Enacting and stabilising the nature of colonial history through hunting in the South African Highveld

ABSTRACT

Before apartheid, Afrikaner nationalist ideologues composed a nationalist ‘nature’. South Africa’s political ordering was, thus, naturalised through nationalist ‘natures’ where settlers could perform their dominance over natives and their belonging in their fledgling nations. Post apartheid, Njabulo Ndebele (1999) saw game lodges as offering white South Africans a taste of colonial power and belonging, but having the opposite effect on black South Africans. For Ndebele, recomposing ‘natural’ spaces is fundamental to how South Africans come to belong (or not) in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing from interview and ethnographic data, I show that contemporary biltong hunting ‘nature’ is an assemblage of humans and non-humans composed around a concern with how Afrikaner nationalist masculinities might belong (or not) in a post-apartheid context. I argue hunting ‘nature’ is a commodity that, anchors a past nationalist masculine hierarchy in a reciprocal relationship to game on privately owned land and collapses belonging into ownership.

KEYWORDS:

• Hunting
• coloniality
• compositionism
• conservation
• public

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andre Goodrich is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at North-West University, South Africa. He has published on the theme of nature, landscape and belonging, and his research interests include environmental humanities, small cities and the coloniality of power.

Notes

1. Administrative Management Design (ADMADE) and Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) in Zambia; Natural Resources Management Project (NRMP) in Botswana; Living in a Finite Environment (LIFE) and The Namibian Association of Community Based Natural Resource Management Support Organizations (NASCO) in Namibia; and Selous Conservation Programme (SCP) and Culman and Hurt Community Wildlife Project in Tanzania are all donor funded projects aimed at integrating rural populations with conservation objectives by linking livelihoods to revenue streams generated by touristic wildlife uses.