In his book War and Nature, Edmund Russell examines what happens when the weapons meant for controlling problem animals and noxious plants are deployed against human enemies. From an African standpoint, Russell's proposition opens anew the debate on what Aime Césaire called thingification in reference to the pathological violence of colonialism. Whereas Césaire spoke of the reduction of people to things in the discursive, Russell meant it quite materially.

Focusing on the transLimpopo basin of southern Africa over the last 150 years, I combine these two elements to pose one question: What is the role of nature in the behavior of the state towards its citizens, and what is the role of technology in mediating the relationship between the state and citizens over nature?

To answer it I propose two things. First, to situate the emergence of colonial thingification within a longer time-frame so as to fully understand the connections between the material and the discursive. The dissertation does this by staying in the same place over the longue durée as actors come and go and time goes by.

Second, to unify three intellectual communities and tap into their collective strengths: environmental historians and their interest in human-nature interactions, Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars focusing on the co-construction of human and nonhuman actors (nature and technology), and Africanists and the ongoing discussion about colonialism and the postcolony.

In this way I am able to bring together people, nature, and technology in one narrative under the notion of a mobile workshop. By it I refer to the artifacts, skills and socio-technical relations that surround border-crossing people as they move through time and space. Since these artifacts, skills and socio-technical relations are the very same ones scholars have used to define a workshop (an engineering plant, a laboratory etc.), by equipping the itinerant with similar capacity to produce, they render the workshop mobile. This propensity to lift the workshop so that it is roaming is what is missed when scholars do not seriously consider the agency of mobility in the production of history. Indeed, it is what pushes the state to control and eradicate citizens like pests.