Preventative Inoculation of Cattle against Lungsickness in the Cape: Informal Technology Transfer and Local Knowledge Production in the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT

The early history of inoculation against lungsickness of cattle in South Africa provides a case study of the intercontinental transfer and local adaptation of an innovative veterinary treatment during a period when the state did not yet command the resources to regulate medicinal exchanges and experimental knowledge production. After the accidental importation of lungsickness into the Cape in 1853, information about the Belgian method of tail inoculation was disseminated swiftly, but was initially so brief and imprecise that local cattle-owners’ experiments modified the technique considerably. Their experiences were debated in colonial newspapers, but were commonly so unfavourable that many farmers remained hesitant, whereas the colonial medical profession almost unanimously opposed inoculation on theoretical grounds. Yet its advocates continuously publicised updated instructions, and with improving results, tail inoculation was increasingly widely used in the colony and later adopted by Africans. A different technique of oral immunisation that became generally utilised for calves was almost certainly a local invention, apparently by Khoekhoe cattle-owners, within three years of the disease’s arrival, and was subsequently adopted by settler farmers. Lungsickness inoculation thus demonstrates the potential benefits of pharmaceutical experimentation in a diversity of therapeutic systems unrestricted by hegemonic scientific doctrine and state regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Lungsickness
• inoculation
• cattle disease
• veterinary medicine
• knowledge production
• technology transfer
• newspapers
• Cape Colony
• Xhosa
• Khoekhoe

Acknowledgements

Research funding by the Wellcome Trust is gratefully acknowledged (Wellcome Trust Grant No 075339).

ORCID

Chris Andreas http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2140-1538

Note on the contributor

Chris Andreas is currently serving as Head of Department in the Department of History at the University of Fort Hare, where he has been teaching for a decade. He completed a DPhil thesis on the concurrent epidemics of lungsickness and African horse sickness in mid-nineteenth-century South Africa at the University of Oxford in 2016.

Notes

1 N. Nattrass, ‘AIDS and the Scientific Governance of Medicine in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, African Affairs, 107, 427 (2008), 157–176; N. Carrier and G. Klantschnig, Africa and the War on Drugs (London: Zed, 2012); R. Hodes, ‘The Culture of Illegal Abortion in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 1, (2015), 79–93; S. Klausen and J. Parle, ‘“Are We Going to Stand By and Let These Children Come into the World?”: The Impact of the “Thalidomide Disaster” in South Africa, 1960–1975’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 4 (2015), 735–752; T. Waetjen, ‘Poppies and Gold: Opium and Law-Making on the Witwatersrand’, Journal of African History, 57, 3 (2016), 391–403; T. Waetjen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Opium Trade in the Transvaal, 1904–1910’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43, 4 (2017), 733–751; J. Parle, R. Hodes and T. Waetjen, ‘Pharmaceuticals and Modern Statecraft in South Africa: The Cases of Opium, Thalidomide and Contraception’, Medical Humanities, 44 (2018), 253–262.

2 J. Fisher, ‘Not Quite a Profession: The Aspirations of Veterinary Surgeons in Britain in the Mid-Nineteenth Century', Historical Research, 66, 161 (1993), 284–302; A. Woods and S. Matthews, ‘“Little, if at All, Removed from the Illiterate Farrier or Cow-Leech”: The English Veterinary Surgeon, c. 1860–85, and the Campaign for Veterinary Reform’, Medical History, 54, 1 (2010), 29–54.

3 C. Andreas, ‘The Background to, and Impact and Management of, the Epizootics of Lungsickness and African Horsesickness in the Cape Colony, c. 1853–7’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2016), 184–186. Previously, it was assumed that it only arrived at the earliest in September 1853, and through Mossel Bay: G.M. Theal, History of South Africa: From 1795 to 1872, 3rd edn, 5 vols (London: Allen & Unwin, 1916), vol. 3, 151; M.W. Henning, Animal Diseases in South Africa, 2nd edn (Johannesburg: Central News Agency, 1949), 170; J.B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1989), 70.

