Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park by Jacob S. T. Dlamini

Abstract

Reviewed by: Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park by Jacob S. T. Dlamini Stefan Norgaard Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park. Jacob S. T. Dlamini. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2020. Pp. ix+330, color illustrations, endnotes. $80.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8214-2408-7. $29.56, paperback, ISBN 978-0-8214-2408-7. Kruger National Park (KNP) is the crown jewel of South Africa's national parks system and one of the largest national parks by area in the [End Page 84] world. KNP, Jacob S. T. Dlamini convincingly argues, is also a space that enlivens the contradictions and hidden stories of South African history, from colonialism to the present day. A key theme of Safari Nation is one that is echoed in other works by Dlamini, including Native Nostalgia and The Terrorist Album: for Black subjects, colonial and apartheid South Africa was "an arena of negotiation" (98), hardly fixed by the dualisms and neat categories as imposed by white rulers. In Safari Nation Dlamini traces the cracks in these supposed fixities: he follows the experiences, for example, of elite Black travelers and those granted "exemptions" to move freely in the colonial era; well-off subjects of former South African Bantustans who were able to visit KNP as if citizens of other countries; local-community neighbors still involved in disputes with the park into the twenty-first century; and multiracial groups of schoolchildren at the end of apartheid who visited the park together from urban cities. Tactics of accommodation and resistance help show how there is no one history of KNP, nor one Black experience of twentieth-century South Africa. Dlamini provided an engaging social history of KNP centering these many Black experiences. Scholars writing on South African Black livelihoods, he argues, too often foreground a narrative frame of dispossession. Dlamini does not shy away from discussing dispossession: he traces the story of Swazi chief Lugedlana Ngomane and the forced relocation of the Ngomane peoples, first in 1902 to accommodate reserve animals, and again in 1954 for a railway line to Mozambique. Yet in Safari Nation Dlamini transcends one-dimensional discussions of displacement, writing: "Scholars' focus on these narratives has blinded us to dimensions of the black experience of protected areas defined not by dispossession but by possession, not by hostility but by ambivalence—if not appropriation" (16). Accordingly, we might situate Safari Nation alongside other critical South African histories: Rueedi's (2021) work on the Vaal uprising, Phillips's (2018) articles on social class formation in Lebowa, and Nieftagodien's (2014) work reframing the Soweto uprising. Dlamini's discussion of Black presence in KNP reveals an extensive history of Black South Africans (and Mozambiquans) with many overlapping and conflicting relations to the park. KNP, after all, was fixed and bounded as a "state within a state" (21) but in practice has long functioned as a fluid zone of movement across regions and among peoples. This history engages those indigenous to the area, those traveling [End Page 85] great lengths and with great personal risk to visit the park, and those employed as domestic servants with the park, and as rangers tasked with overseeing it. The book is not structured chronologically but rather thematically, engaging poaching, migrant labor, and Black tourism (part I, chapters 1–4), and Black mobility, local-community engagements, and struggles and contestations with the park across history (part II, chapters 5–8). Dlamini also lays bare the "incoherence" of colonial and apartheid rule, with overlapping bureaucracies like the National Parks Board, the Native Affairs Department, and the Witwatersrand Native Labor Association (Wanela), each with distinct motivations and incentives toward KNP. Dlamini's engagement with former South African Bantustans and in particular the Gazankulu Bantustan abutting KNP is a strong point of the book. Dlamini combines an accessible overall framing of the homelands system with in-depth research that sheds new light on tourism, development, and ecological management as interests for Bantustans' governments. One of these former Bantustan leaders, Hudson Ntsanwisi of Gazankulu, was a conservationist thinking critically about political ecology and stewardship between KNP and Bantustans, and their overlapping ecological systems. Much as Dlamini explores how Bantustans...