Tigers in Africa: Stalking the Past at the Cape of Good Hope (review)

Of late, historians have begun to cultivate the problematic of ‘the natural world’ and colonialism and to reinvest research and theoretical innovation into a terrain first harrowed by Alfred Crosby in 1986. ¹ The swelling concern with the non-human subjects of colonial history-though never divorced from the human communities through which they are known-has in very recent years extended to histories of animals. ² The colonial history of animals may be characterized as a history concerned with how the uneven polylogic formation of colonial realms affected the animal world and also how those realms were themselves effected through the interaction of non-humans and humans-both in a material sense and in the imagination. Tigers in Africa dwells largely in the domain of the latter; Carmel Schrire announces at the book’s outset, on the authority of the fossil record, that there are not now nor have there ever been any “real” tigers in Africa (3). This acknowledged, Schrire’s contribution to a history of animals and empire is not a trivial one; Tigers in Africa directs the reader toward the importance of the idea of the tiger in the construction of the Cape Colony’s past. To this end, Shrire demonstrates how the myth of the tiger in Africa was a colonial fiction and in doing so operationalizes the tiger (in sometimes uncomfortable ways) as the governing metaphor in her discussion of the Cape Colony’s history.

Tigers in Africa: Stalking the Past at the Cape of Good Hope is an amended version of the Third Glynn Isaac Memorial Lecture given by Schrire in January 1999 at the World Archaeological Congress 4 held at the University of Cape Town. It is, at fifty-eight pages, a lively and visually opulent journey, filled with sixty maps, sketches, and photographs, through the historical and historiographical relationship between tigers, colonialism, politics, and academia. In this space, Schrire spins a postcolonial tale (though I wonder if she would characterize it as such) that emphasizes-regardless of whether one believes the fossil record-that any modern debate about either tigers in Africa or the academic in search of the Cape Colony’s past cannot be divorced from South Africa’s colonial legacy.

Schrire trades in four types of tiger: physical tigers, with which she quickly dispenses; the tigers of myth and rumor composed by Dutch and British colonists (4–10); and two sorts of metaphorical tigers-the academic, such as archaeologist Glynn Isaac (2, 11), and figures of resistance from the Cape’s distant and more recent past (11, 30–37, 48–53). Indeed, it was debate about tigers in Africa in the 1960s among a group of this last sort of “tiger”-“political dissidents,” such as Nelson Mandela who were imprisoned at Robben Island-that first drew Schrire to the subject. And it is the metaphorical subspecies as a whole with which she is most concerned. Schrire defines metaphorical tigers as those who “descended from a long line of other fighters, leaping at new ideas, urging for what was right and roaring defiance into the prevailing gloom to light up the future with new ideas and hope” (11).

Tigers in Africa begins with an exploration of the misrepresentations of the Cape’s natural world and the invention of the tiger during the Dutch and British colonial periods. In her analysis, Schrire mobilizes primarily visual evidence-maps, artistic renderings of Cape’s coast, and also illustrations from travel literature and texts that sought to enumerate and classify. From here, Schrire moves into a discussion of the colonial and postcolonial legacies-the “scientific and social world” (12)-of Glynn Isaac’s Cape: the museums, the slave lodges, the soldiers’ barracks, the neighborhoods destroyed by apartheid, and City Hall gazed upon by a statue of King Edward the VII. These details work to set the context for the final and most substantial part of the book in which Schrire considers a number of ‘tigers...