Plant Lives - Luvuyo Wotshela on Existing with the Multi-purpose Plant | 12 May | 4pm (Jhb time)
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South
Luvuyo Wotshela will speak on
Existing with the Multi-purpose Plant: A Social History of Prickly Pear in Contemporary Eastern Cape
Click here for paper
Prickly Pear - a common English name for several cactus species, with Mexican and Central American origin, has had an influence on much of the semi-arid Cape Karoo region of South Africa for about three centuries. Perhaps, it was not foreseen it would grow expansively in that and some adjacent areas when its common species were first introduced in the present Graaff-Reinet area from the mid-1770s. Its presence had by the 1900s influenced varied South African communities, whilst it also traversed environmental, social and political topics. Even after systematic eradication that reduced its prevalence by the second half of the 1900s, the constant use of elements of this plant and fruits even in isolated areas of the Eastern Cape became crucial going forward. It has retained presence amidst lasting ambivalence - mainly between those who saw it as weed, or even scourge that had to be obliterated, and those who have purposely used it in many valuable ways. This paper highlights the sustained use of prickly pear as a multi-purpose plant, and its centrality in aspects of social lives in this region since the second half of the twentieth century. It contends, despite the prickly pear’s vacillated views, that its connections with several aspects of humankind, especially African communities of this region has also shaped key social history of this plant.
Luvuyo Wotshela is Professor of History, and the Head of the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre (NAHECS) at the University of Fort Hare. His interest is on twentieth to early twenty-first century South Africa, mainly the Eastern Cape, on which he has made relatable publications. These are especially the histories of human settlements, communities’ formations, individuals’ life-histories and forms of authorities, civic organs, social and environmental change. One of his co-authored books, with William Beinart is, Prickly Pear: The Social History of A Plant in the Eastern Cape (2011 and 2021). It details how this polemic plant has a long, intriguing history, and variety of uses for different groups of South Africans.
Monday, 12th May 2025
4-5pm (Johannesburg time)
Click here to register
Plant Lives is a seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall.
It follows two previously successful series, Heated Conversations and Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres, convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall
In these calamitous times, are plants a distraction from pressing problems, or a new way to approach them? Is the burgeoning field of the plant humanities just another fad with little bearing on the global South? Can we imagine a seedy and weedy politics in which plants are less metaphors for human logics and more themselves? Can we shift from an abstract concern with plant life to consider material plant lives? And if so, with what consequences?
This seminar series explores the global plant humanities and the conversations that plant worlds enable. We envisage a postcolonial plantarium* which encompasses plantations, pre-colonial pharmacopoeias, philosophy, phytopoetics (both visual and textual) and much more. Our starting point is 'ruderal', a term which describes a plant that grows in disturbed grounds. A plant humanities for the global South takes shapes at the intersection of enforced human and plant migrations and works in the wake of disturbance and damage.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.
*Thanks to Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka for this term