Paper long abstract:

The outbreak of lungsickness among cattle in the Cape in 1853-7 marked the arrival of the first major new animal disease in South Africa. It threatened the colonial transport network as well as African societies in which cattle fulfilled important socio-economic functions. The paper evaluates the main strategies adopted by the colonial state, individual settlers and the Xhosa chiefs for the management of lungsickness during the initial outbreak. These strategies anticipated some of the veterinary interventions implemented during later epizootics, but, in the different institutional setting of the 1850s, they took a less congruent shape and were carried out by different actors. The colonial state issued legislation for the containment of the disease but was unable to enforce it. In the absence of veterinary experts it was left to individual settlers to put a preventative inoculation technique that was in still its infancy into practice. The Xhosa, who had not yet lost all of their political autonomy, implemented rigid restrictions on the access of colonial cattle into their territories that have largely been overlooked by a historiography focussing on the role of lungsickness in the rise of the millennial ‘Xhosa cattle-killing movement.’