Boom2Dust blog: Animal Lives in Galton’s Imperial Imagination
In a new post for the Boom2Dust project, a comparative study of three industrial mining centres in southern Africa (1870–2020), Maaike Rozema examines the relation between animal lives and systems of power. By looking at Francis Galton’s 1850s expedition in Namibia, she explains how he relied on, and at the same time, controlled animals, revealing their central role in colonial exploration. Oxen, horses, mules and dogs enabled travel, transport and hunting, yet were treated as expendable resources when not useful. Galton’s narrative saw the category of 'animal' as not fixed but strategically modifiable to justify domination and hierarchy - for instance, humanising some animals while dehumanising Indigenous people through racist comparisons.
Read the full blog here.
About the author(s) / editor(s)
Maaike Rozema is a PhD candidate at the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL), working on the Boom to Dust project. She holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology, Environment, and Development from University College London (UCL). Her academic work as an anthropologist focuses on the complex relationships between humans and non-human beings, examining how these connections shape and have shaped our world. For her master’s dissertation, she examined how routinised violence against animals becomes normalised through the material and social conditions in the context of Dutch slaughterhouses.
Posted on 28 November 2025, last modified on 28 November 2025