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Sandra Swart appears at the Franschhoek Literary Festival on Sunday 19 May at 13:00, speaking to Don Pinnock and Adam Welz (The End of Eden) about the animal–human relationships that have profoundly shaped our history. How can we better share our landscapes with wild species – and recover or arrive at a deeper understanding of our place in the world?
Click here for the full FLF programme.
Read a review of The End of Eden here.
"Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter," goes the proverb. 'The Lion's Historian: Africa's Animal Past' takes up the challenge: to write a new kind of history. Sandra Swart, professor and chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, tells of a shifting series of significant inter-species relationships – from the odd quirky connections to those that triggered major changes in history itself. The animals in the book – elephants, hippos, okapi, lions, jackals, cows, sheep, horses, white ants, quagga, Nazi cattle, police dogs, and baboons – highlight different facets of our shared past. In this edited excerpt from 'The Lion's Historian', Swart writes about the apartheid regime's dogs.
BOOK: The Lion's Historian: Africa's Animal Past by Sandra Swart (Jacana)
We have a complicated relationship with dogs in South Africa. Who can forget that in 2012, on a tour of his rural dominions, South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, while dispensing his annual Christmas gifts and wisdom, warned his people that loving a dog was merely mimicking white people? It showed that one suffered from a "lack of humanity”, especially if one walked one’s dogs or took them to a vet. Indeed, love of dogs meant a rejection of African tradition and values.
Zuma’s spokesperson explained that he had been referring to "a well-known example of people who sit with their dogs in front in a van or truck with a worker at the back in pouring rain or extremely cold weather. Others do not hesitate to rush their dogs to veterinary surgeons for medical care when they are sick while they ignore workers or relatives who are also sick in the same household." President Zuma’s speech, he said, had been aimed at decolonising the African mind. But perhaps there was some truth in it: something does linger in the South African mind about dogs. Our national psyche is troubled.
But no canine spectre haunts the public’s imagination as much as the snarling German shepherd straining at the end of the Apartheid policeman’s leash.
There is a deep ambivalence about dogs in South Africa. We need to delve into our history to comprehend why that is so. There is a strangeness in the relationship between dogs and humans, and between humans and humans on the matter of dogs. Police dogs were creatures poised between citizenry and state, between technology and sentience, between agency and training – and, as you will see, between good and evil, and always between nose and teeth. To understand what happened, we need to go back a hundred years or more.
The South African Police was established just after South Africa became united and independent of Britain. When the Union was established in 1910, each of the four provinces had its own police force, but the promulgation of the Police Act of 1912 brought a newly united police force into being on 1 April 1913. One of its very first initiatives was a great experiment: the use of dogs in detective work. But these dogs could not have been more different from today’s stereotypical South African police dog that we have come to know.
It is important to understand how bold and experimental this new idea was. Integrating dogs into policing was a radical step. Some tentative trials had been conducted in Belgium and Germany – dogs had been deployed defensively as guard dogs on night service and tracking dogs had been deployed in following cold trails. In Paris, police dogs of a "peculiarly savage disposition" guarded against the "skulking, murderous" criminal underclass.
Early police-dog use in Germany originated in towns for night patrols, as a lone officer might be vulnerable to assault. There is some evidence that dogs were used formally for the first time in southern Africa at the tail end of the nineteenth century by military units in German-occupied parts of Africa, and authorities certainly used Dobermans in police work in neighbouring South West Africa.
Cornelius Kuyper was an immigrant from Holland who moved to South Africa in 1897. Possibly apocryphal legend has it that his idea was born in 1907 when his daughter was witness to a murder. During the investigation, the Kuypers saw the possibility of using dogs in solving such crimes. They pressed the police to try out the way dogs were being used in Germany to track suspects. Kuyper convinced the Commissioner of the Transvaal Police, Colonel Theodorus Truter, to use dogs in investigating crime. Kuyper was appointed dog master, and in the winter of 1911, three Doberman pinschers (Maxim, Bosco and Pitty) were imported from the Netherlands. Kuyper was given a year to prove himself and his dogs.
By the time the brand-new police dog programme was introduced in 1912, there were just thirteen dogs – five adults and eight puppies – in a training facility in the woods on Jan Smuts’s farm in Irene near Pretoria. The school moved to Quaggaspoort (Kwaggaspoort) in 1923. The idea was to train the dogs at this central base and then send out trained graduates, operating in pairs, under a dog handler who had trained with them. They would be stationed predominantly in the rural areas of the country and near the gold mines on the Reef.
