Swart
Biographic Data
| ID | 67052 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Swart |
| FAMILY NAME | Swart |
| SIGNATURE | SWART |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stellenbosch University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4608-2182 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 70 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 70 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Mounted masculinity – imperial identity in the equestrian acts of Frank Fillis’s circus in South Africa, c. 1882–1910
This article analyses equestrian performances in South Africa in Frank Fillis’s Circus between 1882 and 1910. We show how he was influenced by an array of popular acts, such as war re-enactments and hunting spectacles, where horses provided both elements of authenticity and idealized empire through the romantic spectacle of the military. However, we argue that the ‘imperial’ battled the ideographic, as uniquely South African tropes were added to …
The Hunger Games’: Politics and drought in post-colonial Zimbabwe, 1980–1992
This paper explores the politics of drought and hunger in the immediate post-colonial period in Zimbabwe, 1980–1992. This period was characterised by the state's efforts to consolidate power in the context of the African citizenry's anticipated reform of the colonial system and ensuing white supremacist state. The new African-led state's power consolidation efforts manifested in the Gukurahundi massacre between 1982 and 1987, in which drought bec…
Transdisciplinary Histories and the Rise of the Environmental Humanities
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0
Redeeming race: Anton Obholzer, physical education and perfecting the white body, 1937–1939
NEXTGATe Report Back
Eseh Notepad
The occult goes underground: Rumour, rituals, and the everyday entrepreneurship of women in artisanal gold mining in Mazowe, Zimbabwe, c. 2000–2021
Our stomachs are still hungry’: The colonial state, African nutrition and small grains in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), c.1950 to 1970s
By the early 1950s, farms and industries in Southern Rhodesia were reportedly experiencing increasing cases of malnutrition and poor physical health among African workers. Yet, notwithstanding these alarm calls, the government as well as most mining and commercial crop sectors of tobacco, maize, and cotton, were reluctant to acknowledge the crisis – let alone take action. The colonial state and employers alike avoided the additional expense of pr…
Gender and Animals in History: Yearbook of Women’s History 42 (2023)
This exploratory introductory essay has thought about a gender in humananimal or animal sensitive history.It brings into conversation environmental history, natural sciences (ornithology, primatology), feminist science studies and queer ecocriticism.It explores the ways in which our shifting understandings of animals have contoured our understandings of our own species' gender and sexuality and, vice versa, human heteronormativity and sexism have…
A Necessary Evil: (Southern) Rhodesia's Diplomatic and Economic Relations with Zambia, 1963 to 1973
This paper historicises the diplomatic and economic relations of Southern Rhodesia and Zambia between 1963 and 1973. While there has been comprehensive scholarship delineating the relations between, for instance, Zimbabwe and South Africa over the years, neighbouring Zambia has hitherto been given little attention by historians. Where the relations of Zimbabwe and Zambia have been examined, this has been in the context of political and military c…
Shared Skin: The Slow Intimacy of Horse and Rider
This essay explores the co-constructed sensory experiences between two species over time, offering a deeper understanding both of the multi-sensory nature and different scales of inter-species intimacy. A five millennia long intimate sensory conversation between humans and horses was integral to hunting, domesticating, taming, training, sacrificing, harnessing and - eventually - riding the once-wild horses of the steppeland. Domesticating the hor…
The beast that never forgot? Baboon conservation and the role of multispecies history
History and culture were long seen as definitionally human. As other distinctive traits that once defined our species as unique disappeared, at least we still had those two. But are we really the only species shaped by our pasts and who have cultures that change over time? This article explores animal cultures, the significance of history (and individual and group memory) in the survival of social animals and the role the discipline of History ca…
Little Grey Men? Animals and Alien Kinship
