Jacklyn Cock is a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology at Wits University and an Honorary Research Professor in the Society, Work and Development Research Unit (SWOP). She has written extensively on environment, gender and militarisation issues. Her most recent book is The War against Ourselves: Nature, Power and Justice. (2007). She is best known for Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation (1980)

• Acknowledgements; Plates; Chapter 1: Motivations; Chapter 2: The River; Chapter 3: The Battle; Chapter 4: The Harbour; Chapter 5: The Marina; Chapter 6: Connecting nature and justice through rivers; Appendix; Glossary of isiXhosa terms; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Jacklyn Cock has penned a love letter that is as hopeful as it is elegiac. Drawing on family connections to the Kowie that go back to the 1820 settlers, Cock asks big questions about the relationship between nature and culture, between humans and other forms of life, and about the place of rivers in human history. It is only by rethinking our relationship to nature that we can save ourselves."" - Jacob Dlamini, Assistant Professor 0f History, Princeton University""Jacklyn Cock has made the story of a small and fairly insignificant river into a metonym of the biological glories of South Africa and the ecological devastation they have endured, and continue to endure. The result is at once lyrical and trenchant. As a history rooted in the landscape of South Africa, it has few peers, and no superiors."" - Robert Ross, Professor Emeritus of African Studies, Leiden University""Jacklyn Cock has written an extraordinary work of engaged and imaginative scholarship. Writing the Ancestral River will become a South African classic, accessible to the public but at the cutting edge of international scholarship."" - Edward Webster, Professor Emeritus, University of The Witwatersrand