shopping_cart
Ohio University Press · Swallow Press · www.ohioswallow.com

Safari Nation
A Social History of the Kruger National Park

By Jacob S. T. Dlamini

Winner of the American Historical Association's 2021 Martin A. Klein Prize in African History

“In Safari Nation, the Kruger Park and South African ideas of nature and nationality are revealed in profoundly new and insightful ways. Jacob Dlamini captures South African experiences of nature and leisure that have largely escaped the historical profession, focusing his sharp eye on the significant minority of black South Africans who managed to live ’with—as opposed to under—colonialism and apartheid.’ An enjoyable book, full of surprises.”

Saul Dubow, author of South Africa's Struggle for Human Rights

“An innovative work of intellectual, political, and social history, Safari Nation advances a compelling new explanation for why the ANC government has chosen not to dismantle colonial-era conservation projects whose origins lie in the dispossession of countless black families. Dlamini’s skillful storytelling throughout the book manages to balance compassion and concern for justice with careful empirical detail in a direct, graceful prose that makes Safari Nation an enjoyable read from start to finish.”

Heidi Gengenbach, author of Binding Memories: Women as Makers and Tellers of History in Magude, Mozambique

Safari Nation is a highly original treatment of the history of Kruger National Park from a black perspective. Dlamini does not pursue a polarized interpretation of the park and conservation as simply white/colonial constructs but instead develops a growing literature that presents African people as engaged in many different facets of park history, as agents, and conservationists.”

William Beinart, author of Rise of Conservation in South Africa

“This book is about nature and black South Africans, but not as daughters and sons of the soil. Rather, Jacob Dlamini describes people on the move towards Kruger National Park, a place where conservation meant racial exclusion. On their way, they made a space of belonging through political effort, not nativism. Following its own eclectic route through rural reserves, cities, and mines, from Table Mountain to the lowveld, Safari Nation offers a bold argument that by making claim on the more-than-human world, black South Africans created an inclusive nation.”

Nancy Jacobs, author of Birders of Africa: History of a Network

Safari Nation opens new lines of inquiry in the study of national parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park is South Africa’s most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich flora and fauna. According to author  Jacob Dlamini, there is another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars and popular writers alike in which blacks (meaning Africans, Coloureds, and Indians) occupy center stage. Safari Nation details the ways  in which black people  devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century—engagement that transcends the stock (black) figure of the laborer and the poacher.

By exploring the complex and dynamic ways in which blacks of varying class, racial, religious, and social backgrounds related to the Kruger National Park,  and with the help of previously unseen archival photographs, Dlamini’s narrative also sheds new light on how and why Africa’s national parks—often derided by scholars as colonial impositions—survived the end of white rule on the continent. Relying on oral histories, photographs, and archival research, Safari Nation engages both with African historiography and with ongoing debates about the “land question,” democracy, and citizenship in South Africa.

Jacob S. T. Dlamini is assistant professor of history at Princeton University and is a qualified field guide. He is the author of  Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle  and  Native Nostalgia.   More info →

Featured

Review in the American Historical Review 126, no. 3 (September 2021)

Download

Order a print copy

Paperback · $29.56 ·
Add to Cart

Retail price: $36.95 · Save 20% ($29.56)

Hardcover · $64 ·
Add to Cart

Retail price: $80.00 · Save 20% ($64)

Buy from a local bookstore

IndieBound

US and Canada only

Buy an eBook

Amazon Kindle Store Barnes & Noble NOOK Google Play iBooks Store

Availability and price vary according to vendor.

Cover of Safari Nation

Share    Facebook icon  Email icon

Requests

To request instructor exam/desk copies, email Jeff Kallet at kallet@ohio.edu.

To request media review copies, email Laura Andre at andrel@ohio.edu.

Permission to reprint
Permission to photocopy or include in a course pack via Copyright Clearance Center

Links

Documents

Formats

Paperback
978-0-8214-2409-4
Retail price: $36.95, S.
Release date: April 2020
70 illus. · 350 pages · 6 × 9 in.
Rights: World except SADC

Hardcover
978-0-8214-2408-7
Retail price: $80.00, S.
Release date: April 2020
70 illus. · 350 pages · 6 × 9 in.
Rights:  World

Electronic
978-0-8214-4088-9
Release date: April 2020
70 illus. · 350 pages
Rights: World except SADC

Additional Praise for Safari Nation

Safari Nation is more than a social history of KNP. It is a history of black South Africans opposed to injustice engaging with the land, leisure, what it means to be South African, and ‘ways of being’ under colonialism, apartheid, and a still unequal nation…. Indeed, Dlamini’s history of Kruger National Park makes a bold and hopeful statement about conservation and the land question in South Africa.”

Jill E. Kelly, American Historical Review

Related Titles

Cover of 'Black Poachers, White Hunters'

Black Poachers, White Hunters
A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya
By Edward I. Steinhart

Black Poachers, White Hunters traces the history of hunting in Kenya in the colonial era, describing the British attempt to impose the practices and values of nineteenth-century European aristocratic hunts followed, ultimately, by claims over African wildlife by conservationists.

African History · History · Social History · Race and Ethnicity · Kenya · Eastern Africa · Africa · African Studies

Cover of 'Imagining Serengeti'

Imagining Serengeti
A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present
By Jan Bender Shetler

Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists.

African History · African Studies · History | Historical Geography · Eastern Africa · Tanzania

Cover of 'Highland Sanctuary'

Highland Sanctuary
Environmental History in Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains
By Christopher A. Conte

Highland Sanctuary unravels the complex interactions among agriculture, herding, forestry, the colonial state, and the landscape itself. Conte’s study illuminates the debate over conservation, arguing that contingency and chance, the stuff of human history, have shaped forests in ways that rival the power of nature.

History | Historical Geography · African History · Environmental Policy · Tanzania · African Studies

Cover of 'The Game of Conservation'

The Game of Conservation
International Treaties to Protect the World’s Migratory Animals
By Mark Cioc

The Game of Conservation is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable examination of nature protection around the world.Twentieth-century nature conservation treaties often originated as attempts to regulate the pace of killing rather than as attempts to protect animal habitat.

History | Historical Geography · African Studies · History · Environmental Policy