Safari Nation: A Transfrontier History of the Kruger National Park - Jacob Dlamini

This project seeks to expand the limits of the adjective 'national' in Kruger National Park in order to show that, like South Africa itself, the park was born transnational. This means that, unlike many national parks around the world (the Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. would be a good example here), the role of the Kruger National Park in giving what we might call 'natural expression' to a sense of South African-ness, a feeling of nationhood, cannot be taken for granted. The Kruger National Park, which discriminated against but never barred black people from ever visiting, was subjected to challenges by so-called non-whites in ways that not only forced the park to be more welcoming, but also expanded the meaning of the adjective 'national' in Kruger National Park.

Jacob Dlamini (History, Princeton) is a historian of Africa, with an interest in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial African History. He obtained a Ph.D. from Yale University in 2012 and is also a graduate of Wits University in South Africa and Sussex University in England. Jacob held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Barcelona, Spain, from November 2011 to April 2015, and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University from August 2014 to May 2015. A qualified field guide, Jacob is also interested in comparative and global histories of conservation and national parks.