Anthropology Lecture

‘Williston is always left behind’: Living in the global shadows of mega-projects of renewable energy, Big Science and racialised histories of genocide and dispossession

Steven Robins (Stellenbosch University) 

29 June 2026 I 18.15 (CEST)

Abstract

Since 2016, researchers from the Cosmopolitan Karoo research group at Stellenbosch University have been focusing on questions of land, environment and ‘sustainable development’ in the Karoo drylands of the Northern Cape Province, a vast and sparsely populated arid zone comprising a third of South Africa. This region has witnessed massive private investment in mining, wildlife farming, eco-tourism, conservation corridors, rewilding and carbon credits and, most significantly, renewable energy, green hydrogen and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio astronomy programme. Focusing on the small Karoo town of Williston, the paper examines the paradoxes of scale and the contradictions of these Karoo mega-projects as well as the commercial farming ‘success stories’ of resilience and agency of the largely white farmers in this drought-prone arid zone. In Letters of Stone: From Nazi Germany to South Africa (2016), I wrote about my great uncle Eugen Robinski who fled to Williston in the 1880s as a fugitive from East Prussia. His trajectory from fugitive, to businessman, to hotel owner and eventually mayor of the town in the early 20th century, took place in the immediate aftermath of colonial violence and dispossession of the indigenous people of the area. This paper examines how these historical legacies have intersected with new technoscientific developments such as renewable energy and ‘Big Science’ projects in the Karoo region. These developments make Williston a productive space to interrogate celebratory narratives of technoscientific projects as drivers of development and transformation – what Sheila Jasonoff refers to as ‘the dreamscapes of modernity’ (2015) and others identify as ‘the promise of infrastructure’ (Anand 2018). What are the tensions between these modernist dreamscapes and more sober observations about the stubborn persistence of the historical legacies of structural inequalities and racialised poverty in the Karoo region. An equally pessimistic, if not dystopic, perspective on such technoscientific resource frontiers is provided by Neil Brenner’s (2020:22) concept of ‘hinterland,’ which he uses to refer to “non-city spaces that are swept into the maelstrom of urbanisation, whether as supply zones, impact zones, sacrifice zones, logistics corridors or otherwise.” Do places like Williston function as ‘hinterlands for African futures’ elsewhere, and if so, how? 

Steven Robins is the National Research Foundation (NRF-SARChI) Project Leader in the Sociology & Anthropology of Land, Environment and Sustainable Development Research Programme at Stellenbosch University. He has published on a wide range of topics, including the politics of land, environment, housing and water and sanitation infrastructure; issues of memory and identity and the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC); and questions of citizenship and governance after apartheid. His monographs include "From Revolution to Rights in South Africa: Social Movements and Popular Politics" (2008) and "Letters of Stone: From Nazi Germany to South Africa"/Briefe Aus Stein: Von Nazi-Deutchland Nach Sud Africa (Penguin Random House, 2016; Metropol, 2019). He also edited "Limits to Liberation After Apartheid: Citizenship, Governance and Culture" (David Philip, James Currey and Ohio University Press, 2005) and co-edited (with Nick Shepherd) "New South African Keywords" (Jacana and Ohio University Press, 2008).

Venue

S21, Seminargebäude, University of Cologne

Universitätsstraße 37, 50931 Köln

This lecture is part of the series “60 Minutes in Ethnography, Theory, Anthropology” by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology.