Enacting and stabilising the nature of colonial history through hunting in the South African Highveld

Abstract

Before apartheid, Afrikaner nationalist ideologues composed a nationalist 'nature'. South Africa's political ordering was, thus, naturalised through nationalist 'natures' where settlers could perform their dominance over natives and their belonging in their fledgling nations. Post apartheid, Njabulo Ndebele (1999) saw game lodges as offering white South Africans a taste of colonial power and belonging, but having the opposite effect on black South Africans. For Ndebele, recomposing 'natural' spaces is fundamental to how South Africans come to belong (or not) in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing from interview and ethnographic data, I show that contemporary biltong hunting 'nature' is an assemblage of humans and non-humans composed around a concern with how Afrikaner nationalist masculinities might belong (or not) in a post-apartheid context. I argue hunting 'nature' is a commodity that, anchors a past nationalist masculine hierarchy in a reciprocal relationship to game on privately owned land and collapses belonging into ownership.