Dr. Innocent Dande

Innocent Dande is a socio-environmental historian of twentieth-century southern Africa. He obtained his doctorate in animal history from Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in 2020. He has published extensively on rabies outbreaks, dog taxation regimes, dogs in Zimbabwean literature, stray and suburban dogs in Harare, the Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP), the historiography of the Zimbabwean crisis, and on the changing eating habits of the urban poor in Harare’s high-density suburbs between 2000 and 2020.

Innocent has been working on a postdoctoral research project, provisionally titled “Harare’s Informal Foodscapes: Class, Identity, and Culture in Zimbabwe, 1980–2020.” His interest in food histories ignited his interest in the human waste histories of the city of Harare. He draws insights from anthropology, sociology, and the species seeking to better understand southern Africa’s more-than-human pasts. Innocent’s focus on these topics is informed by his conviction that causality and agency do not belong to human beings alone, but also to other organisms, substances, and nonhuman animals.

RCC Research Project: On the Feceocene: Sewerage Works, Sanitation, and Society in Harare (Zimbabwe), 1890–2020

Selected Publications:

• “Cooking, the Crisis and Cuisines: Household Economies and Food Politics in Harare’s High-Density Suburbs, 1997–2020.” Journal of Southern African Studies 48, no. 6 (2022): 1057–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2023.2167391.
• with Sandra Swart. “‘Today We Will Milk Dogs!’ (Nhasi tinokama imbwa)*—A Socio-political history of African-Owned Dogs and the Dog Tax in Southern Rhodesia, c. 1900–1950.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 50, no. 4 (2022): 672–704. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2022.2057746.
• “The Political Economy of Informal Dog Breeding Businesses in Harare’s high-density Suburbs, Zimbabwe, 1990–2019.” Critical African Studies 13, no. 3 (2021): 321–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2021.2005377.
• with Sandra Swart. “A City Gone to the Dogs? Power, Modernity and Canine Citizens in Post-Colonial Harare, c. 1980–2017.” Journal of Southern African Studies 47, no. 4 (2021): 567–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2021.1929442.
• “The Colonial State, African Dog-Owners, and the Political Economy of Rabies Vaccination Campaigns in Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s and 1960s.” The Journal of the History of Biology 54, no. 4 (2021): 689–717. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-021-09661-6.
• with Joseph Mujere. “Contested Histories and Contested Land Claims: Traditional Authorities and the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe, 2000–2017.” Review of African Political Economy 46, no. 159 (2019): 86–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2019.1609922.