School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies is delighted to welcome you to the following seminar:

'Rethinking Environmentalism in Response to Resource Extraction in South Africa, Zambia and Nigeria'

Speaker: Dr Jabulani Shaba, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in AFREXTRACT, Political Ecology of Extraction in Africa, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

Oil drilling and copper and gold mining generate menacing landscapes in the Niger Delta, the Zambian Copperbelt and the gold mine dumps in Johannesburg: radioactive waste sites, seismic blasting, sinkholes, petrochemical wastelands, reverberatory furnaces, tailing dams, derelict oil pipelines, fractured landscapes and toxified human bodies. The presentation combines historical archives, ethnography and oral history to examine plural forms, expressions, and understandings of environmentalism. It analyses protest letters, environmental litigations, songs, Non-Governmental Organisation activism, everyday acts of ecological care, cultural and spiritual entanglements in mining localities. Local environmental narratives about oil, copper and gold pollution are complex, layered, and diverse, and contain different scales, bureaucracies, and politics in the African communities where they exist. This presentation unpacks our expectations of a homogenous reaction to pollution and shows how responses are more nuanced and individual, even while they are simultaneously shared, because they are based on embodied experiences specific to the socio-spiritual, ecological and political contexts that shape them.

When: Wednesday 25th February 2026 (4-5.30pm) GMT

Where: TBA

Format: In-person only. RSVP via Eventbrite

Speaker biography

Jabulani Shaba is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of Resource extraction, Gender and Environmental Justice. He obtained his PhD at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in a European Research Council (ERC) research project, AFREXTRACT at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands where he researches on the Political Ecology of Extraction in Sub-Saharan Africa with a particular focus on oil drilling in the Niger Delta, copper mining on the Zambian Copperbelt and environmental histories of gold mine dumps in Johannesburg South Africa.