Ways of Seeing Nonhuman Animals: Some Likened Zebras to Horses, Others to Asses

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Peter Heywood
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Plains Zebra

Abstract When Europeans first encountered zebras in South Africa, they variously referred to them as horses, asses, or mules. This type of classification continued into the nineteenth century when mountain zebras were sometimes described as “asinine” and plains zebras as “equine.” Quaggas, a subspecies of the plains zebra with reduced striping and brown coloration that were occasionally used as draft animals, were considered by some observers to be the most equine zebras. This perception seems to have influenced the image of quaggas and led some artists to incorrectly portray them with horse-like tails that they did not possess. This article examines the designations “equine” and “asinine” as applied to plains zebras (including quaggas) and mountain zebras, and connects these terms to their representation by various artists.

Humanitarianism, Human Rights and Biopolitics in the British Empire, 1890–1902

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Clark
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Personal Rights

The 1890s were a key time for debates about imperial humanitarianism and human rights in India and South Africa. This article first argues that claims of humanitarianism can be understood as biopolitics when they involved the management and disciplining of populations. This article examines the historiography that analyses British efforts to contain the Bombay plague in 1897 and the Boer War concentration camps as forms of discipline extending control over colonized subjects. Secondly, human rights language could be used to oppose biopolitical management. While scholars have criticized liberal human rights language for its universalism, this article argues that nineteenth-century liberals did not believe that rights were universal; they had to be earned. It was radical activists who drew on notions of universal rights to oppose imperial intervention and criticize the camps in India and South Africa. These activists included two groups: the Personal Rights Association and the Humanitarian League; and the individuals Josephine Butler, Sol Plaatje, Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, and Bal Gandadhar Tilak. However, these critics also debated amongst themselves how far human rights should extend.

Normal Rights, Just New: Understanding the Judicial Enforcement of Socioeconomic Rights

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fowkes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Inherent Property ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Existing Structure

Abstract A common skeptical view holds that socioeconomic rights are a different kind of right than civil-political rights. Even those who support justiciable socioeconomic rights often see them as a different kind of right with special challenges. I argue that this view is wrong. What all these observers are reacting to is not an inherent property of socioeconomic rights: it is a contingent property of a situation in which judges are asked to enforce a rights claim without a pre-existing set of familiar public understandings of the right’s content and/or an existing structure of officials and procedures to give effect to that content. It is because the rights claim is new, and this is something that can be, and often is, true of rights across the spectrum. Any rights claim is problematic to enforce to the degree that it is new, but these obstacles can and do disappear if society changes and the claim becomes less new. In the first part of the Article, I seek to establish the accuracy of this argument, drawing on examples of rights distinctions from the nineteenth-century United States and rights across the spectrum displaying newness in contemporary South Africa and India. I then show how controlling for newness can help us to understand standard features of the socioeconomic rights debate: the ubiquitous, but misleading, negative–positive distinction; arguments about resources; Fuller’s endlessly cited polycentricity argument; and current controversial cases, such as the budget-shifting judicial enforcement of Latin American healthcare entitlements. These topics are central to our widespread intuition that socioeconomic rights are different; newness can help us to see that this intuition is misleading us, and by recalibrating the debate can filter out some distractions that have long dogged it.

scholarly journals Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942098201
Author(s):  
Sarah Comyn ◽  
Porscha Fermanis
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Canons ◽  
Methodological Position

Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.

Why English dominates the central economy

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Wright
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Language Policy ◽  
South African ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
African Society ◽  
World Language ◽  
South African Society ◽  
Economic Basis ◽  
State Of Affairs

This paper sets out to formulate some of the economic reasons for the continuing dominance of English in the boardrooms, government forums, parastatals and laboratories of South Africa, to consider whether this situation is likely to change, and to assess the extent to which such a state of affairs is at odds with South Africa’s new language policy. The historical reasons for the dominance of English in this sphere are well known: the language’s imperial history, its status as a world language, its role as a medium for political opposition during the apartheid conflict, and the accumulation of capital and economic influence by English-speakers from the mid-nineteenth century onward. However, the day-to-day economic basis for the continuing dominance of English at the apex of South African society has hardly been considered.

scholarly journals Historical understanding and rethinking the foundations

2007 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jurie Le Roux
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The University ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article contributes to the fundamental rethinking of New Testament scholarship being undertaken by New Testament scholars attached to the University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria, South Africa. The thrust of the article holds that the historical Jesus research is of the utmost importance and it puts the emphasis on the individuality of an event and the contribution of nineteenth century reflection on history. As point of departure and further elaboration it accentuates the notion that history writing must be a form of homecoming.

No Will to Know: The Rise and Fall of African Civil Registration in Twentieth-Century South Africa

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Breckenridge
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Vital Statistics ◽  
African Women ◽  
Biometric Identification ◽  
Vital Registration ◽  
Civil Registration ◽  
Women And Children

Vital statistics have been politically fraught in South Africa for decades, not least because the state made very little effort to record information about the well-being of African women and children. This chapter shows that in the last years of the nineteenth century a working system of vital registration was developed in the colony of Natal and in the native reserves of the Transkei. From the beginning this delegated bureaucracy faced opposition from African patriarchs, from parsimonious white elected leaders and from the advocates of coercive systems of biometric identification. In the early 1920s, under the weight of mostly unfounded accusations of corruption, the system of registration by means of ‘native agency’ was deliberately terminated, despite the general enthusiasm of the magistrates charged with maintaining it.

People at the Gates

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flordeliz T. Bugarin
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Resources ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Eastern Cape ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Traded Goods ◽  
Economic Interaction ◽  
The Impact

During the early nineteenth century in South Africa, the British built Fort Willshire on the banks of the Keiskamma River. At its gates, they established the first official trade fairs and mandated that trade throughout the Eastern Cape be confined here. This area became a vortex in which a variety of people convened, traded goods, and influenced cultural and economic interaction. This chapter introduces the various Africans who gravitated to the region, claimed the surrounding lands throughout the river valley, and vied for economic resources and political power. By looking at the archival records, oral traditions, and archaeological evidence, research demonstrates that the region consisted of a variety of people with different backgrounds and affiliations. Furthermore, this area provides a model for understanding the impact of the British on the Xhosa, yet it is just as much a window to the interactions between various Xhosa factions and chiefdoms.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document