‘Like the Wild Beast after the Taste of Blood’: War, Hunting, and Racialised Discourse in Southern Africa in the 19th Century

Abstract

Historians of colonial conquest have explored the emergence of various manifestations of racialised discourse about Africans during the numerous colonial wars in Southern Africa. To a slightly lesser extent they have also examined the impact of colonial conquest on the environment. The interconnectedness of the two has been less fully examined. One of the consequences of colonial expansion in what is now South Africa’s Eastern Cape province was the emergence of a distinctive military discourse on Africans in general and the Xhosa in particular. Another was the destruction of large mammals previously endemic to the area. Hunting was part of the dominant masculine military ethos and the colonial record is replete with numerous examples of the close connection between colonial wars and hunting. The same record also contains accounts blaming indigenous people for the decline in wild animals – often simultaneously detailing the mass slaughter of animals by the narrators. This article argues that military attitudes to fauna and to indigenous people were interconnected and fed into a racialised discourse that had an impact beyond the military.