The Lion’s Historian

There is an African proverb: ‘Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.’ This book is an acceptance of that challenge, to write a brand new kind of history, where the author becomes the the lion’s historian. As a species, we are not alone. But for too long our history has been written as though we are. This book insists on a retelling of our more-than-human past, a retelling of a shifting series of significant inter-species relationships – from the odd and quirky connections to those that triggered major changes in history itself. Sandra Swart has scoured the archives to find both the real animal stories and the stories we have told about them for millennia. The animals in this book – elephants, hippos, okapi, lions, jackals, cows, sheep, horses, white ants, quagga, Nazi-bred Heck cattle, police dogs and baboons – are chosen strategically to highlight different facets of our shared past. With this animal-centric lens, decades of research are brought together in a stunning book that take animals seriously. To do this, Swart embraces the natural sciences (biology, ethology, conservation biology, palaeontology) and the social sciences, oral history, indigenous knowledge as well as archival history. This is a book with fangs! It tears through conventional stories to ask: if we are not alone and given our current global crises of mass extinctions, are we prepared to move beyond the convention that ‘history’ is only the story of our own species? Can we, instead, consider a more-than-human past? In our current cataclysmic biodiversity crisis, we humans need to find new ways to live with and relate to other beings. The possibility of our shared future pivots on a reckoning with our shared pasts. This ground-breaking book shows what human–animal history can do, not only to understand our place in the world better but to make our world – however slightly – a better place.

Sandra Swart is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University. She received her DPhil in Modern History from Oxford University in 2001, while simultaneously obtaining an MSc (with distinction) in Environmental Change and Management, also at Oxford. She studies the socio-environmental history of southern Africa, with a particular focus on the shifting relationship between humans and animals. She is an editor of the Brill book series African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities, an editor of the South African Historical Journal and past president of the Southern African Historical Society. Swart is the author of Riding High – Horses, Humans and History in South Africa. She lives in Stellenbosch with a large and happy herd. Two amongst them Rio, the most beautiful dog on earth, and Kodiak, the naughtiest dog in the world.

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