SEGREGATED SPECIES, pests, knowledge, and boundaries in South Africa, 1910-1948

323pp., illus., maps, paperback, First SA Edition, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2026

ISBN: 9781997461197

First published in the USA in 2024. Winner of the First Book Prize by the Royal Historical Society.

A timely history of the connections between science, racial segregation, and pest control in early twentieth-century South Africa.

Jules Skotnes-Brown demonstrates that strategies for the containment of pests were redeployed for the management of humans and vice versa, and that the history of South Africa - and colonial history generally - cannot be fully understood without analysing the treatment of both animals and humans.

"Segregated Species brilliantly shows the racialized and scientifically dubious grounds on which South Africa's much-lauded conservation record rests. As Jules Skotnes-Brown illustrates in this wonderful book, distinctions and boundaries between charismatic animals and pests have always been fundamentally political. They have always been about who has the power to name and, therefore, to segregate." Jacob S. T. Dlamini, Princeton University

"Our understanding of South Africa's natural world was a hard-fought negotiation between competing camps, especially between scientists and vernacular experts. Skotnes-Brown shows us how animals were also agentic actors in this fractured and fractious process. He delineates the toxic taxonomies that lay behind 'vermin' and 'pest' as categories. A powerful book with significant implications for how we address human-animal conflict today." Sandra Swart, author of The Lion's Historian: Africa's Animal Past

Jules Skotnes-Brown is a historian of science,  medicine, and the environment. He is Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool.