Claudia speaks with historian Sandra Swart about the importance of recognising animals’ cultural histories. They discuss the maturation of animal history as a field and focus on the cultural histories of baboons and elephants in South Africa.
Topics covered:
- Working definition of animal culture
- Fuffification and disnification of wildlife
- The deep and urban history of baboons
- A lone elephant in the Knysna Forest
- ‘Rogue’ elephants in the Pilanesberg
- Animal Highlight: Elephant history in Kingston, Ontario
Sandra Swart is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is Director of the African Anthropocenes Research Centre, Guest Professor of Anthropocene History at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and co-Vice President of European Society for Environmental History. She received her DPhil in Modern History from in 2001, and simultaneously an MSc in Environmental Change and Management, both at Oxford University. She studies the more-than-human history of southern Africa. She is an editor of the Brill book series African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities. She is the co-author with Greg Bankoff, of , Breeds of Empire: The ‘invention’ of the horse in the Philippines and Southern Africa, 1500-1950 (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press 2007); co-editor, with Lance van Sittert, of Canis Africanis: a dog history of southern Africa (Brill, 2008), co-editor of Gender and Animals in History (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), and co-editor with Emily O’Gorman, Mark Carey and William San Martín, The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History (Routledge, 2023). She is sole author of Riding High – Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2010) Her most recent book is The Lion’s Historian – Africa’s Animal Past (Ohio University Press, 2025), winner of the Southern African Historical Prize 2025. Learn more.
Date Recorded: 20 May 2026
Featured:
- The Lion’s Historian by Sandra Swart
- Riding High: Horses, Humans, and History in South Africa by Sandra Swart
- The Dreaded Comparison by Majorie Spiegel
- Cooperative Hunting: How Eels and Grouper Partner on Prey
- Animal rights/human rights: Entanglements of oppression and liberation by David Nibert
- Lions of Gir
- Stones Walking Tour: Colonial Elephant
Other Episodes of The Animal Turn Mentioned:
- S2E3: Animal Culture with Carl Safina
- S6E8: Re-Animalization with Krithika Srinivasan
Quotes:
“Until the lion has the opportunity to tell the story of the hunt it will aways be a story of the hunter” (West African Proverb).
“I would be proud to call myself ‘the lion’s historian.’ I hope I have many years ahead exploring social and environmental history in a way that takes the other animals seriously. But let us not concede that we historians are more like baboons than lions. Of course, I mean this in the nicest possible way. A good historian is baboonesque – a trickster figure, adept at shapeshifting and boundary-crossing, unconstrained and omnivorous in our intellectual pleasures. We diligently and delicately pick the lice from the archival armpit. We are not afraid to grasp the nettle or to pluck the prickly pear of public polemic. We are strangers on the rocks, the watchers on the krantzes, the sentinels on the wall. We see and remember” (Swart, The Lion’s Historian, 2023, 294).
“We need to write histories taking a broader view beyond that of the hunter. We need accounts that connect deep history to the present moment. We need stories in which gender and generational context are not forgotten. These new histories will allow us to understand our own past as more complete in a multi-species and more-than-human context. But I would go much further and suggest that the other animals have their own histories too, both entangled in and independent of our human histories. Our understanding that animals have their own ‘cultures’, their ‘having history’ becomes irrefutable. What, after all, is history if not cultures changing over time?” (Swart, The Lion’s Historian, 2023, 83).
The Animal Turn is part of the iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, LinkedIn,Blue Sky, and Instagram
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo. Thank you Rebecca Shen, Christiaan Menz, Herre de Bondt, and Carlo Salzani for back of house and content support. This episode was edited and produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.
A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
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