This essay confronts the lack of vernacular, indigenous or local knowledge in human-animal history and pushes it back into Deep History. It analyses the shifting meanings of the occult baboon and the alien 'other' in South Africa's syncretic and synchronic cosmologies. It asks why it is the baboon - out of all the animals - who came to be a witch's familiar? It asks why the tokoloshe, a supernatural sprite, became baboon-esque? In answering these…
Introduction: New Geographies in Animal History
Eseh Notepad: Introducing the New Eseh Presidential Team
‘Today We Will Milk Dogs!’ ( Nhasi tinokama imbwa )* – A Socio-political History of African-owned Dogs and the Dog Tax in Southern Rhodesia, c.1900–1950
We examine the curious historical phenomenon: suddenly, at the start of the twentieth century, dogs suddenly began to matter to the colonial state. To find out why, we examine the role of dogs and the dog-tax in Southern Rhodesian by exploring the larger power struggles over the living landscape of people and animals. We examine a six decade period from the early to mid-twentieth century to delineate shifts under a changing colonial regime. We tr…
Eseh Notepad: 11Th Biennial European Society For Environmental History (Eseh) Conference Report
Joanna Bourke. Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love
In 1758, a Royal Marine was convicted of “buggery upon the body of a she-goat.” He was pardoned when his accusers realized he was an “illiterate, ignorant, stupid young fellow.” The goat was not so lucky. She was observed to have answered his amorous overtures with delight—no passive victim, she seemed to welcome them. Neither was she perceived to be as stupid as her male partner. She was executed. This vignette appears in Joanna Bourke’s Loving …
Beyond Agency: The African Peasantry, the State, and Tobacco in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900–80
This paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain…
African Studies
A City Gone to the Dogs? Power, Modernity and Canine Citizens in Post-Colonial Harare, c. 1980–2017
This article examines the ‘post-colonial’ dogs – and their humans – of an African city. It draws on archival sources, newspaper sources and oral interviews to describe how Zimbabwe dealt with its urban canine citizens over the almost 40 years following independence. The local narrative is contextualised in a comparative reading of dog histories from other urban centres around the world, but it demonstrates the idiographic idioms and shifting spec…
Reflections on Lockdown’
On 27 March 2020, South Africa officially entered a 21-day lockdown to limit the spread of the COVID-19 disease, which had first been detected in China towards the end of the previous year. There was much talk at the time about the public health and economic implications of the restrictions, which aimed to limit human contact to ‘essentials’. It was clear that the lockdown would have important short-, medium- and possibly even long-term consequen…
At the Edge of the Anthropocene: Crossing Borders in Southern African Environmental History
So here we are at the end of the world. We feel like we are living in a moment of historical crisis. Yet a pandemic is hardly novel, and societies have always faced crises. So is it really the case
Humanimalia Roundtable on Breed
Big cat acts and big men: Performing power and gender in South Africa’s circus industry, c.1888–1916
This article analyses lion-taming performances in South Africa through the acts displayed in three circuses: Frank Fillis’s, William Pagel’s and the Boswell’s, between 1888 and 1916. While lion-taming proved popular in the international arena, especially Britain, by the 1830s already, it was performed in South Africa only from the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on global literature on the symbols – both natural and cultural – integral to …
The World the Horses Made: A South African Case Study of Writing Animals into Social History
This paper explores new ways to write history that engages with the lives of animals. It offers a sample card of how social history can be enriched by focusing on history from an animal perspective - and equally, how the tools provided by social history reveals the historicity of animals. The case study is drawn from South African history and the focus is on horses. The paper firstly proposes that horses changed human history not only on the macr…
A boer and his gun and his wife are three things always together: Republican Masculinity and the 1914 Rebellion
In 1914, there was a rebellion against the young Union government by some 11,000 Afrikaans‐speaking men. This social movement has primarily been understood as an Afrikaner Nationalist phenomenon. This article focuses on the gendered identity of the rebels in order to illuminate the Rebellion in a different light. In 1912, the introduction of the Defence Act threatened the identity of Boer men who had come to have their masculinity encoded and rei…
