Routinising genocide: the politics and practice of vermin extermination in the Cape Province c.1889-1994

Adhikari has recently argued that genocide was a practice particular to colonial frontiers where commercial stock farmers encountered indigenous hunter-gatherers. This paper supports and extends Adhikari's analysis by broadening its anthropocentric focus to include other species. It shows that the key technologies of genocide employed in the extermination of San hunter-gatherers were subsequently incorporated into everyday Cape stock farming practice and redeployed from the late nineteenth through to the end of the twentieth century in a continual 'vermin extermination' campaign against other indigenous commercial stock 'predators'. The institutionalisation of animal genocide in Cape stock farming served to maintain white farmer solidarity and hegemony, especially in marginal environments, by both militarising the countryside and intimidating the rural proletariat through the routinised symbolical re-enactment of the original act of conquest into acquiescence to white stock farmer ownership and use of the land.