Following Jane Carruther's seminal work The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History, the Kruger National Park (KNP) has become an important location through which to disentangle South Africa's complex history.Footnote ¹ Jacob S. T. Dlamini's Safari Nation builds on this tradition and demonstrates that Kruger was never the exclusively white playground of popular and scholarly imagination. Rather, he adopts a ‘histories of presence’ framework to offer evidence of black experiences with the park, both inside and outside of the preserved landscape (3). Dlamini constructs ‘black’ as a composite entity that includes Africans, Asians, and Coloureds, all of whom are key to his efforts to recover black presence in South Africa's conservation history, with KNP providing the backdrop and framing context to the story.

Part 1 of the book, titled ‘Movements’, is divided into four chapters. Within the section, Dlamini deftly charts incidences of African mobilities and livelihoods within KNP that revolve around hunting and labor relations. Park authorities contested African hunting as ‘depredation’ or poaching. On the other hand, African hunters were fulfilling an age-old livelihoods activity, and did so to express grievance against restrictions limiting access to material benefits from a protected ecology (54). The park was also a zone of movement for itinerant wage laborers from Mozambique destined for the South African mines, many of whom were detained as they passed through. As punishment for trespassing, they worked on the park's maintenance. ‘Native’ residents and squatters residing within the park were employed as regulars or rangers. Dlamini also analyzes how an educated, wealthy, and Christianized African elite utilized the segregated railway infrastructure to go on tours. He argues that historians need to take seriously how a class of black South Africans viewed the park as a valued recreational space. There they found a measure of freedom in a rapidly modernizing and segregationist South Africa (90–2).

Also divided into four chapters is Part 2, ‘Homelands’, in which Dlamini uses cases of black interaction with KNP to demonstrate their visibility in the park. African, Indian, and Coloured elites toured the park to maintain their social statuses, notwithstanding colonial and apartheid restrictions on black mobility within the park. Black visitors made their own travel and accommodation arrangements. While on these tours, visitors from multiple communities tapped into networks of solidarity to ‘avoid [the] petty humiliation of racism’, while forging a sense of communalism in the process (167, 171). Elsewhere in the section, Dlamini pivots to consider the experiences of ordinary Africans, particularly female domestic workers, who visited the park with their European employers. Other Africans worked as tour guides, attendants, and caretakers in KNP. He uses these communities and their tours and visits to demonstrate that black people from various walks of life navigated segregationist restrictions in pursuit of various forms of leisure in nature. Dlamini successfully demonstrates how tourism revealed the complexity of black experiences of and responses to white rule and shows how class played an important role in shaping this — especially when it came to questions of leisure (185–7).

One of Dlamini's more significant contributions is in how he expands his analysis to encompass the Bantustans that surrounded KNP. He argues that Bantustans, designed to deprive blacks of citizenship, generated contradictions that ultimately undermined apartheid's broader national mission and KNP's restrictive policies. Bantustans assured ‘self-rule’ and ‘citizenship’ to their African inhabitants, a ‘privilege’ that spared them KNP's racist restrictive policies. This led to unintended, gradual desegregation and decolonization of the park, a process accelerated by the homelands’ African rulers to pursue local conservation measures that challenged apartheid's prerogative on resource conservation (187–93).

Dlamini conclusively demonstrates the many ways in which Africans, Indians and Coloureds were present in the KNP during the eras of segregation and apartheid. Yet even though the end of apartheid and the ascendance of Mandela to power in 1994 ushered in both democracy and inclusive conservation — what Dlamini describes as ‘social ecology’ — KNP has still failed to exorcise the ghosts of historic racial policies. This is evidenced by the persistence in tensions between the park and its African workers and neighbors over grazing rights, land dispossession, animal depredation of community farms, fire outbreak damages, and unsettled compensation claims. These legacies have undermined the transformation of KNP into a truly national symbol.

Safari Nation is a tour de force into the social history of KNP. Dlamini relies on archival and oral sources, including an impeccable collection of pictures and maps, to disentangle South Africa's histories of exclusion and conflict resulting from efforts to institute white nationalism through conservation. He uses multiple microhistories to demonstrate how blacks undermined this pursuit, enabling him to provide an alternative, more national, South African history regarding KNP. The book reads as a sophisticated social history of wide ranging but related issues spawned by the creation of KNP: dispossession, labor relations, livelihoods, justice, freedom, black naturalism and intellectual life, citizenship, gender, class, democracy, and trauma, among others. Also, while the last three chapters offer an excellent analysis on elusive efforts by postapartheid South Africans to achieve a national identity around KNP, Dlamini does so by relying on episodes involving only African communities. There is an obvious silence on the roles played by Indian and Coloured communities on the postapartheid order relating to the park, an absence more notable for Dlamini's efforts to show how South Africans insisted that the KNP was theirs during the heyday of segregation. This notwithstanding, Safari Nation is powerful, thought-provoking, well-written, and an excellent addition to South African social and conservation history.