Historians of colonial conquest have explored the emergence of various manifestations of racialised discourse about Africans during the numerous colonial wars in Southern Africa. To a slightly lesser extent they have also examined the impact of colonial conquest on the environment. The interconnectedness of the two has been less fully examined. One of the consequences of colonial expansion in what is now South Africa’s Eastern Cape province was the emergence of a distinctive military discourse on Africans in general and the Xhosa in particular. Another was the destruction of large mammals previously endemic to the area. Hunting was part of the dominant masculine military ethos and the colonial record is replete with numerous examples of the close connection between colonial wars and hunting. The same record also contains accounts blaming indigenous people for the decline in wild animals – often simultaneously detailing the mass slaughter of animals by the narrators. This article argues that military attitudes to fauna and to indigenous people were interconnected and fed into a racialised discourse that had an impact beyond the military.

殖民征服的历史学家探索了在南部非洲的众多殖民战争中出现的关于非洲人的各种种族化话语的出现。在较小程度上，他们还研究了殖民征服对环境的影响。两者之间的相互联系没有得到充分的研究。在现在的南非东开普省进行殖民扩张的后果之一是出现了一种针对非洲人特别是科萨人的独特军事话语。另一个是以前在该地区流行的大型哺乳动物的破坏。狩猎是占主导地位的男性军事精神的一部分，殖民记录中充斥着许多殖民战争与狩猎之间密切联系的例子。同一记录还包含将野生动物数量减少归咎于土著人的描述——通常同时详细描述叙述者对动物的大规模屠杀。本文认为，军队对动物群和土著人民的态度是相互关联的，并融入了一种影响超越军队的种族化话语。