In 1920, London-born Ernest Schwarz published The Kalahari; or, Thirstland Redemption from Cape Town, where he was employed by the South African government as a geologist. It was a culmination of arguments he had made in South African scientific and agricultural circles over the previous years. It sparked increased popular debate in the decades to come over his ‘Kalahari scheme’ to divert rivers far to the north and make that supposed desert bloom. Yet, despite the popularity of the scheme, evident in farmers’ newspapers of the 1910s–1940s, and three government commissions to investigate its viability up to 1945, few who study South Africa’s past today have heard of this project. It never came to pass.

In Green Lands for White Men, Meredith McKittrick exhumes Schwarz’s ideas and their reception. She shows why this failed scheme provides fresh insight into heated debates about white South African land politics and environmental management of the interwar period, as the young country’s ruling minority struggled over future strategies for maintaining their supremacy over the African majority. She successfully traces a global scope to these Kalahari engineering ideas: credentialled scientists operating in southern Africa and to a certain extent ordinary settler farmers cast a wide geographical net in their readings and professional interactions with those developing hydro-engineering plans in the world’s arid regions of expanding white settlement from the Americas to Australia. Yet the story also reveals the fragile nature and historical construction of scientific and climate expertise, particularly in a colonial context.

The scheme and its visionary came, in part, from a later nineteenth-century imperial scientific culture of hubris. Schwarz had never visited the Kalahari at the time of his publication. He was lax about citing his influences and assistants. Thanks to McKittrick’s meticulous archival sleuthing, we learn that Schwarz’s idea for the Kalahari scheme came from at least one uncited German settler farmer, if not several of them, in neighbouring South-West Africa (Namibia), who had written at the turn of the twentieth century about their own ideas for river diversion to increase arability in the arid landscape. To develop his climate narrative of recent and cataclysmic drying in that region far to the north-east of the Cape, Schwarz used his geologist’s imagination from his surveys of the arid Cape Province, combined with his reading of what McKittrick pithily terms the Kalahari ‘canon’ of nineteenth-century missionary writing and European travelogues that lamented a desert moonscape with hints of a wetter past in fossils and dry riverbeds. When he did visit the Kalahari for the first time in the inaugural government commission of 1924–5 to assess the scheme’s viability – incidentally in a year of enormous natural flooding – he largely invisibilized African presence and assistance in his field reports. This denial reflected conventions of late nineteenth-century scientists in South African colonial space: having previously perpetuated narrative erasure of African people from the supposed ‘no-man’s-land’ of a Kalahari landscape open for future settlement, Schwarz also enacted the erasure of African presence, expertise, and co-production in this scientific research expedition.

Yet the scheme, as McKittrick deftly situates it, also belonged to the international scientific milieu of what scholars have called ‘techno-optimism’ and ‘hydrology of hope’ in arid settler colonial lands of the twentieth century, where inchoate understandings of climate science were still under debate and refinement. Despite increasing scepticism among career scientists about the viability of Schwarz’s plan to flood the Kalahari, the scheme captivated white farmers because it activated a sensitive bundle of racial and class anxieties. What farmers believed to be the steady creep of dryness into previously arable regions represented an existential crisis of white survival, because widespread white poverty would undermine a white-supremacist, segregationist state. At the same time, the scheme vindicated rural farmers’ feelings of victimhood and mistrust directed toward the scientific elite. By the early twentieth century, most government scientists had rejected earlier ideas of a South African climate trending toward dryness and instead held white farmers responsible for environmental degradation due to poorly conceived farming practices. Schwarz’s writings maintained the climate desiccation explanation, absolved farmers of blame, and proposed a settler utopian solution. In McKittrick’s hands, the alliance that earlier historians have explored between the rural white population and government elites in South Africa’s interwar period appears much more contentious.

Although rural white farmers resented the scientific elite and felt their condescension, they also felt a tremendous entitlement to government intervention to support their livelihoods. McKittrick successfully shows that, in their shared goal of securing white minority rule into the future, both elites and ordinary farmers invested in a geographically expansionist vision. This is an important intervention for twentieth-century South African historiography notorious for examining the South African past within national borders. It is also a notable finding for scholars of southern Africa well aware of South Africa’s imperial ambitions in the region, because research until now has revealed these ideations as belonging to elite statesmen like Jan Smuts. Through McKittrick’s careful work, we glimpse rural farmers throughout South Africa invoking the Schwarz scheme map of a borderless subcontinent where South African claims over natural resources extend all over British Bechuanaland (Botswana), League of Nations Mandate South-West Africa (Namibia), and perhaps beyond. This enormous space would more than double the size of South Africa within its 1910 borders. The South African state across eras bent to public will to explore the scheme, ultimately rejecting it only because it lacked scientific feasibility. In the last chapter we learn that the apartheid government did ultimately implement Orange river and Angolan border region damming schemes in the 1970s. Government support for these rather uneconomic investments must be understood in the context of an undying white public fervour for hydro-engineering solutions that the Schwarz scheme catalysed in around 1920. In Green Lands for White Men McKittrick has delivered compellingly on her invitation to consider how histories of scientific and engineering failure can be as illuminating for global environmental history as are the origins of the theories that stuck.