Jackson Tamunosaki Jack is an environmental sociologist whose research focuses on resource extraction, environmental politics, and Indigenous environmentalism. His writing draws on extensive ethnographic work in the oil-rich Niger Delta. He is a postdoctoral research fellow on the AFREXTRACT project and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Federal University Otuoke.
Tholithemba Lorenzo Ndaba is a PhD researcher on the AFREXTRACT project, working on gold mine townships within social and environmental history. With a background in sociology, his research examines how systems of extraction produce forms of marginalisation across race, gender, and space and time.
A. Chukwudumebi Obute is a scholar of Anglophone literatures and cultures, whose work focusses on ecocriticism and transatlantic relations. Between 2024 and 2026, he was a postdoctoral
fellow in the AFREXTRACT project. He is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Tübingen.
Iva Peša is a social and environmental historian, whose work is grounded in long-term research, primarily in Zambia. Between 2022 and 2027, Iva was the principal investigator of the ERC-funded
project AFREXTRACT: Environmental Histories of Resource Extraction in Africa. She is an Associate Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Groningen.
Jabulani Shaba is an interdisciplinary researcher with strong interests in resource extraction, environmental history, and gender in southern Africa. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in political ecology within the AFREXTRACT project. Jabulani holds a PhD from Stellenbosch University. He is commencing a critical historical study of the Just Energy Transition in
Zimbabwe.
Andrea Stultiens is an artistic researcher whose work focusses on photographic images and imaginations of Uganda and ‘Africa’ at large. Stultiens was an advisor on the production and use of photographs in the AFREXTRACT project, and involved as a curator and designer. She holds a PhD from Leiden University and is a senior lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague.
About the photographers
Danny Chiyesu is a Zambian photographer and visual artist. Based in the Copperbelt town of Ndola, Chiyesu works with Mission Press, particularly on the Speak Out! youth magazine. In his
creative post-production process, Chiyesu digitally overpaints photographs. Chiyesu believes that the illustrative use of cameras reinforces visual storytelling.
Lucas Deinma is a photographer who was born and bred in the Niger Delta. He runs Mangrove Studios in Port Harcourt, a name that refers to his beloved Niger Delta environment. A multitalented
artist, Deinma also works with television, radio, and he has contributed a poem to this collection.
William Matlala is a south African documentary photographer. Born in 1957 in Dithabaneng village, Northern province (now Limpopo). When looking for employment in Gauteng in 1976 he briefly worked in a gold-mine. After this he found employment in factories. Early 1980s, he got a camera and started offering photographic services to his colleagues, co-residents of the hostel in which he lived and residents of Katlehong township. This resulted in a unique collection of photographs of everyday Black life during the last decade of Apartheid. When the factory closed in 1988, Matlala became a full time photographer. He briefly worked with COSATU (the trade union federation in South Africa) and stayed committed to photographing the struggle of workers and their labour conditions.
Madoda Mkhobeni is a street photographer from Soweto. His work portrays the daily life struggles of people in inner-city Johannesburg. Trained at the iconic Market Photo Workshop, Mkhobeni’s oeuvre includes Trolley Pullers - a project on the lives of Johannesburg’s migrants who collect recyclable materials.
What is it like to live with the pollution from mining and oil day in day out? Through photography and poetry, this volume portrays scenes from everyday life in the Niger Delta, the Zambian Copperbelt, and Johannesburg. While Abundance/Extracted features oil spills, sinkholes, and toxic wastelands, it also foregrounds how people have caringly made these places their home. The result of a long-term collaboration between academics, photographers, and poets, the book complicates and challenges narratives on extraction in Africa.