Elijah Doro

Elijah Doro is a Humboldt Fellow from the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich, Germany. He is an Environmental Historian and did his PhD at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is also author of Plunder for Profit: A Socio-environmental History of tobacco Farming in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. His research interests are on the entanglement of extraction, human bodies and the environment in colonial southern Africa and the implications for the post colony. His work is founded on postcolonial theory and emphasises the imperative for ‘urgent histories’ that connect Africa’s historical experiences within the objective needs of the present. Elijah’s broader research project is on investigating the ‘chemical violence’ of colonial encounters in Africa and how it shapes contemporary vulnerabilities. His research explores innovative ways of using the archive to illuminate on the slow violence of settler colonialism and challenges hegemonic discourses that extirpate the agency and visibility of African experiences. Elijah is currently writing on the medical histories and toxic legacies of gold mining in Zimbabwe focusing on arsenic and the contamination of landscapes and multispecies systems. He plans to use his time at the African Studies Centre Leiden to integrate his research into broader multidisciplinary frameworks and networks which are essential for his growth as an African scholar. He will be working with the CRG Trans-species perspectives on African Studies.