeed, local African narratives postulate a direct relationship between war and the environmental crises of the 1980s and 1990s that is expressed in terms of images associated with witchcraft:  ‘the war ate the rains’ (as witches ‘eat’ the souls of their victims). The witchcraft discourse also underscores the civil-war aspects of the conflict: ‘witches’ are typically not strangers at all, but relatives and neighbours.

The research described is mainly based on interviews with 240 male and female respondents from approximately 60 rural communities from the Angolan-Namibian and Mozambican-South African border regions that constituted some of the major theatres of the war. Most of the South African Defence Force was based in north-central Namibia (Ovamboland) and South African units frequently operated across the border, entering deep into Angola’s Kunene Province. The interior of Mozambique’s Gaza Province saw increased levels of violence in the 1980s while the adjacent Lowveld in South Africa (particularly the Gazankulu Homeland) witnessed massive forced removals and villagization in the 1960s and 1970s and an influx of refugees from southern Mozambique in the 1980s.