The Lion's Historian

Africa's Animal Past

Sandra Swart

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780821426456
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Biological Sciences

“Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Sandra Swart takes up the challenge of that African proverb and, with this book, becomes the lion’s historian. As a species, humans are not alone; but our history has been written as though we were. Swart insists on a multispecies retelling of our more-than-human past as she reconstructs a shifting series of significant interspecies relationships, from quirky, idiosyncratic connections to others that triggered major changes.

Embracing a radical interdisciplinarity informed by a background in history and environmental studies, Swart combines the natural sciences with the social sciences, oral history, indigenous knowledge, and archival research. She blends current thinking about animal sentience, agency, cognition, and emotion to offer a new way to understand animals’ roles in our shared history.

The animals in this book—baboons, cows, elephants, hippos, horses, jackals, lions, Nazi cattle, okapi, police dogs, quagga, sheep, and white ants—exemplify different facets of our shared past. With this animal-centric lens, decades of research come together in a collection that takes animals seriously. It is a book with claws and fangs, tearing through conventional narratives to ask, Are we prepared to move beyond the convention that “history” is the story of only our own species?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Pachyderm Preface
• 1. Beasts of the Southern World: How Do We Write African Animal History?
• 2. The Lion’s Historian: Hunting Animal Histories from the South
• 3. Creatures of Contact: Animals and Power at the Mid-Seventeenth Century Cape
• 4. The Empire Rides Back: Horses and Indigenous Resistance
• 5. ‘It Is as Bad to Be a Black Man’s Animal as It Is to Be a Black Man’: The Politics of Species and Race
• 6. The White Soul of the Ant?: Insects and Identity
• 7. Apartheid’s Hounds: How South Africa Invented the World’s Most Terrifying Police Dog
• 8. Zombie Zoology: The End of Extinction?
• 9. History for the End of the World: Finding New Futures in the Animal Past
• Notes
• Index