ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Conservation, Contagion, and Collecting: Guy Shortridge and Nicholas Arends’s Scientific Expeditions to Namibia, 1920s

• In Event: Scientific Travel in Colonial Contexts: Logistics, Politics and Practices

English Abstract

This paper examines a series of scientific expeditions into Namibia led by zoologist and museum curator Guy Shortridge and taxidermist and trapper Nicholas Arends. Over the course of a decade, these two men along with local interlocutors and assistants gathered what was then the largest mammalian collection of any single region in Africa. The goals of their expeditions were threefold. Firstly, to collect a ‘complete’, salvage zoological collection of every mammal in central and northern Namibia, and ‘preserve’ indigenous fauna threatened by the onslaught of white settlers. Secondly, to investigate which areas the government should proclaim as game reserves to protect the remaining wildlife in the region. And thirdly, to gather ecological information on potential rodent reservoirs of the dreaded disease bubonic plague, which was ravaging neighbouring South Africa in the 1920s. In this presentation, by centering the process of travel itself in this story – the logistical and environmental dynamics behind Shortridge and Arends’s expeditions – I will offer an environmental and social history of southern African natural history collecting. In so doing, I will show how collecting was an ecological process that involved both transforming landscapes and negotiating the agency of both the environment and its animal inhabitants. I will also tell the largely forgotten story of how Indigenous Damara, Herero, Kwanyama, and San peoples shaped the collecting that took place in this region, and the scientific knowledge produced within it.

Author

• Jules Skotnes-Brown, University of Liverpool