All dried up: The materiality of drought in Ladismith, South Africa

This paper argues that the narrow pursuit of profits and capital accumulation of the few has produced a fundamental disruption between nature and society which contributed to transform drought in Ladismith, South Africa, into a socioecological crisis. Whilst advancing debates on materiality, the researchers note two fundamental contributions to the study of drought. First, their approach makes hydrological accounts of droughts less politically naive and socially blind. Second, it develops a political ecology of droughts and socioecological crises more attuned to the materiality of drought. They contend that apprehending the materiality of drought and the active role of its non-human processes can further understandings of the workings of power and the production of socioecological injustices.

The drought-stricken Ladismith in Western Cape, South Africa, is the instrumental case study and point of departure of the paper's empirical analysis. To advance a materiality of drought that seriously accounts for the coevolution of biophysical and political transformations, they alter the spatiotemporal and empirical foci of drought analyses, thereby retracing Ladismith’s socioecological history since colonial times. In turn, such extended framework exposes the agency of soil, vegetation, hydrology and microclimate and their metabolic exchanges with processes of colonisation, apartheid, capitalist and neoliberal transformations of South African economy.