Sandra Swart

'A Boer and His Gun and His Wife are Three Things Always Together': Republican Masculinity and the 1914 Rebellion

In 1914, there was a rebellion against the young Union government by some 11,000 Afrikaans‐speaking men. This social movement has primarily been understood as an Afrikaner Nationalist phenomenon. This article focuses on the gendered identity of the rebels in order to illuminate the Rebellion in a different light. In 1912, the introduction of the Defence Act threatened the identity of Boer men who had come to have their masculinity encoded and reinforced in the Republican commando system. The Defence Act was not a rarefied piece of legislation, but a law that touched people at the level of their religion, their language and their identity. Hardest hit was the Boer Republican self‐conception of masculinity. The main focus of this article is on the period after 1912, when the Defence Act imposed modern training methods, uniforms, ranking system, disciplinary codes and promotional norms. In the build‐up to World War I, Afrikaans‐speaking males living on the periphery of the new locus of central state power be...

“But Where's the Bloody Horse?”: Textuality and Corporeality in the “Animal Turn”

Summary In the last decade, “animal studies” has arisen in belated parallel to other counter-hegemonic disciplines. In order to discuss this new departure of considering animals in the humanities rather than solely the natural sciences, we use the case study of the horse. We discuss what the “animal turn” might mean in disciplinary terms. We show that there is a significant move towards embracing new subject matter, and concomitant new sources, in history writing in southern Africa. We argue, however, that it is difficult to label it a new “paradigm” as it remains largely in the social (or socio-environmental) history camp. Instead, it encompasses a continuing process of inclusion and measured mainstream acceptance of the animal as subject, object and even perhaps agent. The “animal turn” (and, indeed, “green social science”) is not founded on any one method or approach, instead it remains diverse in terms of its methodology and raison d’être, mirroring the multiplicity of its object of study. We discuss changes within socio-environmental history that might permit a transformed understanding of the horse as historical actor with the acceptance of the animal as subject, object and even agent-in short, how academics in the humanities might find the “bloody horse”.

The construction of Eugène Marais as an Afrikaner hero

Eugène Marais (1871–1936) is remembered as an Afrikaner hero. There are, however, competing claims as to the meaning of this ‘heroic’ status. Some remember him as the ‘father of Afrikaans poetry’, one of the most lionised writers in Afrikaans, and part of the Afrikaner nationalist movement. Yet a second intellectual tradition remembers him as a dissident iconoclast, an Afrikaner rebel. This article seeks to show, first, how these two very different understandings of Marais came to exist, and, secondly, that the course of this rivalry of legends was inextricably bound up with the socio‐economic and political history of South Africa. We look at his portrayal at particular historical moments and analyse the changes that have occurred with reference to broader developments in South Africa. This is in order to understand the making of cultural identity as part of nationalism, and opens a window onto the contested process of re‐imagining the Afrikaner nation. The article demonstrates how Maraiss changing image was a result of material changes within the socio‐economic milieu, and the mutable needs of the Afrikaner establishment. The hagio‐graphy of Marais by the Nationalist press, both during his life and after his death, is explored, showing how the socio‐political context of the Afrikaans language struggle was influential in shaping his image. The chronology of his representation is traced in terms of the changing self‐image of the Afrikaner over the ensuing seven decades. Finally, in order to understand the fractured meaning of Marais today, the need for alternative heroes in the ‘New South Africa’ is considered.

“The World the Horses Made”: A South African Case Study of Writing Animals into Social History

This paper explores new ways to write history that engages with the lives of animals. It offers a sample card of how social history can be enriched by focusing on history from an animal perspective – and equally, how the tools provided by social history reveals the historicity of animals. The case study is drawn from South African history and the focus is on horses. The paper firstly proposes that horses changed human history not only on the macro-level, but in the small, intimate arena of the bodily, following Febvre’s call for a sensory history. Secondly, this paper explores social history’s long-time concern with agency and with understanding socio-cultural experiences from the perspective of those who actually lived them – in this case, from an equine perspective. Thirdly, the paper asks how social history that takes animals seriously might be written and might offer a fresh dimension to our understanding, with examples from the most analysed event in southern African historiography, the South African War (1899–1902).

Canis Familiaris: A Dog History of South Africa

Dogs, like humans, are products both of culture and nature. For the past twelve thousand years they have been entangled with human societies. Dogs connect the wild and the tame. They occupy an ambiguous position, straddling the opposing spheres of nature and culture.’ They occupy warm stoeps, follow their masters at night, track insurgents, patrol borders, sniff: out strangers, hunt game, protect homesteads and leave their pawprints all over the archives. Yet equally, they are often scavengers, liminal creatures in only loose association with human society, foraging at the peripheries of homesteads and nomadic groups, spreading disease and polluting civilized streets. This suite of essays is a first step in recovering Canis famifiaris ’s ubiquitous yet invisible presence in southern African history and, because of its relationship with humans, some of our own species’ past as well. What is revealed is in many respects familiar territory, albeit illuminated in an unfamiliar light, but in others it is a terra incognito mapped here for the first time. The use of the dog to think about human society has a long scholarly pedigree and the recent animal turn in the humanities has sparked a florescence of canine studies.‘ These have emphasi-

