Segregated Species by Jules Skotnes-Brown

ISBN: 9781997461197

Publisher: Wits University Press, 1 April 2026

Paperback, 340 pages

Rural South Africa was dominated by systems of racial segregation that brutally oppressed its Black population in the early twentieth-century. Segregated Species argues that pest control was closely connected to racial segregation, demonstrating that history must be understood by looking at the treatment of both animals and humans.

Throughout the twentieth century, rural South Africa was dominated by systems of racial segregation and apartheid that brutally oppressed its Black population. At the same time, the countryside was defined by a related settler obsession: the control of animals that farmers, scientists, and state officials considered pests. Elephants rampaged on farmlands, trampling fences, crops, and occasionally humans. Grain-eating birds flocked on plantations, devouring harvests. Bubonic plague crept across the veld in the bodies of burrowing and crop-devouring rodents.

In Segregated Species, Jules Skotnes-Brown argues that racial segregation and pest control were closely connected in early twentieth-century South Africa. Strategies for the containment of pests were redeployed for the management of humans and vice versa. Settlers blamed racialised populations for the abundance of pests and mobilised metaphors of pestilence to dehumanise them. Even knowledge produced about pests was segregated into the binary categories of ‘native’ and ‘scientific.’ Black South Africans critiqued such injustices, and some circulated revolutionary rhetoric through images and metaphors of locusts.