4 H. Schneider, J. van der Lugt and O. Hübschle, ‘Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia’, in J.A.W. Coetzer, G.R. Thomson and R.C. Tustin, eds, Infectious Diseases of Livestock: With Special Reference to Southern Africa, 2 vols (Cape Town: Oxford UP, 1994), vol. 2, 1485–1494.

5 J. Fisher, ‘A Pandemic (Panzootic) of Pleuro-Pneumonia, 1840–1860’, Historia Medicinae Veterinariae, 11, 1 (1986), 26–32.

6 L. van Sittert, ‘Holding the Line: The Rural Enclosure Movement in the Cape Colony, c.1865–c.1910’, Journal of African History, 43, 1 (2002), 95–118; D. Neville, B.E. Sampson and C.G. Sampson, 'The Frontier Wagon Track System in the Seacow River Valley, North-Eastern Cape', South African Archaeological Bulletin, 49 (1994), 65–72.

7 C. Andreas, ‘The Spread and Impact of the Lungsickness Epizootic of 1853–57 in the Cape Colony and Xhosa Chiefdoms', South African Historical Journal, 53 (2005), 50–72.

8 R. Waller, ‘Emutai: Crisis and Response in Maasailand 1883–1902', in D.H. Johnson and D.M. Anderson, eds, The Ecology of Survival: Case Studies from Northeast African History (London: Lester Crook, 1988), 72–112; H. Weiss, ‘“Dying Cattle”: Some Remarks on the Impact of Cattle Epizootics in the Central Sudan During the Nineteenth Century', African Economic History, 26 (1998), 173–199.

9 J. Cobbing, ‘[Review of] J. B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise, Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–57', Journal of Southern African Studies, 20 (1994), 339–341; J. Guy, ‘A Landmark, Not a Breakthrough', South African Historical Journal, 25 (1991), 227–231; H. Bradford, ‘Akukho Ntaka Inokubhabha Ngephiko Elinye (No Bird Can Fly on One Wing): The “Cattle-Killing Delusion” and Black Intellectuals, c. 1840–1910', African Studies, 67, 2 (2008), 209–232.

10 J. Lewis, ‘Materialism and Idealism in the Historiography of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement 1856–7', South African Historical Journal, 25 (1991), 244–268; T. Stapleton, ‘“They No Longer Care for Their Chiefs”: Another Look at the Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856–1857', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 24, 2 (1991), 383–392; H. Bradford, ‘Women, Gender and Colonialism: Rethinking the History of the British Cape Colony and Its Frontier Zones, c. 1806–70', Journal of African History, 37, 3 (1996), 351–370.

11 Peires, Dead Will Arise, 128.

12 Ibid., 312.

13 Ibid., 71, 73, 97, 312; T. Stapleton, ‘“They are Depriving Us of Our Chieftainship”: The Decline and Fall of the Traditional Xhosa Aristocracy (1846–1857)', Historia 38, 2 (1993), 86–99, here 96; J. Peires, ‘“Soft” Believers and “Hard” Unbelievers in the Xhosa Cattle-Killing', Journal of African History, 27, 3 (1986), 445.

14 Morbidity and mortality caused by lungsickness vary widely. According to Schneider, Van der Lugt and Hübschle, ‘Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia’, 1485–1487, morbidity ranges between 40 and 90 per cent. They provide no general prediction of mortality but report an overall mortality rate of 68 per cent from one particularly strong outbreak in Zambia. The highest possible mortality rate in exposed populations predicted by H.O. Mönning and F.J. Veldman, Handbook on Stock Diseases (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1982), 39–40, amounts to 72 per cent.

15 J. Fisher, ‘To Kill or Not To Kill: The Eradication of Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia in Western Europe’, Medical History 47, 3 (2003), 320.

