‘It Is As Bad To Be a Black Man's Animal As It Is To Be a Black Man’ – The Politics of Species in Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa

Sandra Swart

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2014, vol. 40, issue 4, 689-705

Abstract: ‘This law makes us dogs, stray dogs for all time’1Ilanga Lase Natal, 22 August 1913Sol Plaatje and his contemporaries described the traumatic effects of the Natives Land Act 27 of 1913: forced expulsions of Africans and their animals, followed by desperate livestock sales at slaughterhouse prices. In many places, previously secure sharecroppers on white-owned farms became roaming exiles accompanied by their skeletal sheep and cattle, many of which starved along the road. Yet no single overarching narrative can capture the new law's immediate effects, as the dynamics of changes were geographically idiographic. This Act is perhaps the most thoroughly studied piece of legislation in South Africa's past, but the historical meta-narrative should be contested. The ‘land’ part of this Act has monopolised historiographical attention, while other aspects have been neglected. In this essay, I hope, therefore, to contribute another category to the analytical lens of class, race and gender through which the Act has been considered: species. Thus I focus on Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa as a key source, arguing that his repeated refrain that the Act was ‘cruel to animals’ was both a sincere response to its impact on African livestock and a deftly deployed act of political theatre scripted by Plaatje himself.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2014.930625 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:40:y:2014:i:4:p:689-705

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2014.930625

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().