"Dying Cattle": Some Remarks on the Impact of Cattle Epizootics in the Central Sudan during the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Outbreaks of cattle diseases in the Central Sudan were common in the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, it is astonishing how little we actually know about the outbreaks and effects of epizootics in the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno before the imposition of colonial rule. Most of the few studies of cattle-epizootics by early colonial officials investigated the occurrence of various cattle diseases during the first decades of the twentieth century.2 These investigations very seldom included questions about earlier years of epizootics, and if they did, the occurrences of disease were dealt with briefly. Later research on cattle diseases in Northern Nigeria put little, if any, emphasis on the situation during the nineteenth century. The aim of this paper is to investigate two outbreaks of cattle epizootics in the Central Sudan, comprising the Sokoto Caliphate and the state of Borno. Cattle breeding and various forms of pastoralism were practiced in the nineteenth century, although the majority of the population were neither cattle owners nor cattle breeders. Thus, the impact of the epizootics was, in the end, not as destructive as in Eastern or Southern Africa for the states concerned, but it certainly was for pastoral societies and cattle keepers. The first epizootic, the great cattle death, was diagnosed as an outbreak of contagious bovine plero-pneumonia (CBPP).3 Its impact was witnessed by the German traveller Gustav Nachtigal in Borno in 1869. The second was the rinderpest (RP) panzootic which swept over Africa in the late nineteenth century and ravaged the herds in the Sudan savanna during the 1890s.4