Stellenbosch University
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Stellenbosch Forum Lecture: Prof Sandra Swart
Start: 29/09/2022, 13:00
End: 29/09/2022, 14:00
Contact:Whitney Prins -
Location: MS Teams

Register: Click on the link https://forms.office.com/r/dtk73iGRpp

 

Topic: 'Zombie Zoology: the end of extinction?'

We all know about trans-frontier conservation. But what about conservation where the frontiers are between the living and the dead?

The last known quagga died on 12 August 1883. On an unseasonably damp and bitter morning, the zookeepers did their rounds at Amsterdam Zoo. They found the old mare lying dead on the cold stone floor of her enclosure. She was an unwitting refugee from a sustained slaughter and campaign of carnage against the quagga, who disappeared from their once-extensive range by the mid-nineteenth century. By 1860 both quagga (and the Cape lion) had vanished from south of the Orange River and the last relict population in the Orange Free State was wiped out in the 1870s, with the last quagga dying out in the wild by 1878.

Or did they?

Because the quagga is back! This Forum Lecture explains how it happened and what it means. It discusses how a species might become 'de-extinct'. It discusses de-extinction as part of the broader conservation movement that needs input from the humanities, especially animal-sensitive historians. Together, we will explore the changing ambitions and methods behind such Lazarus projects. We learn the long roots of this seemingly modern development. We travel from Amsterdam to Nazi Germany, Siberia and back to Stellenbosch. Fundamentally, we ask what ending extinction might mean – for us and the other animals.

 

More about the presenter

Prof Sandra Swart is the Departmental Chairperson 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 in Environmental Change and Management, also at Oxford. She has published on the social and environmental history of southern Africa, with a particular focus on the shifting relationship between humans and animals. She is an editor of the South African Historical Journal and has served as president of the Southern African Historical Society. She has supervised doctoral students from Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. She has authored and co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, co-authored two books, co-edited one book and is the sole author of Riding High – Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (Witwatersrand University Press, 2010).