"Keeping the enemy at bay": The extermination of wild carnivora in the Cape Colony, 1889-1910

Environmental History, Jul 1998 by van Sittert, Lance

Agrarian history is the poor relation of recent South African historiography. For a generation of "revisionist" historians, the mineral revolution (the discovery of diamonds and gold) has been the defining moment in modern South African history, driving accelerated economic, political, and social change across the subcontinent since i86o. Viewed through a materialist lens, these changes revealed an intensifying struggle between settler capitalists and indigenous black societies for control of land and labor. In accordance with this grand narrative, rural historians have been primarily concerned with tracing black resistance to capitalism's penetration of the countryside in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, producing a rich literature on rural class struggle. The focus on resistance, however, has rendered both settler production and the natural environment as little more than broadly sketched backdrops to class warfare in the countryside.1

Commercial small-stock farming in the Cape Colony provides a case in point. The development of the colony's pastoral economy is well documented before 1840, after which attention shifts to the travails of the predominantly cattle-keeping black peasantry in the Eastern Cape. The rapid commercialization of settler pastoral production that followed the widespread introduction of merino sheep and angora goats around mid-century is thus largely absent in the work of revisionists, and the 1936 study by Afrikaner nationalist historian H. B. Thom remains the standard text. The environmental factors constraining or enhancing settler smallstock farming have also been ignored, and its spread treated as a "natural" consequence of the colonial state's military and political rollback of the northern and eastern frontiers. The vermin extermination campaign against wild carnivores waged by "progressive" small-stock farmers and the colonial state in the period from 1889 to 1910 brings the neglected issues of economics and environment in South Africa's modern agrarian history into sharper focus.3 Wild carnivores were excluded from the definition of "game" under the 1888 Game Protection Act and the proscriptions of the sportsman's code. By default, they were "vermin" to be "exterminated," and in a final repudiation of the ethos of the hunt, this was encouraged by the colonial state through a system whereby magistrates paid rewards for "proofs" of dead carnivores. The economics of profit and loss, not chivalry or social Darwinism, underlaid this slaughter, which did not end with union in 191o; the new Cape provincial state revived the bounty system and continued it, with only minor adjustments, until 1956.

Vermin extermination, unlike the more glamorous imperial hunt, has been almost completely ignored by historians of Africa.4 William Beinart, in his exploratory foray into jackal extermination in the twentieth-century Cape Province, treats the economics of small-stock farming in a broad and unsystematic fashion and entirely neglects the nineteenth-century origins of the policy, which he erroneously dates from the 1910s. His further implication that the bounty system lapsed around 1930, coincidental with the extermination of the jackal, is also woefully misinformed; tens of thousands of these and other carnivores were killed annually with state sanction until the mid-1950s. The vermin extermination policy of the Cape colonial state was fundamentally different in aim and implementation than that of its successor and can only be properly understood in the context of the economic and environmental challenges facing small-stock farming in the two decades after 1889.5

"A Howling Wilderness"

By the mid-nineteenth century, the once prolific wild game of the Cape Colony had been decimated by the vanguard of expanding white settlement and replaced with domestic small stock on the interior grasslands and Karoo. In the last two decades of colonial rule, sheep and goat numbers fell from a peak of 23 million in the early 189os, to a trough of probably less than 15 million during the South African War (1899--1902), before climbing back to a new high of more than 25 million on the eve of union in 191o. Commercial small stock-wooled (merino) sheep and angora goats-made up approximately three-quarters of the flocks prior to the South African War and slightly more than one-half in the following decade. They yielded a wide range of products for export, including wool (greased, scoured, cleaned and fleece-washed), mohair, and hides that were sold almost exclusively to the United Kingdom.6

Small-stock farming's importance to the colonial balance of payments declined precipitously over the period as diamond and gold exports soared. Wool accounted for around 70 percent of total earnings, but its share fell steadily from 78.6 percent in the period from i88o to 1884 to just 62.8 percent in the period from 1905 to 1909. The average export price of wool fell by 50 percent in the final two decades of the nineteenth century to its lowest level ever, and it recovered only very slowly thereafter. The price of mohair and skins also declined, but their more rapid recovery made little impression on the shortfall in wool earnings which was recouped by the near-doubling in the quantity exported.7