The Lion's Historian: Africa's Animal Past

“Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Sandra Swart takes up the challenge of that African proverb and, with this book, becomes the lion’s historian. As a species, humans are not alone; but our history has been written as though we were. Swart insists on a multispecies retelling of our more-than-human past as she reconstructs a shifting series of significant interspecies relationships, from quirky, idiosyncratic connections to others that triggered major changes. Embracing a radical interdisciplinarity informed by a background in history and environmental studies, Swart combines the natural sciences with the social sciences, oral history, indigenous knowledge, and archival research. She blends current thinking about animal sentience, agency, cognition, and emotion to offer a new way to understand animals’ roles in our shared history. The animals in this book—baboons, cows, elephants, hippos, horses, jackals, lions, Nazi cattle, okapi, police dogs, quagga, sheep, and white ants—exemplify different facets of our shared past. With this animal-centric lens, decades of research come together in a collection that takes animals seriously. It is a book with claws and fangs, tearing through conventional narratives to ask, Are we prepared to move beyond the convention that “history” is the story of only our own species?