Preventing Plague, Bringing Balance: Wildlife Protection as Public Health in the Interwar Union of South Africa.

Jules Skotnes-Brown

doi:10.1353/bhm.2021.0054

Abstract

summaryThis article proposes a new line of enquiry in the history of animal conservation by suggesting that African wildlife protection was a form of public health in the early twentieth century. Through examining the activities of South African epidemiologists, politicians, bureaucrats, farmers, and zoologists in the 1920s and 1930s, the author argues that wildlife was integrated into epidemiological strategies and agricultural modes of production. Against the backdrop of a series of plague outbreaks, carnivora once deemed “vermin” were legally protected as sources of human health and agricultural wealth. As public health, food security, and carnivore populations were imbricated, the categorical boundaries between human and animal health also began to blur. Ultimately, this case suggests the need to bridge environmental and medical history and to broaden the history of environment and health beyond canonical figures such as Rachel Carson. Paying attention to colonial “peripheries” and African thought is critical in understanding the origins of twentieth-century environmentalism.

Highlights

Summary: This article proposes a new line of enquiry in the history of animal conservation by suggesting that African wildlife protection was a form of public health in the early twentieth century
Through examining the activities of South African epidemiologists, politicians, bureaucrats, farmers, and zoologists in the 1920s and 1930s, the author argues that wildlife was integrated into epidemiological strategies and agricultural modes of production
Through examining the attempts of employees and affiliates of the Union of South Africa’s Department of Public Health to control bubonicplague-carrying rodents in the veld, this paper examines an unstudied approach to wildlife management that rested on the opposite assumption

Summary

Bubonic Plague as a Symptom of Nature Out of Balance

In early 1920, James Alexander Mitchell, the first secretary of the Department of Public Health (formed in 1919), was baffled by what he later described as a “complete mystery.”[15] Since 1914, outbreaks of bubonic plague, one of the most dreaded diseases in history, had been appearing in isolated, disconnected, and seemingly random locations across the Orange Free State, Cape, and Transvaal provinces. Urban-plague-control policies in South Africa largely gravitated around attempts to exclude rats from areas of human occupation through retrofitting houses to render them rat proof, razing entire buildings to the ground and burning their contents, forcibly removing Africans and Asians from their homes on suspicion that these harbored rats or fleas, inspecting and fumigating rat-occupied premises, and strategically laying out poisons and traps.[49] Such spatial strategies of urban rodent exclusion, could not be utilized in the vast expanse of the veld: one could rat proof a farmer’s house, a field of maize was another matter.

Wild Birds as Agricultural Laborers and Public Health Workers

Rodent Control and the Imbrication of Human and Carnivora Population Health

Findings

Conclusion