In the autumn of 2004, a remarkable gathering of 102 scholars took place at St Antony's College, Oxford: they had come for an interdisciplinary symposium on ‘Trees, rain, and politics in Africa: the dynamics and politics of climatic and environmental change’. Symposium papers were grouped into panels that focused on either particular resources (such as trees and water) or particular aspects of social relationships (such as politics and discourses). This format resulted in a series of dialogues between the natural science and social science paradigms, and this first half of the present issue of Africa takes as its theme just one of those interdisciplinary conversations. Taken together, these authors demonstrate how the hybridization of natural science and social science can benefit understandings of the African past, interpretations of the African present and planning for the African future.1

The demise of springbok treks, the irruptive migration patterns of the species in South Africa's Karoo region, has long been attributed to the rinderpest epizootic understood to have coincided in both time and space with the last of the great springbok treks. This is incorrect. Instead the cessation of springbok treks can be attributed to a variety of anthropogenic factors. This article first examines and then rejects the case for rinderpest, before introducing alternative causal factors such as the increase in livestock and human populations, the effects of fencing and the double impact of hunting and concomitant drought. These factors, it is argued, acted in concert to effectively remove the conditions necessary for springbok treks and thereby end the phenomenon. It is suggested that the local extinction of this phenomenon – a keystone species and process – is an important and heretofore unconsidered element in the decline of the Karoo ecosystem.

During the twentieth century, the 20,000 hectares commons surrounding the village of Paulshoek as well as the neighbouring privately-owned farms have been significantly influenced by evolving land-use practices driven largely by socio-economic and political change in the broader Namaqualand and South African region. Land-use practices in the communal lands of Namaqualand were based initially on transhumant pastoralism, then on extensive dryland cropping associated with livestock production under restricted mobility, and more recently on a sedentarized labour reserve where agricultural production now forms a minor part of the local economy. For the first half of the twentieth century, farmers on communal and privately-owned farms shared similar transhumant pastoral practices and both moved across unfenced farm boundaries. By the middle of the century, however, fence-lines were established and commercial farming on privately-owned farms was increasingly managed according to rangeland science principles. As the population grew in the communal areas, families gravitated to new ‘service’ villages such as Paulshoek and became increasingly dependent on migrant labour and state welfare. While the majority of former croplands are now fallow, many of them for decades or more, communal livestock populations have remained relatively high, fluctuating with rainfall. The impact of this history of land use can be compared with that of neighbouring privately-owned farms where low stocking rates, coupled with a variety of state subsidies, have had a very different environmental outcome. This article charts the environmental transformations that have occurred in the area of Paulshoek as a direct result of the region's political history and the evolution of the regional economy. We present a variety of evidence drawn from archival sources, oral history, repeat aerial and ground photography, and detailed climate, cropping and livestock records to show that events far beyond the borders of Namaqualand's communal areas have had a profound influence on their environments.

This article presents the case of the creation and expansion of Namaqua National Park in Namaqualand, South Africa, to highlight the contradictions between global interests in biodiversity conservation and local livelihoods. Despite the policy shift in the conservation literature from ‘fortress’ to community-based conservation, we argue that in practice conservation still tends to dominate when there is a trade-off between Western-style conservation and support to the livelihoods of marginalized communities. This can again be explained by the hegemony of a conservation discourse that is shared by a network of actors. The article highlights the role played by powerful environmental organizations and wealthy individuals supporting conservation at the expense of land redistribution in Namaqualand. The combination of scientific research and finances provided by this actor-network aided the creation and expansion of the Park. Local people, however, see the expansion of the Park as direct and unfair competition for land that they wish to acquire through the land redistribution programme, as well as an indirect challenge to their local livelihoods. Whatever the merits of their case, it seems clear that communities aspiring to more land, together with advocates of human rights and poverty alleviation, remain on the margins in terms of policy influence, especially when they pursue goals that are perceived by the conservation advocates to be in conflict with those of biodiversity conservation.

This article aims at contributing to our understanding of violence and warfare in contemporary West Africa by adopting a bi-focal analysis that looks both at power struggles within the urban elite and at the grassroots multi-ethnic setting in southern Guinea-Bissau. I pay close attention to the social dynamics of rural peoples' perspectives, coping strategies and inter-ethnic conflicts. Local conflicts are elucidated as an ongoing process that traverses times of war and peace. Although they are subject to manipulation by urban actors, local conflicts are also a matter of continuous negotiation and partial consensus at the grassroots. In stark contrast to this, the struggles in the ruling group are characterized by an escalating spiral of factionalism, diminishing compromises and elimination of rivals. By analysing the relationship between urban and rural actors and the role of cosmology, the article also aims to shed new light on the multiple shapes patron–client relations can assume in Africa.

Customary land tenure is seen as a field in which social and political relationships are diverse, overlapping and competing. Property regimes are, therefore, often analysed in terms of processes of negotiation, with people's social and political identities as central elements. This article studies the negotiability of customary tenure in peri-urban Ghana where land is at the centre of intense and unequal competition and closely tied up with struggles over authority. It focuses on one village to provide a grassroots view of processes of contestation of customary rights to land. The analysis of how and to what extent local actors in this village deal with, negotiate and struggle for rights to land confirms that contestants for land never operate on a level playing field. Postulating the social inequalities of local communities, the article analyses whether it is useful to place all local land dealings under the term ‘negotiations’, or whether such a characterization stretches the boundaries of the term too far and risks undermining the significance of local stratification and ignoring the winners and losers in a contest with uncertain rules.

This article explores how people in Botswana approach and navigate their own feelings of disgust and morbid curiosity towards the aesthetically impaired bodies of their fellow citizens, and the problems and opportunities these feelings present in a context where a particular humanistic ethos of respect and manners, botho, is stressed in the public discourse of nationalism. The agenda of contemporary disability and patients' rights movements is based on the assertion that moral sentiment is neither determined nor subverted by particular bodily states or configurations. While such activism acknowledges and affirms experiences of debility and physical suffering, the political agenda largely centres on enabling persons to participate equally in rational-critical discourse in the public sphere regardless of the vagaries of any individual's particular bodily state. Within this framework, physicality should have no power to structure relationships among citizens. And yet, in Botswana, as in other places, the messiness of the human body – manifested in diarrhoea, drool, disfigurement, and disgust – threatens to subvert humanistic efforts, and challenges the smooth enactment of rights-based politics and other liberal projects. In what follows I explore the sometimes troubling physicality of humanistic and affective life in Botswana to better grasp the messy bodily dimensions of sociality that are so often swept under the rug in discussions of citizenship, rights and community. Aesthetic efforts at bathing, bandaging and otherwise reworking the bodies in question reveal dimensions of sociality and aspects of sensory and affective interaction that are critical to the enactment of moral sentiment.