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Elijah Doro

Dr. Elijah Doro

Humboldt Fellow

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Elijah Doro is a historian and Humboldt research fellow with a special interest in the environmental histories of southern Africa. His work focuses on colonial extractive encounters and their toxic legacies on post-colonial socio-environmental landscapes. He obtained his PhD from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Based on his doctoral research, he wrote a book, Plunder for Profit: A Socio-Environmental History of Tobacco Farming in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. He was part of the Deadly Dreams research project at the University of Agder in Norway where he was working on toxic histories of southern Africa and arsenic poisoning. His current research is on the toxic legacies of gold mining and arsenic pesticides in Zimbabwe.


Selected Publications:

  • with Marco Armiero. “Toxicity, Racial Capitalism, and Colonial Mining: Lessons from Cyanide and Gold Mining in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia).” In The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History, edited by Emily O’Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey and Sandra Swart, 261–273. London: Routledge, 2024.
  • Plunder for Profit: A Socio-Environmental History of Tobacco Farming in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
  • “African Goats, the State, and Conservation in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1892–1970s.” In Environmental Humanities of Extraction in Africa: Poetics and Politics of Exploitation, edited by James Ogude and Tafadzwa Mushonga, 38–55. London: Routledge, 2023.
  • “No Body, No Crime? Vicariously Imagining Africa’s Arsenic Century: Bovines, Arsenic Poisoning, and Multi-Species Toxic Histories in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900–1940s.” Environment and History (2023): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.3197/096734023X16869924234804.
  • with Sandra Swart. “Beyond Agency: The African Peasantry, the State, and Tobacco in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900–80.“ The Journal of African History 63, no. 1 (2022): 55–74. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853722000226.
  • with Sandra Swart. “A Silenced Spring? Exploring Africa’s ‘Rachel Carson Moment’: A Socio-Environmental History of the Pesticides in Tobacco Production in Southern Rhodesia, 1945–80.” International Review of Environmental History 5, no. 2 (2019): 5–39. https://doi.org/10.22459/IREH.05.02.2019.01.