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ABSTRACT
Adhikari has recently argued that genocide was a practice particular to colonial frontiers where commercial stock farmers encountered indigenous hunter-gatherers. This paper supports and extends Adhikari’s analysis by broadening its anthropocentric focus to include other species. It shows that the key technologies of genocide employed in the extermination of San hunter-gatherers were subsequently incorporated into everyday Cape stock farming practice and redeployed from the late nineteenth through to the end of the twentieth century in a continual ‘vermin extermination’ campaign against other indigenous commercial stock ‘predators’. The institutionalisation of animal genocide in Cape stock farming served to maintain white farmer solidarity and hegemony, especially in marginal environments, by both militarising the countryside and intimidating the rural proletariat through the routinised symbolical re-enactment of the original act of conquest into acquiescence to white stock farmer ownership and use of the land.
Note on contributor
Lance van Sittert is an associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He has written on the history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cape Colony/Province with a focus on capitalism, the state and environment.
Notes
1. The provincial state also revived the colonial practice of distributing poison at cost to the divisions in 1917, but only included the laying of poison as a legitimate activity of vermin clubs in 1929.
2. There were 85 divisions in the Cape Province in 1917. Assuming an average of 5 districts per division this would represent 425 vermin clubs and an annual subsidy of £8,500. The divisional council was required to act as a vermin club in districts without a private landowner club. See also Ordinance, No. 10, 1927, Section 3 which permitted divisional councils to register more than one vermin club in large districts.
3. Ordinance, No. 27, 1935, Section 1(b) authorized vermin clubs to hunt outside their registered district.
4. These subsidies were set respectively at £20 and £30 per club per annum in 1917 and divisional councils limited to subsidizing only one hound pack per district. A further dog subsidy was exemption from dog tax.
5. Delinquent land owners were required to receive seven days written notification including the date(s) of the proposed hunt where after preventing a vermin club entry became an offence punishable by a fine of up to £10 or three months imprisonment with hard labour.
6. The club captain could grant a delinquent owner exemption ‘on the ground of illness or other unavoidable cause’.
7. Zoos and scientific research were exempted from the ban on keeping vermin in captivity and the importation of ‘uncured skins of vermin’ from beyond the borders of the Cape Province permitted if specially marked under threat of a maximum fine of £200 of six months imprisonment with hard labour for transgressors.
8. The act defined a vermin-proof fence as ‘a fence which is jackal proof in the area within which the dividing fence is proposed to be constructed or … erected’.
9. See also Hey (Citation1955), Rand (Citation1955) and McLachlan (Citation1955).
10. The ‘coyote getter’ was an American invention comprising a buried spring gun designed to fire a sodium cyanide cartridge into a predator’s mouth when it pulled on a bait trigger.
11. Calculated from data contained in Province of the Cape of Good Hope, Department of Nature Conservation Reports No. 18–42 (Citation1961–1985/6). Telodrin was used in the mass poisoning of baboon, monkey, hyrax and fruit baits, but its distribution was discontinued in the early 1970s in favour of the live capture with cage traps for sale as experimental animals in scientific research.
12. Divisional councils were first empowered to employ their own hunters by Ordinance 10, 1927, Section 20.
13. Thus, for example, the bushy terrain of the Eastern Cape prevented the use of horses and required smaller-bodied hounds. Most hunt clubs in the region therefore employed black hunters who hunted on foot with packs of dogs, but were prohibited from using getters.
14. See Ordinance 10, 1927, Section 3 and Ordinance 25, 1934, Section 3 for the imposition of the subsidy requirement that vermin clubs hunt ‘monthly’ and its subsequent amendment to ‘12 times a year’ in recognition of the severe seasonal constraints on this form of hunting.
15. See Ordinance, No. 21, 1959, for the explicit exclusion of ‘native’ land owners from membership of vermin clubs and native reserves from their sphere of operation.
16. The refusal to report may have been intended to cover up transgressions of provincial regulations particularly those governing the use of poison and trapping technologies and the heavy collateral damage in non-target species that resulted. The reported hunt club and permit statistics must also be treated with caution for the same reason.
17. See Nattrass and Conradie (Citation2013) for a useful balanced account of the recent agitation for a resumption of the war against the jackal in the Democratic Alliance-ruled Western Cape Province. Neoliberal predator control in the post-apartheid Western Cape takes the form of permits issued by the provincial state to individual farmers, many of whom employ professional hunters using call-and-shoot technology imported from the United States and used at night to shoot jackal and other small stock predators on their behalf. Some professional hunters in turn sell-on these predator shooting rights to sport hunter clients including foreign tourists.