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BRINGING IN THE WILD: THE COMMODIFICATION OF WILD ANIMALS IN THE CAPE COLONY/PROVINCE c. 1850–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2005

LANCE VAN SITTERT
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town

Abstract

The history of the imperial/colonial elite's preoccupation with saving a handful of specific ‘game’ species in reserves has come to stand for the relationship of all classes with all wild animals in both South Africa and the wider world of the British empire. The result is a narrative of process and periodization flawed in general and false in the specific case of the Cape Colony/Province, where economics rather than ideology was both the primary motor of game conservation and the mediating factor in human relationships with wild animal species. Here the general trend across the century from 1850 to 1950 was, contra MacKenzian orthodoxy, towards private not public ownership of game propelled by a rural rather than an urban elite. Public ownership was instead restricted to ‘vermin’ species in which the state created a market in which it became the chief consumer. The Cape's great tradition was refracted through its customary permissive legislation to yield a myriad of small traditions at the regional or local level. Rather than an argument for Cape exceptionalism, its wild animal history is a caution against glib generalizations from the elite archive and an indication of the need to broaden prevailing ‘game reserve history’ to include the full range of human and animal inhabitants as agents rather than as residual analytical categories in any narrative.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The title is lifted from K. Anderson, ‘A walk on the wild side: a critical geography of domestication’, Progress in Human Geography, 21 (1997), 474 and 477. Thanks to Nick Lindenberg, GIS Laboratory University of Cape Town, for the maps and the numerous undergraduate researchers who collected the data over the past five years: Tamsanqa Kobi, Nqabutho Madida, Elly Manyonda, Musa Marawu, Andile Mgweba, Grace Mokoena, Siviwe Ngese, Hope Nsangi, Madoda Sigonyela and James Simpson. All errors remain my own.