“You can judge a bad European by the number of big dogs he has”: a history of dogs, race and white settlers in Zambia – 1960 to the present
The above statement was made by Dr Konoso, Zambian Minister of Justice, during a parliamentary debate about a tax on dog biscuits in 1966 and strikes at the unusual position dogs occupied (and continue to occupy) in the relationships and social interactions both amongst, and between, settlers and Africans. The projection of (supposed) human characteristics onto canines in which some dogs are delineated as ‘racist dogs’ while others are labelled ‘African dogs’, alongside the intimate spaces dogs occupy in many white lives, demonstrates the special, and often divisive, position they hold in both settler lives and settler mythologies.
Existing literature on dogs in Southern Africa has looked at the development of white settler breeds and African naming practices. This paper breaks into new territory by using dogs to understand class and racial identity amongst white settlers through the intimacy between dogs and settlers, and the relationship between white owned dogs and black Zambians.
This paper synthesises work on settler colonialism, intimacy and animal history and analyses a cross section of newspapers, archival material and oral history interviews in order to examine the ways in which racial and class ideologies shape settler experiences of dog ownership and patterns of breeding. In particular this paper seeks to explore the spaces that they inhabit and the purposes of their ownership, and what this can tell us about fractured white identities.