My first book project - ‘Arid Lives’ - tells the story of Southern Africa over the past 600 years through its waterscapes – how they shaped life and death, and the rise and fall of communities, kingdoms, and empires.

The book chronicles how indigenous communities across language groups lived in dynamic relation with rains and rivers, how settlers worried constantly about water, how traders and politicians made transport routes across lands with no flowing rivers, and how colonial states remade regional ecologies towards agricultural and industrial production and profit, with new kinds of water technologies from pipes to concrete arch dams, and new languages of water law. In another way, it seeks to understand what happens when we try to tame rivers, control rain, or to quieten the floods they make.