Stellenbosch University
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Prof Sandra Swart makes (her own) history
Author: Engela Duvenage
Published: 24/02/2022

​​As an environmental historian working on the relationship between people and animals, Stellenbosch University’s Prof Sandra Swart has made history herself numerous times.

In 2016 she was the first woman to be appointed as a full professor in the University’s Department of History. To celebrate the occasion, five horse riders were present at her inaugural address – not something known to have happened before. She reached another milestone recently when she was appointed as the first woman to chair the SU Department of History.

Since joining the Department as a junior lecturer in 2002, Swart has seen the field of animal history develop around her worldwide. Along with her 14 past PhD graduates and six current PhD candidates and many Master’s students (many of whom hail from other African countries), she studies an historical menagerie from horses to dogs, lions and kudu hunting in the Eastern Cape. Some of her students even travelled to Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic region recently to delve into the icy region’s animal-related history.

The past two decades have not always been easy, she admits. Her chosen field of animal history was also not understood by all at first.

“When I started, people wanted me to focus on more conventional historical topics, but today animal history is regarded internationally. The discipline developed around me. I’m examining PhD theses of people from around the world, from Finland to Australia,” says Swart, who in recent times has given keynote addresses about the history of animals at notable events such as the International Congress of the World Association for the History of Veterinary Medicine and the Equine History Conference in California.

She has a very simple life hack for dealing with backlash: “Just follow your intellectual passion and ‘mik noord’ (aim north). Build that academic ‘Field of Dreams’, and they will come. My field just happens to have creatures grazing on it, quite literally.”

Studies

Swart graduated from the University of Natal (where both her parents worked as mathematicians) in 1997 with a Master’s degree (cum laude) on the Boer Rebels of 1914, exploring how masculinity, republicanism and social forces shaped the Boer Rebellion. Thereafter, she headed to Oxford University, where she graduated with a DPhil in Modern History in 2001 after having researched the role of poet, author and naturalist Eugene Marais in the shaping of the Afrikaner identity.

“I gradually became more interested in the white ants and the baboons that Eugene Marais had studied than in the man himself. I soon realised I had to do something that was related to animals,” this owner of two dogs and two horses recalls about her first steps into the field of animal history.

An MSc in Environmental Change and Management, also from Oxford, followed, which she completed concurrently with her doctorate.

Author

Author Toni Morrison once observed, “If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

That simple truth guides her in writing about the role of animals, and the environment more generally, in the history of Southern Africa. Her book, Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa was longlisted for the 2010 Alan Paton Award. She has co-authored another book on horses in the Philippines and South Africa, one on the Boer Rebellion, and co-edited another on the history of dogs in Southern Africa.

This former president of the Southern African Historical Society and current editor of the South African Historical Journal is currently working on The Lion’s Historian that takes a historic perspective on animals.

“There’s an African proverb that says that until the lion has his own historian, the story of the hunt will always be told by the hunter.”

She is also putting pen to paper, so to speak, about baboons. The species is currently in the news because of animal/human conflict. Over the years, it has also been associated with sympathetic magic, totemic identity as well as deeply hurtful racial slurs.

“It’s a difficult and painful history to reconstruct.”

Over the years, her fieldwork has taken her on horseback from Lesotho to Outer Mongolia.

“I love the archives, and they are one’s first crime scene when you are trying to solve historic ‘cold cases’. But there’s nothing like a fresh horse and a blue sky,” she smiles.

In Mongolia she was able to ride the vast grasslands to retrace the early footsteps of Genghis Khan and was bowled over by the tradition of nomadic hospitality that she experienced in the villages in the steppes. She has since fruitfully incorporated aspects of her Asian travels into her first-year course dubbed “A brief history of the last five million years”.

“I explain the big lifestyle changes that humankind has undergone. It starts with Australopithecus and culminates in Genghis Kahn, the final collapse of the nomadic way of life and the move to the cities.”

Department head

As department head, she is following in the footsteps of Dr Anton Ehlers, who retired after 36 years of valued service to SU.

“I’d like to keep the democratic culture of transparency and inclusiveness going that Anton introduced over the past six years. He was a very fine chairperson. I’d also like to Africanise the Department more, for instance by bringing in our network of departmental research associates who focus on Tanzania, Botswana, Malawi, Lesotho and Zimbabwe to broaden the scope of our subject. The pandemic has shown us that people can now lecture from anywhere.”

Swart calls herself “a happy professor” and says she has the urge to share it. During a recent trip to Estonia, she even presented a workshop entitled “How to be happy as an academic”.

One of her ways to be happy is ending most workdays at the University’s stables at Coetzenberg to ride her appaloosa mare, Aztec.

“It’s very hard to find a university that has stables and a wilderness next door in which to ride. It’s one of the reasons I stay here. There are even leopards in our mountains.