Rehoming rhinos in southern Africa: animal indigeneity and wildlife translocations in the 1960s and 1970s

In this article, I examine rhino translocations in the 1960s and early 1970s in order to analyze how conservation practices have been influenced by ideas of animal indigeneity and how animals have responded to these initiatives. I investigate successful and unsuccessful Operation Rhino reintroductions to protected areas in South Africa and Mozambique as a way of understanding notions of what belonged in these territories and the role animals played in shaping them. Rhinos were not passive subjects of these ‘recolonizations’ but rather unpredictable participants that often responded to their ‘native’ territories in unexpected or undesired ways. This article also considers how translocation initiatives led to a shift in thinking about animals as members of a species to perceiving them as individual actors. Furthermore, it explores the relationship between wildlife (as both species representatives and as individuals), the humans striving to protect them, and the places to which they have been transported. In considering the ways that animals are managed in and relocated to new protected areas, this article also calls into question the categorical division between wildness and domesticity.