The Karoo and eco-inflections of fracking: preliminary notes on literary imagination

Abstract

The awareness of the “planet in peril” has never been more acute in a South African context than today, when the imminent extraction of shale gas through the process of hydraulic fracturing (known as “fracking”) in the Karoo has gained traction in the public mind. At least two broad dimensions are involved. The first, based on the logic of petro-modernity and its profligate culture, is framed within a seductive, neoliberal narrative of industrial progress and economic development. The second is framed as outright resistance to the inevitable environmental damage caused by this petro-industrial venture. This study reflects on how literature might intervene in this bipolar debate. Alfred Jackson’s Manna in the Desert, Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo, and Etienne van Heerden’s “Poison Karoo” employ the trope of water to stimulate an ethical vision. Materially, water is imagined in its apparent scarcity as a feature of the delicate ecosystem of the Karoo, a vast arid landscape of drudgery, where life forms compete for the limited resource. Allegorically, water signifies as safely concealed, subterranean abundance. The Karoo, possessing more than its external features account for, is a place of beauty and mystical presence where life is sustained and preserved. It is within these significations that the environmental and social repercussion of fracking is inflected. Literature can bridge the divide between the narrative of progress and the counternarrative of ecological consciousness by way of highlighting their contradictions. But it also complicates these contradictions by valorizing their ethical potentiality.

Keywords:

• The Karoo
• fracking
• water metaphor
• petro-modernity
• national progress

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Dirk Klopper, Dan Wylie, and Lynda Spencer. A version of this paper was presented at the English Department Seminar series, University of the Western Cape, in April 2015. Profound gratitude to Hermann Wittenberg, Wendy Woodward, Julia Martin, Meg Samuelson, and Fiona Moolla for their generous comments and constructive criticisms. At the July 2015 AUETSA conference in Grahamstown, where I presented a part of the work, Dorothy Driver recommended that I read Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo. She was completely right. Lesley Green of the Environmental Humanities South program, University of Cape Town, with seed funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF), has been extremely generous in providing funds covering research trips that made the completion of this article possible. Harry Garuba and Helene Strauss read the drafts and gave useful suggestions. Finally, my wife Makhosazana Aghoghovwia, as always, provided that much needed “non-expert” criticism and invaluable comment.

Notes

¹ Klein, This Changes Everything, 328.

² Environmental Protection Agency, http://water.epa.gov.

³ Vegter, Extreme Environment, 1–8; and South Africa: The Good News, “$20 billion and 700, 000 Jobs.”

⁴ Donnelly, “Fracked If You Do.”

⁵ Smith, “Proposed Fracking in South Africa.”

⁶ Shell South Africa, “Hydraulic Fracturing and the Karoo,” http://www.shell.com/zaf.

⁷ Golden, “Decarbonizing Our Future.”

⁸ Vegter, Extreme Environment, 6.

⁹ Ibid., 54.

¹⁰ Ibid., 346. Klein draws substantially on several reports and studies on the environmental threats posed by oil and gas extraction in North America. One such study is the threat to the Delaware River Basin which serves over 15 million Americans, but whose freshwater is being threatened by hydraulic fracturing. It is this fear of contamination to the water body that has motivated anti-fracking movements around the world to great success.

¹¹ See Aghoghovwia, “Transnational Petro-environmentalism,” 61. In writing this article, I have refrained from drawing too much comparison between Nigeria’s Niger Delta and South Africa’s Karoo because the Niger Delta represents, in the public imagination, the extremely negative instance of extractive capitalism, or what Bassey calls “Destructive Extraction” (1), on their environment. Klein describes the Niger Delta as “surely the most oil-ravaged place on the planet” (305). The region has in the last three decades experienced what for many is promised as the apocalyptic future caused by climate change, one whose devastation is already a quotidian reality for the people of the Niger Delta. Although the South African context has seen intense and interminable debates, this future has not yet come into being. I wish to discuss the South African example within the merits of its own context, even while gesturing toward a larger and obviously deeper transnational archive.

¹² Bassey, To Cook a Continent, 36.

¹³ Drouin, “Contaminated Water Supplies,” 2014.

¹⁴ Ferguson, Global Shadows, 195–210.

¹⁵ Bond, Politics of Climate Justice, 214.

¹⁶ Bassey, To Cook a Continent, 11.

¹⁷ Jorritsma, “‘Don’t Frack with Our Karoo’,” 373–91.

¹⁸ Mwangi, “Hydropolitics,” 3.

¹⁹ Walker, “Rethinking South Africa’s Water Security,” https://www.issafrica.org/iss-today/rethinking-south-africas-water-security.

²⁰ Freyman, “Hydraulic Fracturing and Water Stress,” 49–50, 59–63.

²¹ Shearer, “About That Dimock Fracking Study,” March 21, 2012.

²² Louw and Minnaar, “Fracking the Karoo,” 104. For a detailed scientific study on the methane emissions linked to fracking, see the archival work being done at FracTracker.org, http://www.fractracker.org.

²³ See Gasland.

²⁴ Szeman, “What the Frack? Combustible Water,” 4.

²⁵ Quoted in Klein, This Changes Everything, 304.

²⁶ This paper forms the initial part of a series of research inquiry on the Karoo (and fracking) that will culminate in a book publication.

²⁷ Eagleton, Event of Literature, 59.

²⁸ See De Lange et al., Literary Landscapes, 1.

²⁹ Darian-Smith et al, Text, Theory, Space, 3.

³⁰ Quoted in Moffett, Lovely Beyond any Singing, 88.

³¹ Jackson, Manna in the Desert, IV.

³² Ibid., V.

³³ Ibid., 12.

³⁴ Ibid., 34.

³⁵ Ibid., 36.

³⁶ Smith, Little Karoo, 83–8.

³⁷ Ibid., 83.

³⁸ Ibid., 83.

³⁹ Coetzee, White Writing, 4.

⁴⁰ See Wordsworth’s “Michael,” a story about the shepherd Michael and his son Luke – a poem that inspired Eliot’s Silas Marner, which draws on the same theme.

⁴¹ Coetzee, White Writing, 63–70.

⁴² Ibid., 70.

⁴³ Smith, Little Karoo, 83.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 83.

⁴⁵ van Heerden, Poison Karoo, 1.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 3.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 3.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 1.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 2.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 5.

⁵¹ Ibid., 1.

⁵² Ibid., 11.

⁵³ Ndebele, “They Are Burning Memory.”

⁵⁴ Ndebele, “Rediscovery,” 143.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 147.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 147.