16 Andreas, ‘Spread and Impact’, 58–67.

17 G. Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western Science', Science, 156 (1967), 611–622; R. MacLeod, ‘On Visiting the “Moving Metropolis”: Reflections on the Archtecture of Imperial Science', Historical Records of Australian Science, 5 (1982), 1–16; I. Inkster, ‘Scientific Enterprise and the Colonial “Model”: Observations on Australian Experience in Historical Context', Social Studies of Science 15 (1985), 677–704; D.R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988); J. Todd, Colonial Technology: Science and the Transfer of Innovation to Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995).

18 S. Feierman and J. Janzen, eds, The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

19 K. Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 (Durban: University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press, 2008), 158–182; S. Swart, ‘“Bushveld Magic” and “Miracle Doctors”: An Exploration of Eugène Marais and C. Louis Leipold's Experiences in the Waterberg, South Africa, C. 1906–1917', Journal of African History, 45, 2 (2004), 237–255; W. Beinart, K. Brown and D. Gilfoyle, ‘Experts and Expertise in Colonial Africa Reconsidered: Science and the Interpenetration of Knowledge’, African Affairs,108, 432 (2009), 413–433. W. Beinart and K. Brown, African Local Knowledge and Livestock Health: Diseases and Treatments in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits UP, 2013), 12–17, provide a historiographical overview.

20 W. Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770–1950 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 23–63.

21 Beinart and Brown, African Local Knowledge, 17–20.

22 C. Huygelen, ‘Louis Willems (1822–1907) and the Immunization against Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia: An Evaluation', Verhandelingen – Koninklijke Academie voor Geneeskunde van Belgie, 59, 4 (1997), 237–85; Fisher, ‘To Kill or Not To Kill', 320–321.

23 G.H. Pirie, ‘Slaughter by Steam: Railway Subjugation of Ox-Wagon Transport in the Eastern Cape and Transkei, 1886–1910', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 26, 2 (1993), 319–343.

24 M. Worboys, ‘Germ Theories of Disease and British Veterinary Medicine, 1860–1890', Medical History, 35, 3 (1991), 308–327.

25 Andreas, ‘Background’, 214–216.

26 Ordinance 1, 1853, in Statute Law of the Cape of Good Hope … Enacted before the Establishment of the Colonial Parliament and Still … In Force (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1862), 987–989.

27 Andreas, ‘Background’, 213–231.

28 Fisher, ‘To Kill or Not To Kill', 314–315, 322–332.

29 Ibid., 323–325; Worboys, ‘Germ Theories’, 319–323.

30 P. Koolmees, ‘Epizootic Diseases in the Netherlands, 1713–2002: Veterinary Science, Agricultural Policy, and Public Response', in K. Brown and D. Gilfoyle, eds, Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine (Athens: Ohio UP, 2010), 19–41, here 28.

31 Fisher, ‘To Kill or Not To Kill', 325–327.

32 Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 17 November 1853.

33 Fisher, ‘To Kill or Not To Kill', 321.

34 I. Pattison, The British Veterinary Profession 1791–1948 (London: J.A. Allen, 1983); S. Mishra, Beastly Encounters of the Raj: Livelihoods, Livestock and Veterinary Health in North India, 1790–1920 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2015).

35 T.B. Bayley, Notes on the Horse-Sickness at the Cape of Good Hope, in 1854–'55: Compiled, by Permission of His Excellency the Governor, from Official Documents (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1856), Appendix, 51.

36 Beinart, Rise of Conservation, 128–129.

37 Worboys, ‘Germ Theories', 314–317; A. Hardy, ‘Professional Advantage and Public Health: British Veterinarians and State Veterinary Services, 1865–1939', Twentieth Century British History, 14, 1 (2003), 1–23; A. Woods, ‘The Construction of an Animal Plague: Foot and Mouth Disease in Nineteenth-Century Britain', Social History of Medicine, 17, 1 (2004), 29–39.

38 Basalla, ‘Spread of Western Science', 611–622.

39 Beinart, Rise of Conservation, 17–19.

40 Koolmees, ‘Epizootic Diseases', 28.

41 Cape of Good Hope and Port Natal Shipping and Mercantile Gazette (hereafter Shipping and Mercantile Gazette), 9 September 1853; Cape Monitor, 10 September 1853.

