Prologue

The prologue recounts in detail the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on July 19, 1935. An illiterate farm worker with a wife and three-year-old son, Stacy was accused of assaulting a White woman with a penknife in front of her young children. Captured after a three-day manhunt, Stacy was lynched by a racist deputy sheriff and his body riddled with seventeen bullets fired by mob members. No one was charged with his murder, but the lynching prompted an effort by Black leaders and the NAACP to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to support an antilynching bill in Congress, using as a visual reminder of lynching’s horrors a photo of Stacy’s lifeless body hanging from a pine branch while several White children gaze at it. FDR refused, citing his reliance on racist southern senators for passage of his New Deal programs to combat the Great Depression. The prologue also explores the ancestral roots of Stacy and the family of the woman he was accused of assaulting. Both had ancestors among the early Virginia residents; Stacy’s were Black slaves, and his alleged victim’s were White farmers. The different cultures in which they were raised—one oppressed by the other—made Stacy’s lynching an example of White fear of Black men “violating” their wives and daughters.

Backlash Against International Courts in West, East, and Southern Africa

This chapter discusses three credible attempts by African governments to restrict the jurisdiction of three similarly situated sub-regional courts in response to politically controversial rulings. In West Africa, when the Court of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) upheld allegations of torture by opposition journalists in Gambia, that country’s political leaders sought to restrict the Court’s power to review human rights complaints. The other Member States ultimately defeated Gambia’s proposal. In East Africa, Kenya failed in its efforts to eliminate the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) and to remove some of its judges after a decision challenging an election to a sub-regional legislature. However, the Member States agreed to restructure the EACJ in ways that have significantly affected the Court’s subsequent trajectory. In Southern Africa, after the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal ruled in favor of white farmers in disputes over land seizures, Zimbabwe prevailed upon SADC Member States to suspend the Tribunal and strip its power to review complaints from private litigants. Variations in the mobilization efforts of community secretariats, civil society groups, and sub-regional parliaments explain why efforts to eliminate the three courts or narrow their jurisdiction were defeated in ECOWAS, scaled back in the EACJ and largely succeeded in the SADC.

The Monster That Hid Under A Desk? Zimbabwe and the West

Zimbabwe’s diplomatic relations with Britain became exceptionally fractious from about 2000. Britain’s New Labour government publicly criticized the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party for its violent seizure of white-owned commercial farms, political violence, and rolling back of democracy. ZANU-PF countered the British government’s accusation, describing it as unwarranted interference in Zimbabwe’s domestic affairs by an ex-colonial master. Such highly charged accusations between government elites of both countries have tended to animate scholarly debates about the nature of Zimbabwe–-Britain relations. This chapter does something different: it examines understandings of Zimbabwe–Britain relations, drawing on research interviews with Zimbabwean non-elites. The chapter argues that Zimbabwean and British political elites instrumentalized the diplomatic quarrel in order to position themselves as honourable wardens of their respective countries and particular norms such as human rights and sovereignty. However, the chapter further contends, non-elites’ comprehensions of the diplomatic argument reveal the limits of this instrumentalization and reflect the complicated and ambivalent appreciations of Zimbabwe–Britain relations. The diplomatic argument attained popular resonances and dissonances, which reflect a multifaceted existential entanglement with roots in the colonial era. Ideas of the expulsion of white farmers as a representation of ‘real independence’ and the display of the shortcomings of a post-colonial order on the other end, impress particular self-understandings and identities.

Intensifying Production

Wartime damage intensified cotton production among small farmers. The disappearance of livestock, the increase in rates of animal diseases, and the lack of fencing materials meant that more farmers penned stock. Lapses in cultivation reinvigorated the land through crop rotation and vegetative regrowth, but this created false hopes for cotton yields at a time when preexisting debt posed enormous economic risk. The practice of shifting cultivation became less frequent throughout, but the fertilizers used to replace it did not halt erosion or correct soil-nutrient imbalances in the same way. Intensification gradually worsened farmers’ prospects. The environmental changes wrought by the war meant that southerners faced the “reconstruction” of their agricultural landscape without several cornerstones of the antebellum land-use regime. White farmers had to operate within the environmental limitations they had previously been able to circumvent, causing them to abandon food and livestock production in favor of cotton.

Climate Histories in Black and White: Contextualizing Climate Services Through Anthropology

Although agricultural communities have long adapted to changing markets, weather patterns, regulatory environments, and technology innovations, increasing climate pressures are challenging tried and tested responses. This article ponders the contribution anthropologists can make to enhance climate services programs that build adaptive capacity. A comparison of two community workshops conducted in the southeast United States illustrates the roles that anthropologists can play to reveal the heterogeneity of perspectives, needs, and experiences among farmer groups. The article describes how differently Black and White farmers experienced past changes and how divergent historical narratives influence perspectives about current and future adaptation pathways. Instead of solely focusing stakeholder-scientist discussions on how farming systems need to adapt, results highlight the importance of considering those “unforeseen” factors that shape adaptation options. The study underscores the importance of developing climate services programs purposively tailored to community contexts and social histories, a process that anthropologists are well positioned to guide.

Resistance against Conservation at the South African Section of Greater Mapungubwe (Trans)frontier

The need to increase the amount of land under nature conservation at the national and global levels has gained attention over the past three decades. However, there are mixed reactions among stakeholders in South Africa regarding the establishment and expansion of cross-border nature conservation projects. Whereas conservationists and other white private landowners are in support of nature conservation projects, some white farmers are resistant to releasing land for conservation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate historical and contemporary reasons for farmers' resistance to conservation and to analyse the consequences arising from that resistance for the consolidation of the core area of South Africa's contribution to the Greater Mapungubwe Transfrontier Conservation Area. The paper argues that consolidation of land to create such special areas is a social process shaped through local contestation over land, power, and belonging. The study draws on fieldwork material from the South African section of the Greater Mapungubwe Transfrontier Conservation Area.