The first case they investigated took place on 18 March 1912, when Bosco and Pitty were involved in a domestic assault case. They successfully tracked and pointed out the assailant. After this victory, Kuyper received permission to train dogs with the first group of dog handlers. He was not a young man, being already in his fifties, but he was as eager as a young dog on a fresh scent. He was driven by a single goal: creating the perfect detective dog.
He wrote his official police reports with a kind of poetry. In a report to the Minister of Justice, he grew lyrical:
He kept begging for more tracker dogs – "good noses" – from the Netherlands to be sent to South Africa. His passion proved infectious just as his progress proved persuasive.
By the 1940s and 1950s, the South African Police dog-training programme, the dog unit and the dogs themselves were internationally respected. Previous writers on police dog history have sometimes assumed that the metropole led the way, with the colonial Global South tailing. But, in fact, it was frequently the tail that wagged the dog of imperial policing. Accordingly, dogs as detectives became a matter of great pride in South Africa. When the British royal family visited South Africa in 1947, they were shown around the dog unit at Quaggaspoort.
The period after the Sharpeville massacre saw a shift in policing. The thing the police had come to fear most was the crowd. They lacked manpower and needed a new kind of force multiplier as well as "softer" crowd-control mechanisms to avoid another Sharpeville. One of the novel technologies of control was a bio-weapon, a deterrent capable of both attack and defence: the police dog. In theory at least, dogs made less violent policing possible.
What the police wanted was a different kind of dog and a different kind of dog handler for a very different purpose: for imposing order, both physical and psychological, on an African public that was starting to resist apartheid. They wanted patrol dogs, defence dogs and attack dogs. They wanted them for the urban areas to control the ordinary citizen. After all, the 1961 study tour had revealed that one patrol dog could be as efficient as four non-dog patrols. In the summer of 1961, patrol dogs were unleashed on the streets of South African cities. Police dogs were to join policemen on the beat to stop urban crime, especially in what the newspapers called "riotous areas". The next year, new dogs were imported and attached to the flying squads in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. These dogs were, for the first time, German shepherds. They were, in essence, a force multiplier – with the emphasis on force.
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This was a new kind of policing. It needed a new kind of handler and a new kind of training, which meant creating a new kind of dog. It also meant creating a different kind of relationship between human and dog. But instead of following overseas practice, which, as the study tour had revealed was moving in a different direction, the authorities drew on a model much closer to home.
From the early 1960s, the police budget swelled. The use of patrol dogs grew expansively and expensively. A year after the introduction of the German shepherd dogs and the new model of training, there were only 164 tracker dogs and already 234 patrol dogs. Police officers declared that they could now investigate spots where "as a lone policeman, [they] would not have dared to go". While a tracker dog took fifteen months in training, a patrol dog took a mere four. The dogs learned new commands – and the commands were given in Afrikaans. (Only Chips, a sheepdog recruited to help with stock theft cases, remained stubbornly Anglophile, refusing to learn Afrikaans.)
The police were increasingly militarised and worked closely with the Defence Force. Joint police–army operations were launched into black townships. From 1964, German shepherds were also used in the military, at first trained by De Beers and the police. The army had dogs like the infamous Brutus, who was so dangerous that he had to be permanently caged. These dogs were more than dangerous weapons (to which they were often likened). Because they exercised their own agency, they were more akin in unpredictability and volatility to blasting dynamite.
In fact, vicious or uncontrollable German shepherds could be donated by the public – it was an escape route for those dogs deemed too aggressive for suburban society. Conversely, in 1966, 17 German shepherds were sold to the public by the police because they failed their course: they were too friendly and therefore psychologically unsuited for patrol. There were some experiments: one of the inventors of apartheid as an ideology tried to interest the police in a new dog breed of his own invention – "Halsatians". The authorities even introduced the blood of a Siberian wolf in 1971 to make the German shepherds more lupine. Wolf dogs and wolves were deployed by the South African military and police during the 1970s and 1980s. Old soldiers remembered their strange silence, their cold yellow eyes, and that only their handlers could go near them.
Wolves and German shepherds were tangled up in each other's identities, especially their shared symbolism, as both were made infamous by their links with Imperial and Nazi Germany. Hitler had revered the breed for its wolfish wildness: he called his first shepherd "Wolf". Their first breeder had described them as fierce and fiercely loyal: the model animal apparatchik of apartheid.
