Wildness and Domesticity: the Addo Elephant National Park in early 20th century South Africa

This blog accompanies Jules Skotnes-Brown’s Historical Journal article
Domestication, Degeneration, and the Establishment of the Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa, 1910s–1930s

African elephants are perhaps the most charismatic of all African mammals. They have come to represent ‘untouched’ and ‘timeless’ wilderness, and rallied supporters to the cause of conservation in millions. Although their Asian cousins have long laboured in forestry and warfare, one would be hard pressed to find someone who thinks of the African elephant as an ‘innately domesticable’ animal. Yet for many British hunters, colonial bureaucrats and zoologists from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth-centuries, the wildness of African elephants was a marker of shame. Hannibal of Carthage had domesticated these elephants in antiquity, and, with the decline of the Carthaginians and Romans, it was alleged that the African elephant, too, had ‘degenerated’ to its original wild state.

For many British imperialists, elephant domestication posed a solution to numerous animal-labour problems. African elephants were immune to the trypanosomiasis-spreading tsetse-fly and impervious to crocodiles and lions. If domesticated, elephants could be farmed for ivory, and their looming extinction would cease to be a concern. By the late nineteenth century, Belgian despot King Leopold had already initiated a domestication project in the Congo. Here, drawing upon the expertise of Indian elephant-trainers (mahouts), Commandant Laplume taught indigenous Zande peoples to capture, ride and direct African elephants for labour.

In this context, my article explores the debates about elephant-management that arose in early twentieth-century South Africa, showing how concepts of domestication and degeneration – which we typically associate with human spaces – shaped the creation of a ‘natural’ place, the Addo Elephant National Park. In the 1910s, farmers in the Addo region were battling to contend with about 100 ‘Addo Elephants’, who feasted upon crops, wallowed in dams, destroyed infrastructure, and occasionally killed humans. These farmers complained bitterly to local bureaucrats, indicting the elephants as ‘vermin’ to be exterminated. Bureaucrats were hesitant to take such action: zoologists had warned that they were the last survivors of a distinct ‘race’ of elephants.

Yet their characterisation as a unique ‘race’ also played into the hands of their enemies. The Addo Elephants were denounced as a ‘degenerate family’ of ‘rogues’ who delighted in thievery and murder. Domestication – a process thought to be key to the racial evolution of humans and animals – was proposed as a solution. By putting the Addo Elephants to work on the very farms they were ‘raiding’, the Cape Province would be able to ‘civilize’ the beasts.

Despite much support, this proposal never materialised. Instead, the Cape Provincial Government hired hunter PJ Pretorius to ‘exterminate’ the elephants in 1919. Only sixteen survived his campaign of carnage. These traumatised beasts were subsequently protected in a space more commonly associated with elephants: a national park. Shortly after its creation in 1931, publicists depicted the park as a tourist spectacle showcasing the prehistoric: a primordial space in which the elephants had evolved into a sub-species over millennia.

However, the establishment of the park did not mean that the elephants were left in a state of wildness. The animals were terrified and hid from tourist visitors. Attempts were made to tame them by offering them oranges and pumpkins produced on the farms they had once raided. By 1934, the former ‘rogues’ had become a tame ‘treat for tourists’ who were simultaneously an exhibition of the deep past and ‘the papered pets of the Parks Board’.

The story of the Addo Elephants is fascinating because it invites us to rethink some central tenants of the national parks movement. Environmental historians have long argued that national parks are not ‘untouched’ spaces, but constructed visions of wildness, forcibly separated from domesticity and culture. This case presents an alternative: wildness and domesticity were not inevitably opposed to one another, but rather coexisted, in the Addo Elephant National Park.

Read the full article for free here

 


Main image credit: Elephant training in the Belgian Congo

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