"The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner"--Towards a Social History of Humor
Journal Article "The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner"—Towards a Social History of Humor Get access Sandra Swart Sandra Swart Stellenbosch University, History DepartmentMatieland 7602South Africa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 42, Issue 4, Summer 2009, Pages 889–917, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/42.4.889 Published: 01 July 2009
Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa
This suite of essays is a first for historical writing about southern Africa: they recover an animal's ubiquitous, yet hidden presence in human history. The authors have used the dog as a way "to think about human society". The dog is the connecting thread binding these essays, which each reveals a different part of the complex social history of southern Africa. The essays range widely from concerns over disease, bestiality, and social degradatio…
Better Breeds?’ The Colonial State, Africans and the Cattle Quality Clause in Southern Rhodesia, c.1912–1930
Colonial officials, veterinarians and animal scientists in tropical Africa managed ‘native’ livestock whose physical and behavioural characteristics, preferred food, and disease resistance were understood to be very different from the corresponding animals of their homelands. Furthermore, they were faced with unfamiliar relationships and management patterns between indigenous humans and their domestic animals. However, existing scholarship on the…
Reviving Roadkill? Animals in the New Mobilities Studies
Conceptual work on the history of mobilities has been devoid of animation other than humans and their machines. The deafening automobility of the present has drowned out memories of an “animal past” teleologically, and the raucous rapidity of the mobile machine drives over the “animal present.” This article is an attempt to explore what a history of mobility that takes animals seriously might look like. It is based on the argument that living non…
"Men of Influence"- The Ontology of Leadership in the 1914 Boer Rebellion
This paper raises questions about the ontology of the Afrikaner leadership in the 1914 Boer Rebellion - and the tendency to portray the rebel leadership in terms of monolithic Republicans, followed by those who shared their dedication to returning the state to the old Boer republics. Discussions of the Rebellion have not focused on the interaction between leadership and rank and file, which in part has been obscured by Republican mythology based …
The occult goes underground: Rumour, rituals, and the everyday entrepreneurship of women in artisanal gold mining in Mazowe, Zimbabwe, c. 2000–2021
Humanimalia Roundtable on Breed
Writing animals into African history
The Okapi/ disappears the way wind moves/ leaving no vacancy, the stilling leaves,/ coffers of light we can do nothing/ with, that we grow into the listening/ stance of a tree, and it finds us out
Falling off the Map: South Africa, Antarctica and Empire, c . 1919–59
During the first half of the twentieth century, despatches about the coldest corner of the British Empire were circulated to three, sometimes four, of its southern neighbours under the British crown: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falklands. Of these four, South Africa seemed the least interested in Antarctica, despite the keen interest of some influential individuals and a strategy of bringing Antarctica into the imperial fold thro…
Horses in the South African War, c. 1899-1902
This essay discusses the role of horses in war through the lens of their mortality in the South African War (1899-1902). This conflict was the biggest and most modern of the numerous precolonial and colonial wars that raged across the southern African subcontinent in the late nineteenth century. Aside from the human cost, the theater of war carried a heavy environmental toll, with the scorched-earth policy shattering the rural economy. The enviro…
The ‘Five Shilling Rebellion’: Rural White Male Anxiety and the 1914 Boer Rebellion
Our stomachs are still hungry’: The colonial state, African nutrition and small grains in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), c.1950 to 1970s
By the early 1950s, farms and industries in Southern Rhodesia were reportedly experiencing increasing cases of malnutrition and poor physical health among African workers. Yet, notwithstanding these alarm calls, the government as well as most mining and commercial crop sectors of tobacco, maize, and cotton, were reluctant to acknowledge the crisis – let alone take action. The colonial state and employers alike avoided the additional expense of pr…