42 Grahamstown Journal, 27 May 1854.

43 Henning, Animal Diseases, 187.

44 Grahamstown Journal, 10 March 1855. Original emphasis.

45 Graaff-Reinet Herald, 22 September 1855. Original emphasis.

46 Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Mercantile Gazette (hereafter Port Elizabeth Telegraph), 24 August 1854.

47 Grahamstown Journal, 29 July 1854. Original emphasis.

48 Cape Monitor, 7 October 1854, quoting P.[ort] E.[Lizabeth] Mercury [undated].

49 Grahamstown Journal, 7 October 1854.

50 Ibid., quoting Boerenvriend [undated; translated].

51 Grahamstown Journal, 17 March 1855.

52 Grahamstown Journal, 7 October 1854.

53 Grahamstown Journal, 7 October 1854, quoting Boerenvriend [undated; translated].

54 Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 20 October 1854.

55 Port Elizabeth Telegraph, 27 July 1854.

56 Even in contemporary Britain where a specialised agricultural press existed, oral communication between neighbours was still a common mode for the dissemination of veterinary treatments invented or adapted by farmers. For example: Eastern Province Monthly Magazine, 2, 22 (June 1858), 620.

57 Grahamstown Journal, 16 September 1854.

58 Cape Monitor, 7 October 1854, quoting P.[ort] E.[Lizabeth] Mercury [undated].

59 The Colonist, 25 February 1854, quoting Port Elizabeth Mercury [undated].

60 The Colonist, 27 July 1854, citing E.[astern] P.[rovince] Herald, 18 July [1854].

61 The Colonist, 29 July 1854.

62 Grahamstown Journal, 24 March 1855.

63 Grahamstown Journal, 7 July 1855, quoting Natal Government Gazette [undated].

64 Eastern Province Herald, 3 October 1854.

65 R.R. Langham-Carter, 'Orpen, Charles Edward Herbert', in C.J. Beyers, ed., Dictionary of South African Biography Vol. 4 (Durban: Butterworth, 1981), 437–438.

66 Cape Monitor, 16 December 1854.

67 Cape Archives (hereafter CA), Colonial Office 4502 (Papers re Horse Sickness), C. Orpen to Governor, 18 January 1855.

68 Grahamstown Journal, 27 January 1855.

69 Cape Monitor, 16 December 1854. Original emphasis.

70 Eastern Province Herald, 19 June 1855.

71 Grahamstown Journal, 10 February 1855.

72 Graaff-Reinet Herald, 28 February 1855.

73 Ibid.; Grahamstown Journal, 10 March 1855. Original emphases.

74 Graaff-Reinet Herald, 28 February 1855.

75 Graaff-Reinet Herald, 14 March 1855.

76 H. Bazin, 'A Brief History of the Prevention of Infectious Diseases by Immunisations', Comparative Immunology, Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, 26, 5–6 (2003), 293–308.

77 Graaff-Reinet Herald, 14 March 1855. Original emphasis.

78 Ibid. Original emphasis.

79 R. Porter, ‘Pain and Suffering', in B. Bynum and R. Porter, eds, Companion Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1993), vol. 2, 1580.

80 Grahamstown Journal, 23 February 1856.

81 Cape Frontier Times, 12 February 1856.

82 Grahamstown Journal, 8 March 1856.

83 Grahamstown Journal, 10 November 1855, quoting Natal Star [undated].

84 Grahamstown Journal, 23 February 1856.

85 Huygelen, ‘Louis Willems’, 361.

86 Graaff-Reinet Herald, 9 May 1855. Original emphasis.

87 Grahamstown Journal, 8 March 1856.

88 Grahamstown Journal, 23 February 1856.

89 CA, British Kaffraria 87 (Magistrate with Kama 1859–1861), J. Ayliff to Secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor, 21 April 1861. Thanks to Deborah Lavin for this reference.

