Histories of violent dispossession and extraction are often read through their terrestrial and economic afterlives. Yet the intensifying climate crisis shows how the reconfiguration of socio-ecological relations in the "peripheries" of extraction intersects with vulnerability to climate harm. Without the capacitative nature of land, already vulnerable populations are made increasingly vulnerable by climate extremes. This lecture explores how to redress histories of extraction without depending only on incapacitated governments.
The lecture thinks with historical metabolisms from various "non-city" spaces in Southern Africa. It tracks the metabolic flows from the peripheries of South Africa and the South-West African Territory (present-day Namibia) to urban Cape Town and into international markets. It gestures toward a framework for socio-ecological repair that is historically and materially grounded, while enabling a generative environmental politics from past, present and future sacrifice zones. The talk draws on ethnographic research across South Africa and Namibia and centres Cape Town as a space of metabolic concentration.
About the speaker: Dr Matthew Wingfield is an expert in environmental activism and hydropolitics, and the author of Mobilizing the Day Zero Drought in Cape Town (Bloomsbury, 2026). In this lecture, he will draw on ethnographic research from across South Africa and Namibia to connect histories of extraction to climate vulnerability and socio-ecological repair.
You can find the lecture recording here:
https://www.reparationsresearch.eu/lectures/socio-ecological-repair