“Ah, Dr Swart, and how is your little pony?” an elderly professor from Stellenbosch University would ask environmental historian, Professor Sandra Swart in the corridors. Her revolutionary take on history — recognising animals as subjects, not objects, that have changed the course of history — was unpopular when she pioneered this research 20 years ago.
But she was willing to risk her career to explore interspecies relationships between humans and animals, adopting an animal-centric approach. “History is about more than the human world and what I want to do is reawaken our kinship with other creatures. This new way of doing history is exciting,” says Swart.
The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past, released this week, is a culmination of her work in archives, across disciplines and millennia, and in the field from the Kalahari to Zululand and beyond. For an earlier book, she rode on horseback across the bear and wolf country of Mongolia.
Why care about human-animal relationships in history?
In this era of vanishing biodiversity, humans need to rediscover how to live with other species and the historical voices of these species need to be heard, says Swart, the head of Stellenbosch University’s history department. It’s a view that resonates with many; she has 21 PhD students working in, or graduated from, this field.
The daughter of two maths professors, Swart veered off (her sister did maths) on her own trajectory, doing a doctorate in modern history at Oxford University and master’s in environmental change and management, before moving to Stellenbosch University “for a year”. That was 21 years ago.
“Animals and human struggles are intertwined, and animals hold up a mirror to us,” says Swart, whose meticulous research shows that animals, like humans, also have “cultures”, which change over time.
People have learnt from animals throughout the ages, from precolonial times to today, she says. For millennia, hunter-gatherers took their cues from baboons in choosing foods that were safe to eat or could be medicinal.
Horses teach people about body language, says Swart, who has taught at the South African Military Academy, training young soldiers in these skills with her horses. Watching Swart and her appaloosa mares, Aztec and Voodoo, greet each other in the late afternoon, it is clear they share a language.
She looks at the world both as a critical scholar and from the perspective of animals. During lockdown, when newspaper deliveries to her door stopped, she made fake newspapers for her pair of ridgeback dogs to deliver to her.
Perceptions of animals shaped by history, mythology & biology
But Swart’s book is not sentimental and she unsparingly describes, for example, how police dogs were turned into “instruments of torture” during apartheid, a culture of brutality that continued after 1994. The horrific “training exercise” in 1998 when four Gauteng police officers set their dogs on three Mozambican detainees is one such case.
“In the shift from nose to teeth, so much was lost,” Swart writes, referring to other, more gentle, roles for dogs. She cites two tracker dogs that refused to give up searching for two missing children, aged 3 and 4, in the Namibian desert.
“History, myth and biology are entangled in how people perceive dog breeds,” writes Swart.
Dogs are featured alongside lions, elephants, horses, baboons, farm livestock, quaggas and even the mysterious okapi in The Lion’s Historian. The title is from an African proverb: “Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
Symbol of resistance to imperialism: man-eating lions
The story of two man-eating lions from Kenya illustrates this, with a modern twist. In 1898 the British colonial rulers were extending the railway line from Mombasa to Uganda, using Indian labourers.
“But one by one they were being eaten by two male rogue lions,” says Swart, noting that the lions came from an area where trafficked slaves in “caravans of death” used to travel. “The very weak were abandoned along the way. It is possible that, over time, local lions learnt a tradition of man-eating,” she writes.
Animals and human struggles are intertwined, and animals hold up a mirror to us
— Stellenbosch environmental historian, Professor Sandra Swart
Enter Lt-Col John Henry Patterson, who killed the lions (and wrote the book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo) to protect the empire’s interests and the workers, who were, in his words, “half-mad with fright”.
He writes about a “fresh plot... to murder me” by the Indians, and twice in this time the workers mutinied. Swart writes: “This was because the two lions not only halted work on the railway but revealed that the British were not as omnipotent as they seemed.”
After Patterson killed the lions, the railway was built and the lions were stuffed and sent to a museum in Chicago. “Kenya is demanding the bodies back because they say these are two of our earliest resistance fighters,” says Swart.
Living peacefully with shared cultures: lions
But, as The Lion’s Historian reveals, indigenous communities have shown it is possible to coexist with lions and learn from them.
Swart says, for example: “San cultures in Nyae Nyae in the Kalahari Desert astonished people in the 1950s by living closely with lions. Firstly, they took very seriously the division of time: they had the day and the lions had the night...