90 Port Elizabeth Telegraph, 1 March 1855.

91 For example: Grahamstown Journal, 20 June 1857.

92 Grahamstown Journal, 8 March 1856.

93 D. Hutcheon, ‘Lung-Sickness of Cattle; Contagious Pleuro-Pneumonia, or Pleuro-Pneumonia-Bovum-Contagiosa', Agricultural Journal of the Cape of Good Hope, 27, 6 (1905), 756–773.

94 Act 16, 1906, in Colony of the Cape of Good Hope: Acts Of Parliament: Sessions of 1906 (Cape Town: Cape Times, Government Printers, 1906), 5072–5076.

95 N. Bizimana, Traditional Veterinary Practice in Africa (Eschborn: GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit), 1994), 205–207; E. Mathias-Mundy and C. McCorkle, ‘Ethnoveterinary Medicine in Africa', Africa, 62, 1 (1992), 59–93.

96 M. Merker, Die Masai: Ethnographische Monographie eines ostafrikanischen Semitenvolkes, 2nd edn (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1910), 170–171. Thanks to South African Historical Journal’s anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this.

97 R. Mares, ‘A Note on the Somali Method of Vaccination Against Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia’, Veterinary Record, 63, 10 (1951), 166.

98 Natal Government Gazette, 24 July 1855: Government Notice 65, 1855.

99 Cory Library, Grahamstown, Microfilm 172/2, Reel 1: Journal of Rev. H.T. Waters, 15 November 1855. Thanks to both Helen Bradford and Sheila Boniface Davies for independently alerting me to this.

100 C. Andreas, ‘Imofu and Ubuthi: Xhosa Concepts of Lungsickness and Practical Measures Against Its Spread During the Initial Epizootic, c. 1854–6’ (unpublished paper).

101 The term imofu, which came to be used for lungsickness – in the specific sense of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia – stems from the Dutch word Mof, ‘a nickname for any foreigner, especially a German, who has left his fatherland’, and originally meant ‘imported beast, esp. of the shorthorn breed of cattle’: A. Kropf, A Kaffir–English Dictionary (Lovedale: Lovedale Mission Press,1899), 226. As lungsickness is no longer prevalent in South Africa, the temporary use of imofu as a name for the disease has been lost. The word retains its original meanings of imported European cattle in general, and shorthorn breeds in particular, and has acquired some additional anthropogenic meanings based on the characteristic associated with these breeds of having no stamina when exposed to heat: B.M. Mini, The Greater Dictionary of IsiXhosa, 3 vols (Alice: University of Fort Hare Press, 2003), vol. 2, 369.

102 Cape of Good Hope, G.3-'77: Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report Upon Diseases in Cattle and Sheep in This Colony (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1877), xvii–xviii.

103 A. Theiler, 'Die Lungenseuche in Südafrika', Schweizer Archiv für Tierheilkunde, 41, 2 (1899), 57–70; Hutcheon, 'Lung-Sickness', 768–770.

104 South African Commercial Advertiser and Cape Town Mail, 11 October 1853; Statute Law, 987–989.

105 Eastern Province Monthly Magazine, 2, 23 (July 1858), 677.

106 Berliner Missionsberichte [Berlin Mission Reports], April/May 1857, 56. [Report covering second half of 1856.]

107 South African Agricultural Register and Eastern Province Magazine, 8 (25 November 1858), 102: letter by L.H. Meurant.

108 D. Gordon, ‘From Rituals of Rapture to Dependence: The Political Economy of Khoekhoe Narcotics Consumption, c. 1487–1870’, South African Historical Journal, 35, 1 (1996), 62–88; B.-E. van Wyk, ‘A Review of Khoe-San and Cape Dutch Medical Ethnobotany’, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 119, 3 (2008), 331–341; C. Low, Khoisan Medicine in History and Practice (Cologne: R. Köppe, 2008).

109 Huygelen, ‘Louis Willems’, 361.

110 Henning, Animal Diseases, 187.

111 Theiler, ‘Die Lungenseuche', 57–70; Hutcheon, ‘Lung-Sickness', 768–770.