The lion's historian | Summer School

THE LION’S HISTORIAN: HOW TO LIVE IN A MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD

Professor Sandra Swart, Chair of the Department of History, Stellenbosch University

Thursday 30–Friday 31 January  11.15 am  COURSE FEES R220; Staff and students R110

History can play a role in addressing current global biodiversity crises, revealing the shifting dynamics of conservation dilemmas and thereby helping to shape more effective responses. History can also be useful in conservation: it can fuse ecological, political, social and economic data into explanatory narratives of change over time. It can explore successful initiatives, but also expose the failures precipitated by unintended blowback from failed efforts. The first lecture will explore the deep connections between people and animals, challenging the persistent and dangerous idea that human-wildlife relationships are of only subordinate significance relative to ‘pristine’ or non-human interfaces. It will show how historicising elephants and human-wildlife relations helps to avoid romanticising them. Essentially it shows that animals have history and that those histories matter to their futures.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, ‘we could not understand him’. But lions do ‘speak’ – they communicate in voice and action. Homo sapiens have long tried to understand them and sometimes succeeded. This lecture will demonstrate how contact between humans and lions has sometimes shown evidence of mutual comprehension that has been co-created by the changes in human and lion lifeways. It will discuss how, at the same time as Wittgenstein used the lion to illustrate the impossibility of such communication, a real lion-human community were speaking to each other and used this conversation to survive in a shared territory in the Kalahari Desert. This story, of how two apex predators learned to live together in a shared world, will be used as a way of thinking afresh about how we tell more-than-human histories in a way that challenges us to take animal cultures seriously.

Lecture titles

Peter Pan pachyderms: how a doomed experiment on elephants taught us about animal cultures, including our own
If a lion could speak: an ancient covenant between species suggests future possibilities

Recommended reading

Swart, S. 2023. The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/performance.aspx?itemid=1554936181

Internationally renowned environmental historian of Southern Africa, Professor Sandra Swart is Chair of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and vice president of the European Society for Environmental History. In 2016 she was the first woman to be appointed as a full professor in the University’s Department of History. She is also the first woman to chair the SU Department of History. Her latest book is The Lion's Historian: Africa's Animal Past. She is a former president of the Southern African Historical Society and current editor of the South African Historical Journal. She is the author of Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa which was longlisted for the 2010 Alan Paton Award. She has co-authored another book on horses in the Philippines and South Africa, one on the Boer Rebellion, and co-edited another on the history of dogs in Southern Africa.

Sandra graduated from the University of Natal (where both her parents worked as mathematicians) in 1997 with a Master’s degree (cum laude) on the Boer Rebels of 1914. Thereafter, she headed to Oxford University, where she graduated with a DPhil in Modern History in 2001 after having researched the role of poet, author and naturalist Eugene Marais in the shaping of the Afrikaner identity. Her passion for animals and the environment led to a MSc in Environmental Change and Management, also from Oxford, followed, which she completed concurrently with her doctorate.