‘High Horses’ – Horses, Class and Socio-Economic Change in South Africa*

This article examines an aspect of the growth of an Afrikaner bourgeoisie in the platteland through the ‘things’ they desired. It discusses the introduction of the American Saddlebred horse from the USA, to the agrarian sectors of the then Cape Province and Orange Free State. Analysis of breed discourse affords us insights into the role of status symbols, the socio-economic context of their acquisition, and the cultural impetus for their rise in popularity and wide geographic diffusion in rapidly upwardly-mobile, predominately Afrikaans-speaking rural communities in South Africa. In addition to the material context, the article analyses the elite – and, to an extent, internationalist – rhetorical space the American Saddle horse inhabited, by contrasting it with the self-consciously egalitarian and ethnically unifying discourse surrounding another horse used by primarily Afrikaans-speakers, the Boerperd. This article seeks to contribute to an area that is perhaps neglected in southern African historiography: the ‘cultural web of consumption’, with an emphasis on ‘things’ and their meanings. Historians have shown how consumer items and sports, for example, were invested with ethnic identity. This article, however, explores another nuance – the role of class. Past historiography on the culture of national identity has largely focused on the ways in which shared understanding of ‘history’ was mobilised to produce group (ethnic/national) identity, but identity could also be predicated in part on the embrace of ‘modernity’ and consumerism. The comparison between the supporters of American Saddlers and Boerperde, both factions within the (largely male) Afrikaans-speaking society, and an analysis of their quite different discourses reflect two ways of conceptualising identity, especially in the way they mobilised consumer hunger. The Saddle horse discourse reflects the development of a new class, with manifestations of fresh desires and a need to demarcate class boundaries. It reflects a way of thinking about self-identity that is not the traditional view of Afrikaner identity politics: a confident, internationalist, pro-American, elite – above all, embracing of ‘modernity’, the future, and not invested in the past. Instead of ‘Afrikanerising’ the American horse, it became more prestigious to maintain a foreign link. Antithetically, the Boerperd discourse offered a demotic weltanschauung, and the Boerperd breeders contested the notion of a horse as an effete relic of a higher class, revelling instead in nativist history, classlessness, usefulness, and autochthony.

Dogs and Dogma: A Discussion of the Socio-Political Construction of Southern African Dog 'Breeds' as a Window on Social History

Dogs have been entangled in human lives, myths, illusions, and sentiments for at least the last ten to twelve thousand years. The alliance between dogs and humans is the oldest among all the animals, and the relationship is so long that the story we think of as theirs is often our own. This chapter is an attempt to extract a measure of their story and show how and why it has merged with ours in one particular context. It is an engagement with the social role of the three Southern African dog ?breeds?: the Rhodesian ridgeback, the Boerboel and the Africanis. The discussion explores the current discourses, debates and marketing strategies surrounding the dogs, with particular emphasis on the recent move to reclassify the ?kaffir dog? as the ?Africanis?. The chapter tracks the pawprints into the social history of southern African society, opening up wider issues of identity.Keywords: Africanis; Boerboel; Rhodesian Ridgeback; social symbolism; Southern Africa

Frankenzebra: Dangerous Knowledge and the Narrative Construction of Monsters

Summary This article explores the enduring fear of “dangerous knowledge”. It argues that the “de-extinction movement” towards reviving long-disappeared species has been understood largely through recourse to one key “story” – the Frankenstein Myth. It looks at three de-extinction projects – the mammoth, quagga, and thylacine – using the way these projects have been couched to analyse anxieties over the hubristic abuse of technology. The article focuses on the power of mythic narratives to not only explain but shape understandings of science in society, concealing more nuanced understandings. Indeed, deeply entrenched narratives can actually influence scientific endeavour.

Horses in the South African War, c. 1899-1902

This essay discusses the role of horses in war through the lens of their mortality in the South African War (1899-1902). This conflict was the biggest and most modern of the numerous precolonial and colonial wars that raged across the southern African subcontinent in the late nineteenth century. Aside from the human cost, the theater of war carried a heavy environmental toll, with the scorched-earth policy shattering the rural economy. The environmental charge extended to animals. Both sides relied on mounted troops, and the casualties suffered by these animals were on a massive scale. This is widely regarded as proportionally the most devastating waste of horseflesh in military history up until that time. This paper looks at the material context of—and reasons for—equine casualties and discusses the cultural dimension of equine mortality and how combatants on both sides were affected by this intimate loss.

‘Motherhood and Otherhood’ – gendered citizenship and Afrikaner women in the South African 1914 Rebellion

Little historiographical analysis exists on women and citizenship, and very little has been written on women’s historical relationship to the state in South Africa. Signifi cant new inroads have been made, however, and this article seeks to contribute to this growing body of literature by using the 1914 Boer Rebellion as a lens through which gendered processes of citizenship and identity may be observed. Although no women engaged in active military service, there were women who considered themselves to be ‘rebels’. The article examines their role during the Rebellion and in its aftermath, a mass demonstration. The demonstration was couched in traditional, patriarchal discourse, but it was a radical development, an event solely engineered and participated in by women. It signifi es an often-forgotten role of women in confl ict, which is diffi cult to contain in simple stereotypes. The post-rebellion mass demonstration, was pro-active, women-lead, and was predicated on an ideology of ‘republican motherhood’. The discourse enabled some women to mobilise their domestic experience into a powerful political statement, allowing them to extend their culturallysanctioned role to incorporate new – albeit constrained – public responsibilities. Just as in other contexts, this rhetoric and imagery of motherhood, as both a socially redemptive and politically persuasive concept, became a fundamental validation. It was an uneasy and ambivalent ‘republicanism’ – no call was made for female suffrage, their demands were couched in terms of their relative position to men – as wives, mothers and daughters of the state. The demonstration refl ects the signifi cant, although limited, role of Afrikaner women in the political arena. Their role was pro-active, vigorous involvement – an action diffi cult to contain in the one-dimensional dichotomy of ‘cheerleader’ or ‘anti-war Other’.