Putting the Kruger National Park in its place: A social history of Africans, mobility and conservation in a modernizing South Africa, 1900-2010

This dissertation is about the social history of the Kruger National Park, the flagship of South Africa's 21 national parks. It is about the history of the park's complex web of relations with Africans in particular and black South Africans in general in the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. It argues that the park's relations with black South Africans were more extensive and complex than extant scholarship on the park suggests. The dissertation examines these complex dealings by looking in particular at how the park dealt with Africans of different classes and social backgrounds in the 20th century. That is, it disaggregates the category "Africans" to illustrate what the park in particular and conservation in general meant to Africans of varying social distinctions. The dissertation adds to our understanding of the complexity of African life under colonial government (1910-1948) and apartheid rule (1948-1994) by examining the material origins and discursive making of African travel and tourism in colonial South Africa. It examines struggles and writings by African elites—a social category ignored in academic and popular work on the Kruger National Park—about the right to travel, and the role of secular leisure in the social and political development of Africans as a "people." The dissertation connects these elite struggles to wider conflict about modernity and the place of Africans in a modernizing South Africa.;The study explores the myriad ways in which various Africans (tourists, migrant laborers, domestic servants) related to a colonial order—of which the Kruger National Park was an important part—in which official concern with nature conservation was at the same time concern with "native administration," meaning the political control of Africans. The study examines how Africans sought to recast their relationships with the land and colonial landscapes by challenging colonial depictions of them as objects of modernity. It uses the Kruger National Park as a lens through which to shed light on changes over a 110-year span in the multiple modes of accommodation, collaboration and resistance adopted by Africans in their engagement with the natural and political landscapes of colonial South Africa.;In other words, the study shows how African responses to the colonial order and its ordering of space and time were more complicated than is suggested by the conventional depiction of the colonial encounter in South Africa as a clash of temporalities in which Africans were by definition anti-modern. Africans cultivated modern relationships with their natural and political landscapes at the same time as they were undermining in instrumental and non-instrumental ways colonial portrayals of them as objects of a modernizing South Africa with only their labor and taxes to offer. This is not to say necessarily that these relationships constituted resistance to white rule. But some, such as the aesthetically-driven tradition of black tourism in colonial South Africa, were potentially subversive of the colonial order and its assumptions. Ultimately, the dissertation shows that African responses to the linkages between native administration and nature conservation effectively undermined the colonial distinctions between tradition and modernity.