The night of the jackal: sheep, pastures and predators in the Cape - South Africa

Past & Present, Feb, 1998 by William Beinart

Environmental issues are edging their way back into the mainstream of Anglophone historiography, especially but not only in the United States. Early twentieth-century treatments of nature, for example in historical geography and anthropology, tended to echo traditions of thought which focused on the way in which human societies and social differences were shaped by physical environments. In reaction, Annales historians such as Lucien Febvre insisted that the influences of nature were extraordinarily complex -- culture transcended territory and place.(1) In his stress on the way in which natural influences are mediated by people and social systems, Febvre anticipated the dominant strands in recent environmental history. During the last few decades, the balance of attention, pushed by an anxious modern environmentalism, has swung towards the impact of human activity and the capitalist political economy on nature. Some of the new environmental history has celebrated the rise of conservationist ideas and institutions, but its watchwords have tended to be exploitation and degradation, its motive a search for `sustainability'.

This emphasis on exploitation is often persuasive in discussing the worlds into which European empires expanded, sometimes with earth-shattering consequences, over the last five hundred years.(2) Environmental history has been permeated not only by a green critique of rapaciousness and pollution, but also by a deep unease about the legacy of imperialism in a post-colonial world. Most analyses, of course, are more ambiguous. Imperialism has been a multifaceted, fractured and extended phenomenon, its influence resisted and modified by the societies into which it penetrated. As Alfred Crosby argues in a book largely about the role of European expansion in reshaping environments, nature also constrained the social geography of settlement: he distinguishes `neo-Europes' from zones less hospitable to Europe's `biotic package'. Donald Worster, while building a picture of relentless corporate control of water in the American West and puncturing myths of frontier individualism, is also acutely aware of water scarcity. Yet it is the taming of indigenous nature which emerges as the central recent motif.(3)

Economic development always entails disturbance and control of nature. This is a major feature of modern history and a condition of contemporary society; nevertheless, it seems important that those who wish to reassert the argument for incorporating the natural world into historical analysis should develop further an understanding of ecological influences and constraints -- or illustrate how nature can bite back. This article touches on some of these dilemmas for environmental history and tries to conceive nature as a dynamic element -- more than `merely ... a backdrop' to human interaction.(4) In exploring the natural history of an unruly pirate of the veld, it provides an example of the difficulties of control and, on occasion, the unpredictability of its outcome.

I

COUNTING SHEEP AND THEIR COST

Succeeding phases of European expansion produced strikingly different imperatives of natural resource exploitation. Plantation economies concentrated capital and large numbers of enslaved people in subtropical islands and littorals which occupied relatively little space in the new geography of world production. By contrast, the expanding nineteenth-century settler pastoral economy occupied vast areas of land in more extensive systems, which required relatively few workers. South Africa, known better for its place on shipping routes and role in mineral production, was also significant for settlers' farming of sheep and cattle. The geographical area involved was smaller than in Australia, or North and South America, because settler expansion was constrained by the demographic and political weight of the indigenous African population as well as the terrain and diseases of the interior. Yet even allowing for its relatively small size, the accumulation of domesticated animals in the hands of South African settlers was rapid.

Whereas cattle and internal markets were probably the major stimulus to commercial stock-rearing in the United States, pastoral farmers in colonial South Africa, as in Australia, were more dependent on woolled sheep whose produce was sold largely to Britain.(5) Changes in industrial production and consumer tastes in Britain and Europe had their direct counterpart in the transformation of the antipodean plains -- the displacement not only of Khoisan and Australian aboriginal people but also of the springbok and kangaroo. Tropical plantations could devastate rich indigenous forest in the enclaves and islands where they dominated; recognition of this ecological destruction played some part in stimulating conservationist ideas.(6) The degree of environmental transformation in the pastoral zones, where natural vegetation often remained significant for grazing, was also sometimes grasped early by contemporary observers.(7)