A City Gone to the Dogs? Power, Modernity and Canine Citizens in Post-Colonial Harare, c. 1980–2017
This article examines the ‘post-colonial’ dogs – and their humans – of an African city. It draws on archival sources, newspaper sources and oral interviews to describe how Zimbabwe dealt with its urban canine citizens over the almost 40 years following independence. The local narrative is contextualised in a comparative reading of dog histories from other urban centres around the world, but it demonstrates the idiographic idioms and shifting spec…
Animals in African History
Animal history in Africa—the multi-species story of the continent’s past—as a separate subdisciplinary “turn” is both recent and tentative, but as an integrated theme within the broader historiography it is both pioneering and enduring. Historians of Africa have long engaged with animals as vectors of change in human history and, of course, at the same time, understood that humans were a key agent of change in animal histories too, especially in …
It is no use advising us! Command us and we will obey: Livestock Management, Soil Conservation and the State in Southern Rhodesia, c.1930-50
This article examines state imposed centralisation and soil conservation policies as pursued by the Southern Rhodesian Department of Native Agriculture, and argues that these were at variance with the state's own veterinary policies. It argues that in the 1930s the state failed to deal with the contradictions caused by shifting and competing agendas between the Departments of Native Affairs, Native Development, Entomology and Veterinary Services.…
High Horses' - Horses, Class and Socio-Economic Change in South Africa
This article examines an aspect of the growth of an Afrikaner bourgeoisie in the platteland through the ‘things’ they desired. It discusses the introduction of the American Saddlebred horse from the USA, to the agrarian sectors of the then Cape Province and Orange Free State. Analysis of breed discourse affords us insights into the role of status symbols, the socio-economic context of their acquisition, and the cultural impetus for their rise in …
Canis Familiaris: A Dog History of South Africa
Dogs and Dogma: A Discussion of the Socio-Political Construction of Southern African Dog 'Breeds' as a Window on Social History
Dogs have been entangled in human lives, myths, illusions, and sentiments for at least the last ten to twelve thousand years. The alliance between dogs and humans is the oldest among all the animals, and the relationship is so long that the story we think of as theirs is often our own. This chapter is an attempt to extract a measure of their story and show how and why it has merged with ours in one particular context. It is an engagement with the…
Gender and Animals in History: Yearbook of Women’s History 42 (2023)
This exploratory introductory essay has thought about a gender in humananimal or animal sensitive history.It brings into conversation environmental history, natural sciences (ornithology, primatology), feminist science studies and queer ecocriticism.It explores the ways in which our shifting understandings of animals have contoured our understandings of our own species' gender and sexuality and, vice versa, human heteronormativity and sexism have…
Shared Skin: The Slow Intimacy of Horse and Rider
This essay explores the co-constructed sensory experiences between two species over time, offering a deeper understanding both of the multi-sensory nature and different scales of inter-species intimacy. A five millennia long intimate sensory conversation between humans and horses was integral to hunting, domesticating, taming, training, sacrificing, harnessing and - eventually - riding the once-wild horses of the steppeland. Domesticating the hor…
The beast that never forgot? Baboon conservation and the role of multispecies history
History and culture were long seen as definitionally human. As other distinctive traits that once defined our species as unique disappeared, at least we still had those two. But are we really the only species shaped by our pasts and who have cultures that change over time? This article explores animal cultures, the significance of history (and individual and group memory) in the survival of social animals and the role the discipline of History ca…
Beyond Agency: The African Peasantry, the State, and Tobacco in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900–80
This paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain…
At the Edge of the Anthropocene: Crossing Borders in Southern African Environmental History
So here we are at the end of the world. We feel like we are living in a moment of historical crisis. Yet a pandemic is hardly novel, and societies have always faced crises. So is it really the case
Letter to Agenda
