NALSU Labour Studies Podcast | Jacklyn Cock, University of the Witwatersrand: Writing the Ancestral River: A biography of the Kowie

SPEAKER AND TOPIC: Jacklyn Cock, University of the Witwatersrand: “Writing the Ancestral River: A biography of the Kowie”

THE PAPER: The story of the Kowie River in the Eastern Cape opens up the story of South Africa, and raises larger questions about colonialism, capitalism, "development," and ecology. These issues are at the heart of Professor Jacky Cock's book, "Writing the Ancestral River: A Biography of the Kowie," the basis of this seminar. There is, of course, a natural history of this tidal river and its catchment area, where dinosaurs once roamed, and where cycads still grow. But the Kowie also runs through a formative meeting ground of peoples who shaped South Africa: Khoikhoi herders, Xhosa pastoralists, Afrikaner trekboers, and British settlers. Their direct descendants in the area still interact in ways decisively shaped by this shared history. The natural world of the Kowie, too, has been shaped by human settlement and stratification. This is strikingly illustrated through the development, and deleterious effects, of building a harbour at river mouth in the 19th century, and of a marina in the late 20th century. "Writing the Ancestral River" asks us to reconsider the connections between social and environmental processes and injustices, and argues that grappling with the past, and with inter-generational inequalities, damages, and denials is necessary for any shared future.

DETAILS: This is a recording of a live event in the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU), Labour Studies Seminar Series, held on Wednesday, 22 August 2018, at Eden Grove, Seminar Room 2, Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa.

HOSTS: The series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) and the Departments of Sociology, History, and Economics & Economic History. 

ABOUT NALSU, based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team from disciplines including Sociology and Economics & Economic History, it has active partnerships and relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. It draws strength from its location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and the contradictions of the post-apartheid state, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture. MORE: https://www.ru.ac.za/nalsu