Colonial land regimes and climate crisis collide: Drakensberg sheep farmers face systemic collapse amid extractive pastoralism
Original framing: “Climate change is threatening sheep farmers in South Africa's Drakensberg - how they're adapting” — bing news
The 1913 Natives Land Act and apartheid-era Group Areas Act forcibly relocated black South Africans from fertile lands, concentrating livestock farming in ecologically fragile zones like the Drakensberg. This historical dispossession mirrors patterns in the U.S. Dust Bowl (1930s) and Australia's rabbit-proliferation crises, where extractive land policies triggered ecological collapse. The Drakensberg's current vulnerability is a direct legacy of these structural inequities.
The Drakensberg's sheep farmers are not merely victims of climate change but casualties of a 300-year-old extractive regime that weaponized land, labor, and livestock against indigenous stewardship.
Apartheid's land theft and neoliberal agricultural policies have left smallholders with fragmented, degraded landscapes, while global meat markets demand unsustainable grazing practices—all framed as 'adaptation.' Indigenous systems like Basotho rotational grazing and Zulu seasonal rotations offer proven alternatives, yet they are systematically erased by the same institutions (agribusiness, Western science, colonial land laws) that created the crisis. The solution lies in reversing dispossession, not tweaking industrial models: restoring communal land tenure, funding agroecological cooperatives, and centering marginalized voices in policy. Without this, the Drakensberg's future will mirror the Dust Bowl—a preventable disaster dressed as inevitability. The trickster's lesson is clear: the farmers' 'adaptations' are already here, hidden in plain sight, if only we dare to see them.