A boer and his gun and his wife are three things always together: Republican Masculinity and the 1914 Rebellion
In 1914, there was a rebellion against the young Union government by some 11,000 Afrikaans‐speaking men. This social movement has primarily been understood as an Afrikaner Nationalist phenomenon. This article focuses on the gendered identity of the rebels in order to illuminate the Rebellion in a different light. In 1912, the introduction of the Defence Act threatened the identity of Boer men who had come to have their masculinity encoded and rei…
Desperate Men’: The 1914 Rebellion and the Polities of Poverty
(2000). ‘Desperate Men’: The 1914 Rebellion and the Polities of Poverty. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 161-175
Mythic bushmen in Afrikaans literature: The Dwaalstories of Eugène N Marais 1
Previous debate around Eugène N Marais’ Dwaalstories [Wandering Tales] has been about their ‘ authenticity ‘ ; Marais maintained that an itinerant Bushman, whom he had met while in the Waterberg, had narrated them, and that he had then written them up as a series of prose‐poems. More interestingly for the present, the stories fill a gap in the analysis of western writing on Bushmen. They shed light on Afrikaans depictions of Bushmen, and they rev…
Canis Familiaris: A Dog History of South Africa
Dogs and Dogma: A Discussion of the Socio-Political Construction of Southern African Dog 'Breeds' as a Window on Social History
Dogs have been entangled in human lives, myths, illusions, and sentiments for at least the last ten to twelve thousand years. The alliance between dogs and humans is the oldest among all the animals, and the relationship is so long that the story we think of as theirs is often our own. This chapter is an attempt to extract a measure of their story and show how and why it has merged with ours in one particular context. It is an engagement with the…
‘Bushveld Magic’ and ‘Miracle Doctors’–an Exploration of Eugène Marais and C. Louis Leipoldt's Experiences in the Waterberg, South Africa, C . 1906–1917
This article contributes to the critique of a particular historiographical construction of the rural socio-intellectual world of the Afrikaner, which portrays that world as narrowly Calvinist and culturally circumscribed, with rigidly patrolled racial borders. This challenge is effected through an investigation into the world of the Bushveld Boer through the work of Eugène Marais (1871–1936) and Christiaan Frederick Louis Leipoldt (1880–1947). Th…
The construction of Eugène Marais as an Afrikaner hero
Eugène Marais (1871–1936) is remembered as an Afrikaner hero. There are, however, competing claims as to the meaning of this ‘heroic’ status. Some remember him as the ‘father of Afrikaans poetry’, one of the most lionised writers in Afrikaans, and part of the Afrikaner nationalist movement. Yet a second intellectual tradition remembers him as a dissident iconoclast, an Afrikaner rebel. This article seeks to show, first, how these two very differe…
"Men of Influence"- The Ontology of Leadership in the 1914 Boer Rebellion
This paper raises questions about the ontology of the Afrikaner leadership in the 1914 Boer Rebellion - and the tendency to portray the rebel leadership in terms of monolithic Republicans, followed by those who shared their dedication to returning the state to the old Boer republics. Discussions of the Rebellion have not focused on the interaction between leadership and rank and file, which in part has been obscured by Republican mythology based …
“Horses! Give Me More Horses!”: White Settler Identity, Horses, and the Making of Early Modern South Africa
In southern Africa, the smell of leather and horse sweat was the smell of conquest. From 1652, South Africa was colonized by men on horseback, creating a white colonial state and changing the face of the land itself. Although species of the genus Equus—such as the zebra and ass—had been present in Africa since earlier times, the horse (Equus caballus) is not indigenous, but was introduced into the continent. The histories of horses and white sett…
The ‘Five Shilling Rebellion’: Rural White Male Anxiety and the 1914 Boer Rebellion
“But Where's the Bloody Horse?”: Textuality and Corporeality in the “Animal Turn”
In the last decade, “animal studies” has arisen in belated parallel to other counter-hegemonic disciplines. In order to discuss this new departure of considering animals in the humanities rather than solely the natural sciences, we use the case study of the horse. We discuss what the “animal turn” might mean in disciplinary terms. We show that there is a significant move towards embracing new subject matter, and concomitant new sources, in histor…
The Mediterranean: An Environmental History
Motherhood and Otherhood’ – gendered citizenship and Afrikaner women in the South African 1914 Rebellion
