Right now, I am in Namibia to continue preliminary fieldwork in preparation for next year, when I will undertake a longer stretch of fieldwork to write an multispecies environmental history of the mining town of Tsumeb. During this time I am visiting two archives: the National Archives of Namibia (NAN) in Windhoek, the Sam Cohen Library in Swakopmund. Among other things, I will look for the so-called ‘animal trace’ and try to foreground the hidden lives of the non-human creatures whose labor and presence have shaped the town. The animal trace refers to any material, archival, or observational evidence of animals’ interactions with the human and industrial world, marks, records, or remnants that reveal their often-overlooked role. In this blogpost, I would like to share some insights from this type of methodology, applied to a particular important travelogue called Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (1853) written by Sir Francis Galton.

Long before industrial smelters existed, the landscape of Tsumeb was already threaded into  histories of mining and exchange. The Hai//om people who lived in the region mined copper and participated in regional trade networks with the Ovambo people of the north.^[1] Yet histories of Western involvement have their narrative starting point at a particular journey. In the early 1850s, the British explorer Sir Francis Galton teamed up with Swedish naturalist Charles Andersson to set out from Walvis Bay, travelling northward through Damaraland into Ovamboland, passing through the region that would later become home to the mining town of Tsumeb. Professor Hans Schneiderhöhn, who worked as a geologist for the Otavi Mining and Railway Company (OMEG) between 1914 and 1919 wrote in a history on the area: 

“Around the middle of the last century, the first white people arrived near the Otavi Mountains, the first among them being the renowned English explorer Sir Francis Galton. Later, they were mostly hunters, attracted by the fabulous abundance of game, especially the large herds of elephants, which at that time roamed the mountains far and wide, especially during the dry season.” (p. 228-229, Schneiderhöhn, 1920)

Fittingly, there is already an obvious ‘animal trace’ in Schneiderhöhn’s description of the arrival of white settlers, hinting at the ways non-human presences are entwined with human histories in the region. As the historian Alfred Crosby once observed, European colonists did not arrive in the ‘new worlds’ alone. They came as part of a “grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-replicating and world-altering avalanche.”^[2] Crosby’s statement resonates with my experience of applying the methodology to Galton’s book. As I was looking for an animal trace, hoping to find a fleeting mention here and there, I discovered a world in which animals had an inescapable presence, actively shaping the course of his two-year journey through what is now Namibia. Almost every page is filled with animals, ranging from domestic animals such as dogs, horses, mules, and oxen to wild animals such as lions, zebras, and rhinoceroses.

Galton admitted openly: his expedition was dependent on animal labour^[3]. Oxen pulled the wagons carrying heavy equipment, horses and mules carried people and packs, and dogs tracked prey and guarded livestock against human and non-human raiders. Without this animal labour, there would have been no expedition at all. Decisions about where to travel, when to stop, and when to turn back were dictated by the exhaustion of the animals, the availability of food and water for them, and in some instances their willingness to perform the labour (there is no way to get an ox to move if he simply does not want to). The need for animal labour actively shaped its course from the outset. Galton, for instance, abandoned his plans to travel to Mozambique, reasoning that the terrain would be too difficult for animals to cross. A more feasible route had to be selected, one that enabled the transport of the necessary scientific equipment for the intended studies, a decision that ultimately determined the journey through Damaraland. The need for animal labour also determined the moment of return: while in Ovamboland, Galton was completely dependent on cattle that were starving and exhausted and abandoned any side-excursions to have a chance to make it back home.^[4] In one passage, a Herero chief employed by Galton, even likened the loss of an oxen to a leg being cut off.^[5]

Most of these living creatures were rarely valued intrinsically and rarely for their companionship. Their worth lay entirely in their capacity to work. When they collapsed, Galton repurposed them as meat, as hides, and even soap. Some animals had no value as living beings at all, and were simply resources to be consumed or commodities to be exchanged for favours. Accordingly, Galton distinguished in his book between different kinds of the same species as  ‘slaughter-oxen’, ‘ride-oxen’  and ‘pack-oxen’ putting emphasis on the idea that their sole identity was defined by their usefulness to his expedition. 

“A sheep therefore feeds ten people for one day. An average ox is equivalent to seven sheep, and it therefore feeds seventy people for one day.” (p. 80, Galton, 1853)

Control over animals was brutally enforced. Oxen were bound by yokes and nose-piercing sticks, while horses and mules were driven on with spurs, bridles, and whips, most notoriously the sjambok, made from the hide of a rhinoceros. Punishment was routine whenever an animal failed to meet human expectations. Galton even described how his dogs, when they strayed from their assigned tasks, were subjected to harsh discipline. In one incident in Damaraland, a dog that damaged a saddlebag was lashed with a sjambok. On another occasion, Galton described how, in need of a water vessel, he seemingly impulsively killed a dog that had hampered his hunting efforts. 

“I could not think what to use as a water vessel, when my eye fell upon a useless cur of ours, that never watched, and only frightened game by running after them, and whose death I had long had in view.” (p. 74, Galton, 1853)

Yet animals resisted. Despite Galton’s sustained efforts to instrumentalise animals for labour and materials, they persistently fought complete human control. His account is filled with stories of animals straying, refusing, fighting back, or even endangering their human masters. Horses and mules would bolt for miles and forced days of retrieval. Mules in particular earned Galton’s frustration for their constant attempts to escape and deliberate and painful kicks. Oxen, meanwhile, would refuse to move ahead of their fellows despite whips and spurs, or would rub off their packs against every tree they could find. 

