'The Ornithorhynchus of the Western World': Environmental Determinism in Erin Anderson Walker's South African History, 1911 - 1936

Van Sittert, Lance

'The Ornithorhynchus of the Western World': Environmental Determinism in Erin Anderson Walker's South African History, 1911 - 1936

Journal Article

2008

Journal Title

South African Historical Journal

Link to Journal

https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rshj20

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Historical Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

The article traces the changing role of environmental determinism in the invention of ‘South African’ history after 1910 through a close reading of the social biography and scholarship of Eric Anderson Walker, professor of history at the South African College (now the University of Cape Town), 1911–36. The dominant liberal historiography still acknowledges Walker as one of the founders of the national academic discipline in English, but otherwise ignores his scholarship which is now deemed irredeemably Eurocentric, empiricist and conservative. By relocating and re-reading Walker in the context of the first quarter century of the new settler nation state confected by Britain out of the wreckage of the South African War, the supposed disciplinary dead-end of his scholarship becomes the route into an examination of historical knowledge as both construct of and aide memoir to the new imaginary of white South African nationhood. It also provides a salutary warning to the modern practitioners of environmental history of the non-innocence of their field and the need to reckon with its determinist past.