Description
This talk examines conflict between settler farmers and elephants in the Addo region in 1910s-30s South Africa to explore the porosity of the concepts ‘wild’, ‘tame’, and ‘domestic’, and their relationship to race, degeneration, nature conservation, and colonialism. In the 1910s, farmers indicted the ‘Addo Elephants’ as ‘vicious’ thieves who raided crops and ‘hunted’ humans. This view conflicted with a widespread metropolitan perception of elephants as docile, sagacious, and worthy of protection. Seeking to reconcile these perspectives, bureaucrats were divided between exterminating the animals, creating a game reserve, and drawing upon the expertise of Indian mahouts (elephant tamers) to domesticate them. All three options were attempted: the population was decimated by hunter PJ Pretorius, an elephant reserve was created, the animals were tamed to “lose their fear of man” and fed oranges. Despite the presence of tame elephants and artificial feeding, in press, literature, film, and ephemera, the reserve was publicised as a natural habitat and a living spectacle of Lamarckian evolution. This was not paradoxical but provokes a need to rethink the relationship between wildness, tameness, and domesticity, along with their associated connotations of natural and unnatural. These concepts were not implicitly opposed but existed on a spectrum paralleling mid-late nineteenth-century European hierarchies of civilisation, and wild was merely a stage in the evolution of the elephant, much like the development of ‘the African’.| Period | 18 Sept 2019 |
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| Held at | University of Cape Town, South Africa |