Safe-guarding the colonial present: game farms on the frontier in KwaZulu-Natal's ‘Battlefields Route’

Abstract

Drawing on Alistair Fraser's concept of the ‘colonial present’, I show how private game farms are both conceptualised and deployed to maintain ideas of boundaries and belonging that sustain colonial ideals and identities. This article is located on the banks of the Mzinyathi River in KwaZulu-Natal, a river that has functioned as a boundary between various groups for almost two hundred years. The game farms located in this area conserve the idea of the river as a frontier space for ‘white’ South Africa and a boundary with ‘black’ South Africa, as well as entrenching their own boundaries through the imagination and realisation of an idealised space. I argue that the game farms safeguard and perpetuate a colonial present whilst obscuring opportunities for other ways of interpreting and using the space of the farm. Ultimately, how the game farms are now imagined and the way they operate is counterproductive to social transformation in the rural landscape.

Keywords:

• colonial present
• frontier
• game farming
• the Mzinyathi River
• KwaZulu-Natal

Acknowledgements

This research is funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences, VU University of Amsterdam. This was provided as matching funds for the NWO-WOTRO research programme ‘Farm Dwellers the Forgotten People? Consequences of Conversions to Wildlife Production in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape’. I would like to express my gratitude to the research participants in KwaZulu-Natal, as well as to my field assistant Thulani Khuzwayo and local historian Paul Garner and his wife Beverly. Sandra Åslund, Femke Brandt, Jeff Guy, Marja Spierenburg and Shirley Brooks provided useful and inspiring input and support.

Note on contributor

Jenny Josefsson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the Free State and the VU University. Her research focuses on relations between people, landscape and wildlife on private game farms in KwaZulu-Natal. She has a special interest in the dynamics, negotiations and methods of ethnographic fieldwork and knowledge-generation.

Notes

1. The main battlefield sites in the area are from the Anglo-Zulu War (1879), although there are also sites from the South African War (1899–1903). For a critical discussion of the ethics of battlefield tourism in the region, see Jeff Guy's ‘Battling with Banality’ (1998).

2. The case studies are included in the author's doctorate research (work in progress) which forms part of a NWO-WOTRO research programme called ‘Farm Dwellers the Forgotten People? Consequences of Conversion to Wildlife Production in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape’. Names of farms and people have been changed for the sake of anonymity.

3. In her Ph.D. dissertation from 2013 ‘Tracking and Invisible Great Trek: An Ethnography on the Re-configuration of Power and Belonging on Trophy-hunting Farms in the Karoo’, Femke Brandt mentions the sense of belonging amongst game farmers with the global trophy-hunting community and its relationship with their roles as landowners in South Africa, (see pages 276–279).

4. Also see Laband, Thompson, and Henderson (1983) about the ‘Buffalo Border’ and the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879. In particular, their discourse around white settlers' relationship to ‘the menacing shadow of the Zulu Kingdom across the river’ (19–28).

5. The amakholwa – believers – is the term used to describe the first Zulu Christian converts. See Norman Etherington's important book Preachers, Peasants, and Politics in Southeast Africa 1835–1880: African Christian Communities in Natal, Pondoland, and Zululand (1978) for a history on the Kholwa.

6. The particulars with regards to this section of land are rather vague. A copy of a map from 1906 showing the Nkandla District (courtesy of Jeff Guy) has left it a blank space. Neighbouring farmers and farm dwellers state that Africans lived there, it was, for example, suggested that it could have been a ‘location’. Also, it first appears on a title deed in the mid-1980s.

7. This event took place during an interview carried out by Shirley Brooks and Mnqobi Ngubane in 2010, and they have kindly shared their records of this interview for this article.