There is a forgotten archive of the dying days of a white supremacist regime. In 1997, the Apartheid-era covert bio-chemical warfare program was exposed, after a top agent was arrested and classified files revealed. These files and subsequent revelations allow us to reconstruct this clandestine project, which appeared to be a hybrid of Nazi plot and bad James Bond movie. Scientists manufactured crowd control agents, from ecstasy to teargas, and assassination weapons. There was also a shadowy eugenic impetus in experiments towards anti-fertility and anti-virility vaccines for black South Africans. In the newly democratic South Africa, these operatives faced allegations of violence far beyond any ethical military standard. The Truth Commission and trials reveal how animal bodies were pressed into the service of the state. Baboons and other animals were deployed in ways that were both brutal and bizarre. But this history also reveals something far more sinister about how primates are used in conventional science.

Sandra Swart is a Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She received her DPhil in Modern History from Oxford University in 2001, while simultaneously obtaining an MSc in Environmental Change and Management, also at Oxford. She studies the socio-environmental history of southern Africa, with a particular focus on the shifting relationship between humans and animals. She is an editor of the Brill book series African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities, an editor of the South African Historical Journal and past president of the Southern African Historical Society and current co-Vice President of European Society for Environmental History. She has supervised 21 successful doctoral students from Botswana, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. She has authored and co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, co-authored two books, co-edited three books and is the sole author of Riding High – Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (2010) and The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past (2023).