Abstract

Histories of violent disposession, extraction, and the grounding of settler ecologies are largely read through their terrestrial and economic afterlives. The intensifying climate crisis, however, has already begun to illustrate how the reconfiguration of socio-ecological relations from “peripheries” of extraction intersects with vulnerabilities of climate harm. By thinking with and through historical metabolisms from various “non-city” spaces in Southern Africa, this paper tentatively indexes socio-ecological repair in a way that is not only analytical. By showing how, without the capacitative nature of land, already vulnerable populations are made increasingly vulnerable by intensifying climate extremes, this paper explores how to redress histories of extraction without depending only on incapacitated governments. It accordingly tracks (and attempts to) enumerate the metabolic flows from peripheries of South Africa and the South-West African Territory (presently Namibia) to urban Cape Town, and into international markets. This paper gestures toward a framework to think about socio-ecological repair that is both historically and materially grounded, while enabling a generative environmental politics from historical, current and future sacrifice zones. This paper draws on ethnographic research from across South Africa and Namibia, and centres Cape Town as a space of metabolic concentration.

Speaker

Matthew Wingfield is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Western Cape, and a research fellow at Stellenbosch University (both in South Africa). He is the author of Mobilizing Day Zero (Bloomsbury, 2026), and has published widely on environmental activism and hydropolitics.

Details

Date : Friday, 26 June 2026

Time : 12.30 pm CET

Place: Location information is coming soon.

Registration: Registration link TBA.

Join online: Information about online attendance is coming soon.

The REPAIR lectures

The REPAIR lectures are an interdisciplinary lecture series on contemporary reparations demands and policies around the globe. They are given by leading reparations experts and investigate how reparations claims and policies come about, how they play out from a political, economic and moral perspective, and what they may teach us about politics and economics today. The lectures are hosted by the REPAIR project, based at the Anthropology Department of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). They are co-sponsored by the UvA’s Amsterdam Centre for Conflict Studies (ACCS).