Cosmopolitan Karoo: Land, Space and Place in the Shadow of the Square Kilometre Array

Abstract

Drawing on insights from critical cosmopolitanism and human geography, this article reflects on the tensions between the local and the global, and ‘space’ and ‘place’ within large areas of South Africa’s arid Karoo region designated as Astronomy Advantage Areas (AAAs), and considers their significance for contemporary identity claims and relationships to land. To date most of the Northern Cape, encompassing some 30 per cent of South Africa, has been declared an AAA in terms of the 2007 Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act. The proclamation of AAAs is intended to facilitate the development of astronomy in the region, centred on the optical South African Large Telescope (SALT) in the south and an internationally networked mega-radio-astronomy project, the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope (SKA), in the centre. The core site of the SKA project, the focus of this article, is being built on a large block of formerly white-owned farms that have been bought by the state. Radio astronomy’s specific requirements for minimising radio frequency interference around its operating sites make co-existence with other land uses (including but not only agriculture) more difficult than in the case of optical astronomy, and local townspeople feel aggrieved that their expectations of development have not been adequately met. In addressing these concerns the SKA has prioritised negotiations with national rather than local organisations, including the San Council, claiming to represent the descendants of the hunter-gatherers whose land this once was, and Agri-SA, representing commercial farmers nationally. To date the promotion of astronomy in the Karoo is premised on a metropolitan view of this region as politically and economically marginal: effectively empty space, to be put to good use in the service of global science and national development, rather than a deeply historical place, long embedded in trans-local dynamics and facing significant, largely unresolved social challenges today.