Innocent Dande
Membership: 2024/2025
Member Bio
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.
