ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the work of a new generation of naturalists who arrived in South Africa in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. European traders huddled behind the walls of forts on the coast from which they seldom ventured into the tropical interior. It shows how science, warfare, and commerce in an outpost of the British Empire combined to support the development of racial biology. In the final section, it looks at the transmutation of this science into a physical anthropology that has transformed South Africa into the cradle of humanity. Hinrich Lichtenstein marks the bridge between old and new ways of collecting and ordering nature. The chapter ends with a short foray into postcolonial South Africa where some see physical anthropology as a means of ending the trauma associated with a violent past while others regard it as an irreverent discipline of the dead. In South Africa, racial science moved in a different direction.
