Much has been said about human colonial subjecthood in Africa; in fact, almost all decolonial scholarship is anthropocentric. However, Saheed Aderinto reminds us in Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa that Africans were not the only colonial subjects. Non-human animals were, in various ways, also colonial subjects, a fact that has escaped scholars working in African history, a history that ‘was not made by humans alone’ (p. 5). Colonial laws and institutions controlled animal lives in ways similar to those applied to African human colonial subjects – by sorting, indexing, putting to work and prioritizing. As with colonized Africans, animals’ worth was judged using colonial understandings of ‘normality, orderliness, and modernity’ (p. 3). Therefore, colonialism transformed human–animal relations in ways that the literature has mostly neglected thus far.
The book consists of two parts. Part 1 considers animals as companions, food, athletes and political beings. Part 2 reflects on pathology, empathy and anxiety. Aderinto weaves together narratives, anecdotes, historical facts and events to demonstrate the complexity and intricacies of human–animal relations under colonial rule. His work is anti-reductive and necessarily complex since it is precisely through complexity that accuracy is found.
Parts 1 and 2 are both divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 investigates the intersections between livestock, animal husbandry, national building and spatial contestations and how these intersections changed due to colonialism. Chapter 2 moves from livestock to how colonialism created ‘new domains of relations’ between humans and horses and donkeys (p. 64). The differing views of the horse (as noble, elegant and grand) and the donkey (as strong and patient) enable us to ‘engage with the contrasting dynamics of colonial modernity’ (p. 69). Colonialism also brought new breeds of dogs to the continent, thereby ‘creating a major expansion in the symbolic and practical importance of dogs as “man’s best friend”’ (p. 93). This expansion is the focus of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 takes the animal into the imaginary, aiming to provide a picture of Nigerian political thought through the visual language of animal cartoons, specifically those by Akinola Lasekan.
Part 2 considers animal disease, wildlife conservation, animal cruelty and ritual murder in its four chapters. Chapter 5, like Chapter 3, focuses on canines, specifically diseased canines. The impact of rabies captures how ‘race, class, location and power relations shaped encounter with the canine populations’ (p. 146). Chapter 6 transitions from domestic to wild animals, as it considers wildlife conservation. It explores how racism, colonial entitlement and hunting restrictions formed conservation in colonial Nigeria. Animal cruelty is also framed within colonial discourse in Chapter 7, as it explores how ‘cruelty to animals was a socio-politically, historically and legally constructed criminal act in colonial Nigeria’ (p. 203). The final chapter, like Chapter 2, speaks about the equine but focuses on the cruelty they faced during races, as overused pack animals and when slaughtered in rituals.
Aderinto’s book serves as a timely reminder that colonialism affected every aspect of human and non-human life. It often did so by introducing new conceptual categories into its colonial territories. Aderinto unpacks how (often dualistic) categories such as urban/rural, pet/livestock, wild/tame or diseased/healthy extended colonial violence and control to other-than-human colonial subjects. His attention to detail compels us to see past monolithic and reductive narratives about colonialism in Africa by confronting us with complexity, ambiguity and homogeneity – characteristics so often (wrongly) assumed to be lacking within colonial spaces. The book is essential in at least four ways. First, it extends scholarly understandings of the colonial project beyond its traditionally anthropocentric construal. Second, it compels scholars to consider colonial animality, contributing to fields such as animal studies, animal ethics, critical animal studies and other nascent disciplines. Third, far from being relevant only to those interested in animal studies, this book sketches a different portrait of colonized humans by exploring human behaviour through relations with animals rather than simply in relation to other humans. Finally, it contributes to disciplines working on African history and thought. It does so not only by focusing on African subject matter, but also by offering an African perspective.
This book is a timely one and is recommended for scholars, students and also (since it is accessibly written) anyone interested in the colonial history of Africa.
