DOGS, POISON AND THE MEANING OF COLONIAL INTERVENTION IN THE TRANSKEI, SOUTH AFRICA

Abstract

In the 1890s and 1900s in the Transkei, South Africa, colonial relations were severely strained as Cape colonial officials attempted to constrain African men's hunting activities by systematically poisoning and shooting their dogs. For colonial foresters, such efforts were part of a larger strategy to ‘protect’ flora and fauna by controlling African environmental activities and mobility more thoroughly. Yet on the ground in many areas, state-sponsored dog-killing was drawn into more complex understandings of, and popular frustrations with, transformations in local landscapes and livelihoods during this period. As rural men and women responded to the particular changes in their local political ecologies arising from colonial wildlife preservation policies, they also located conflicts over state forestry and its policies of exclusion within broader popular experiences of political, economic and ecological subordination. In several communities, rumors and stories proliferated, connecting the killing of dogs to other official attempts to poison and bewitch Africans, their animals and their landscapes. Such stories were ways for people to express deeper concerns over the spreading influence of colonial power in their daily practices and its toll on local communities’ health and welfare.