Radiant Empire: Nuclear Britain and the Making of Postcolonial Namibia

In this talk, Dr Chris Hill shares research from his proposed monograph of the same title. He focuses on the politics of land and earth around the Rössing mine, until 1984 the largest uranium mine in the world. Hill seeks to examine the site of the mine not only in terms of the strategic geopolitics to which it has been historically subject, including from British capitalism, German and South African colonialism, and more recently Chinese investment. He also examines pre-colonial land relations among the diverse African groups who inhabited and passed through this transitional zone of the Namib desert. How can the environmental customs and ritual geologies of these groups provide alternative perspectives on the mild radioactivity and mineral riches of this area? How can these perspectives be retrieved, and what can they reveal for African understandings of the history of uranium mining in Namibia? In answering these questions, Hill reconsiders both the history of the Rössing mine and the environmental knowledge it has helped to consolidate during the making of the postcolonial state.


Dr. Chris Hill, Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales

Dr Chris Hill is a modern British historian at the University of South Wales. He has research interests in histories of activism, imperialism, media and nuclear politics. Chris has recently completed an Early Career Leadership Fellowship, funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council for a project entitled ‘The New Nuclear Imperialism: Science, Power and Diplomacy in the British Empire'. As one of the major outputs of this project, Chris will be publishing a monograph about the political ecology of Namibian uranium: Radiant Empire: Africa's Last Colony and the Making of Nuclear Britain.