“The mules were troublesome creatures, requiring too much watching; they constantly tried to run away, and when off, their pace was so good that the men had runs of many hours before they could overtake and bring them back.” (p. 58, Galton, 1853).

Breaking-in these oxen was a violent ritual of domination that Galton described as “infinite labour,” during which oxen fought back so ferociously that bones were broken and men were chased. Though Galton never framed such behaviour as agency, dismissing it instead as obstinacy or disobedience, these actions complicate his narrative of animals as passive tools. Namely, they show how they asserted their own needs and discomforts within the expedition. Resistance was not limited to domesticated animals: wild creatures, too, acted as agents of violence. Hornets, scorpions, and spiders threatened health, while lions, rhinoceroses, and hyenas attacked men and livestock, sometimes fatally. Even here, Galton’s descriptions betray a kind of rivalry among equals. 

Throughout Galton’s account it is clear that the human-animal boundary is blurry and shaped by power. It is relevant to examine the way in which certain human beings were ‘animalized’. Countless times Galton likened people to animals, collapsing distinctions between human and non-human species in ways that reinforced a hierarchy where “animality” was a state to overcome. When arriving at Walfisch Bay and encountering Nama people, he called them “dirty,” “squalid,” and behaving “like baboons.” Of the Damara/ǂNūkhoen, whom he referred to by the derogatory name ‘Ghou Damup,’ he wrote that they “trace their descent from the monkey-tribe” and “live like jackdaws.” Traits such as nakedness, violence, lack of impulse control, stupidity, and untrustworthiness were consistently emphasized. At the same time, Galton occasionally ‘humanized’ animals, attributing them with intellect, individuality, or emotion. Oxen such as ‘Ceylon,’ ‘Timmerman,’ and ‘Sweetland’ were given names and even admired for their capacity to “think” and for their ability to form meaningful social bonds. Dogs like ‘Dinah’ and ‘Wolf’ were not only named but, in Dinah’s case, explicitly loved.

In one telling moment, Galton compared Dinah’s proto-mathematical “counting” of her puppies to the supposed intellectual failings of a Damara man, ridiculing him while elevating her. In these moments, the human-animal boundary was shown to be not biological but moral: animals could be granted affection and respect, while certain humans were denied it. This logic extended to Galton’s defense of slavery, which he rationalized in terms similar to the restrictions he placed on animals, namely as a way of protecting them against their own evils and the evils of others. As he put it, “these savages court slavery,” casting freedom not as a universal right but a conditional privilege granted only to those deemed capable of it.

“Once, while I watched a Damara floundering hopelessly in a calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah, my spaniel, equally embarrassed on the other. She was overlooking half a dozen of her new-born puppies, which had been removed two or three times from her, and her anxiety was excessive, as she tried to find out if they were all present, or if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and running her eyes over them backwards and forwards, but could not satisfy herself. She evidently had a vague notion of counting, but the figure was too large for her brain. Taking the two as they stood, dog and Damara, the comparison reflected no great honour on the man.” (p.82, Galton, 1953)

It is all too easy, and necessary, to expose Galton as a moral hypocrite.^[6] He was frustrated by Damara men’s refusal to beat their wives into harder labour, yet considered himself too “gallant” to allow women to be beaten by anyone besides their own husband.^[7] He expressed horror at the supposed “savage exultation of man, woman, and child at the thoughts bloodshed”, even as he wielded the sjambok to violently hurt people when they did not obey his command, and as he marveled at the scene of a suffering and bleeding rhinoceros regretting that he did not have a pencil as it was “quite the study of an artist”^[9]. When he encountered a starving and wounded woman with two burned-off feet, he gave her some food, but decided to leave her to die as she crawled after him^[10]. He mocked Damara people on their limited language on “cardinal virtues”, yet it is hard to see what is exactly temperate and courageous about shooting whatever creature passing by from behind a screen of rocks or a hole dug in the ground^[11]. Most ironic of all, he stated that Damara people lack “a perceptible notion of right and wrong”.

Nevertheless, studying Galton’s work still has merit. Not in any way to rehabilitate his scientific reputation, but to examine a specific point in time in which a British explorer produced a text that became in many ways the sole European representation of Damaraland and Obampoland in the nineteenth century. His writing described the region’s geology, plants, people and, of course, its animals. The question remains to what extent animal lives can ever be truly understood. Many scholars have noted the difficulties inherent to the historical project of studying animals, as the available sources are inevitably authored by humans^[12]. In other words, these scholars argue that it can only be the historical representation of animals that can be studied. I would like to restate that, given that written and spoken language is by nature a form of representation, this issue is intrinsic to the historical project itself. Even so, Galton’s travelogue made clear that animals played an indispensable role in the expedition, in which they were exploited, certainly, but never entirely stripped from agency.

In sum, the reader of today learns a little, but certainly not nothing, about animal lives and a great deal about systems of power. Galton’s narrative demonstrated how the category of ‘animal’ was not fixed but strategically mobilized to justify domination over other creatures. The boundary between human and animal was thus not stable, but manipulated to uphold a colonial logic of hierarchy and control.

This is also why, in my preliminary fieldwork in Tsumeb, I will look for the animal trace: to recover how animals were active beings that shaped and were shaped by the region’s history. In my future work, this will extend to the way in which animals were related to industrial mining. Social history was about giving voice to those who had been written out of official narratives: workers, women and communities at the margins. While of course that is an ongoing project, it is now the turn for animals. Their lives, too, were entangled with systems of labour, discipline, and colonial power, and their traces in the archives give historians plenty to work with to tell their story.