“If they came across a lion, or pride of lions, and they did often, they would walk away from them looking down at an oblique angle. At night if lions came around, they had no huts or shelter, just a fire, they just said firmly to the lions ‘go away’.”
Anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who conducted research among the Ju/’hoansi of the Nyae Nyae region in Namibia and Botswana in the 1950s, said their “pleasant relationship” with lions looked like a “truce”. She recorded an encounter in which a party of hunters who had hit a wildebeest with poisoned arrows found a pride of about 30 lions had discovered the carcass before them.
“They walked up to the two nearest lionesses and threw pebbles and clods of sand to explode in front of them, without discourteously touching them, and said to them: ‘Old Ones, this meat is ours.’ The lionesses twitched and paced, but the whole pride retreated, allowing the hunters to take the wildebeest,” she wrote.
“Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was new to Africa and thought this behaviour was normal,” says Swart.
In the 1980s, an analysis of causes of mortality among this community found that only two of some 1,500 fatalities over the previous century resulted from lion attacks.
“In nearby Etosha Park, where the hunter-gatherers had been forced out and fortress conservation imposed... lions grew to maturity without ever coming into contact with humans, except in their cars... and the Etosha lions were deadly,” she says, despite them sharing the same genetics as the Nyae Nyae lions.
The Nyae Nyae lions and Ju/’hoansi showed “an accommodation can be reached between species and that gives us hope”, says Swart. “Their truce pivoted on shared interspecies cultures of understanding.”
Harm in disrupting animal cultures: rogue elephants
The Lion’s Historian argues that animal populations have their own “cultures”, which conservationists should take into account.
“People say animals have instincts, but biology is not destiny for animals. The culture of the elephant in Zululand is not the same as the elephant in the Knysna forest,” she says, describing culture as knowledge, customs and social behaviours passed through generations.
Swart cites the case of elephant orphans that were relocated from the Kruger National Park to KwaZulu-Natal and went rogue.
“When the last of the Zululand elephants was shot out, they needed to bring elephants back, as part of the ecosystem. In those days it was hard to transport elephants but they were culling in the Kruger, so they got the orphaned baby elephants for what was then the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi game reserve in 1981.
“The orphans had suffered the stress of their families being slaughtered and didn’t have role models to teach them how to behave. They came into musth 10 years too soon and went out of control. They were goring and humping rhinos and killing rhinos, and chasing cars and people.”
That was when conservationists realised the important role of the older female elephants in passing on culture, says Swart. “They are like the library of Alexandria, repositories of culture, and the older males are also. They would’ve policed behaviour and stopped the orphans coming into musth too early.
“What these game reserves had to do was bring in adult males so then these little elephants learnt what was what and they became model citizens.”
History’s deep lens on human-animal struggles: baboons
Increasingly, however, the needs of animals and humans in modern society collide; for example in Cape Town with its perennial human-babbon conflict. Fossil evidence suggests that both species have lived closely together for millennia and there may have once been co-operation between them.
But is it the fear of the invader, the burglar staring in through the window? Or it is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass?
— Sandra Swart
This, says Swart, is why learning from “deep history” — as well as disciplines such as palaeontology, rock art and archaeology — has much to offer contemporary society. A society in need of rewilding.
Deep history challenges “stagnant representations of human-animal relations in the precolonial period,” she says. “It takes vernacular knowledge, oral tradition and traditional ecological knowledge seriously in telling the story of past human-animal connections.”
The deepest rift in baboon-human relations came when people transitioned from hunter-gatherer lives to become sedentary, farming crops and keeping livestock, Swart says. That’s when baboon “raiders” got into battles with humans, a war of attrition without end in both rural and urban areas.
When the baboon gang-leader Fred was killed by Cape Town authorities in 2011, says Swart, he had 27 birdshot and buckshot pellets in his body. “I wonder from where this violence must stem — surely either from fear or rage. But is it the fear of the invader, the burglar staring in through the window? Or it is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass?”
Swart says we need to remember that baboons, like humans, are creatures of history that “both experience change and effect change”.
“This is the kind of history we need to write in our current apocalyptic moment: a history not of the end of the world but rather for it — a history that might help us, however slightly, find a way out of our present crisis and into a better future,” she says.
“It is precisely because [baboon-human] relationships change over time and they are so flexible and resilient that baboon cultures — understood historically — also offer us the one thing missing in conventional environmental discourses — and that, of course, is hope.”
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