My first book project ‘Arid Lives’ explores the history of Southern Africa over the past 600 years through water – how it shaped politics and subsistence, and the rise and fall of communities, kingdoms, and empires. The book chronicles how indigenous communities across Khoe-San and Nguni language groups lived in dynamic relation with rains and rivers, how settlers dispossessed limited sources of fresh water, how traders and politicians struggled to make 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.  The project is based on archival research in South Africa, Mozambique, Britain, Portugal and the Netherlands.