Apartheid’s wolves: political animals and animal politics

Abstract

This paper explores the particular complexity of thinking about nature and animals in post-liberation South Africa through focusing on one group of animals, the wolves housed in the Tsitsikamma Wolf Sanctuary. Wolves are not indigenous to South Africa and the presence of the sanctuary raises questions about the place of alien species in the symbolic configuration of the emerging South African nation. Although the Wolf Sanctuary is anomalous in the wider discourse of environmental management in South Africa, the wolves provide an interesting focus for thinking about the production of nature both within the South African nation and within contemporary global culture. These South African wolves are very clearly products of history, imported from North America to satisfy a particular political purpose – the breeding of wolf-dogs for use by the South African military and police during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions transcripts of Hearings on Chemical and Biological Warfare, two self-published border war memoirs, and newspaper reports, this paper investigates how wildness was configured under apartheid particularly in the crucible of the border war. Finally, the paper discusses how as material animals the wolves leave their own traces on the actual and conceptual landscape surrounding wild predators and their place in South Africa.