(2007). ‘Motherhood and Otherhood’ – gendered citizenship and Afrikaner women in the South African 1914 Rebellion. African Historical Review: Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 41-57
Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa
This suite of essays is a first for historical writing about southern Africa: they recover an animal's ubiquitous, yet hidden presence in human history. The authors have used the dog as a way "to think about human society". The dog is the connecting thread binding these essays, which each reveals a different part of the complex social history of southern Africa. The essays range widely from concerns over disease, bestiality, and social degradatio…
Dogs and dogma: A discussion of the socio-political construction of southern african dog ‘breeds’ as a window onto social history
High Horses' - Horses, Class and Socio-Economic Change in South Africa
This article examines an aspect of the growth of an Afrikaner bourgeoisie in the platteland through the ‘things’ they desired. It discusses the introduction of the American Saddlebred horse from the USA, to the agrarian sectors of the then Cape Province and Orange Free State. Analysis of breed discourse affords us insights into the role of status symbols, the socio-economic context of their acquisition, and the cultural impetus for their rise in …
"The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner"--Towards a Social History of Humor
Journal Article "The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner"—Towards a Social History of Humor Get access Sandra Swart Sandra Swart Stellenbosch University, History DepartmentMatieland 7602South Africa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 42, Issue 4, Summer 2009, Pages 889–917, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/42.4.889 Published: 01 July 2009
Horses in the South African War, c. 1899-1902
This essay discusses the role of horses in war through the lens of their mortality in the South African War (1899-1902). This conflict was the biggest and most modern of the numerous precolonial and colonial wars that raged across the southern African subcontinent in the late nineteenth century. Aside from the human cost, the theater of war carried a heavy environmental toll, with the scorched-earth policy shattering the rural economy. The enviro…
The World the Horses Made: A South African Case Study of Writing Animals into Social History
This paper explores new ways to write history that engages with the lives of animals. It offers a sample card of how social history can be enriched by focusing on history from an animal perspective - and equally, how the tools provided by social history reveals the historicity of animals. The case study is drawn from South African history and the focus is on horses. The paper firstly proposes that horses changed human history not only on the macr…
Designing Equids in South Africa and North America
For most of human history, living muscle—both human and animal—provided much of the mobility work now associated with machines. This article extends directions tentatively explored in mobility stud
Changes to the South African Historical Journal
The coordinating editors of the South African Historical Journal (SAHJ) are pleased to announce that the changes to the structure of the journal's Editorial Board that were approved at the last Sou
“Dark Horses”: The Horse in Africa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
This chapter sheds some shafts of light onto the 'dark horses'. The horses of Africa are dark in the sense of being largely unknown, cast in the shade of global histories of the horse. In West and Central Africa, horses always had three sets of passengers: humans, tsetse fly and the trypanosomes they carried in turn. Whenever the date of their first arrival, horses came initially from across the Sahara, breaking through the tsetse barrier, penetr…
Eseh Notepad
Notepad of the European Society for Environmental History, August 2012
No less a foe than Satan himself: The Devil, Transition and Moral Panic in White South Africa, 1989-1993
There are moments in history where the imagined threat of satanism and the devil have been engendered by, and exacerbated, widespread social anxiety. This article looks at particular moments in which the ‘satanic peril’ emerged in the white South African imagination as moments of moral panic during which social boundaries were sharpened, patrolled, disputed, and renegotiated through public debate. Between 1989 and 1993, white politicians warned a…
Sociology (42 works) · Political science (40 works) · History (38 works) · History (28 works) · Law (28 works) · African history and culture studies (27 works) · Politics (24 works) · Geography (23 works) · Law (21 works) · Archaeology (19 works)