Paper short abstract:

This paper examines claims to hunting as sustainable development, both ecological and social, through a historical engagement with the hunting’s links to apartheid. It views the game farm, developed as both industry and escape, as a complex point of intersection for race and class, urban and rural.

Paper long abstract:

On July 1st 2015, Walter Palmer, a white hunter from Minnesota shot and killed Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe. The complex responses to this violence in the public sphere regarding the hunting of animals and the hunting down of 'poachers' serves as an unnerving reminder that the hunting of animals and the hunting of humans are not as clearly separated from one another as we may want to think. In the postapartheid era hunting is legitimized through sustainable development arguments, but vestiges of apartheid era inheritances remain in discourses and practices around the hunting of so-called "poachers." This paper examines hunting in the Waterberg District, South Africa over the second half of the 20th century to develop an understanding of how normative categories of progress, social change, and heritage used to support postapartheid claims of hunting as sustainable development are racially and historically mediated in the space of the game farm and the organizing logics of apartheid. Tracking the formation of the Transvaal Game Protection Commission in 1945, the subsequent 1948 election of the National Party and following the implementation of apartheid laws through the 1960's, 70's and 80's, this paper shows how hunting and wildlife management developed within both apartheid structures and the anti-apartheid movements. The continued contestations between Tswana, Pedi, Afrikaner and international hunters over hunting resources provides an opening to investigate whose notions of sustainability, both human and environmental, are being pursued and for what purpose, particularly when claimed in connection to particular pre-colonial and colonial pasts.