Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the emergence of knowledge on three aspects of the ecology of southern Mozambique - cattle breeds, veterinarian disease and pastures - in the context of a cattle expansion strategy devised by colonial authorities since the 1910s.

Paper long abstract:

Historical research has drawn attention to the key social and economic role that cattle has played in societies in Southern Mozambique in the past centuries. Classic scholarship focusing on Mozambique under colonial rule, alongside studies centred on environmental aspects in African history, have started extending our understanding of how war, migration and different colonial policies, but also low rainfall, droughts, changing land-use patterns and epizooties, have all contributed to changes in cattle population but also production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the early twentieth century, a thesis regarding the future of Southern Mozambique became dominant among colonial officials and experts: while most local animal husbandry practices were viewed as backward and uneconomic and local breeds as low-quality, the region had a major ecological potential for cattle expansion of imported breeds and crossbreeds, mostly to supply settler communities and Africans with varying amounts of meat, dairy, manure and draught animal power. Some officials even envisaged Mozambique would be able to export cattle to different markets. This ambitious strategy, resting mostly on western scientific knowledge adapted to the African environment, reflected race and class-based divisions present in Mozambique's colonial society.

Drawing on archival research, this paper traces the emergence between the 1910s and 1940s, in the context of this strategy, of knowledge on three aspects of the ecology of Southern Mozambique - cattle breeds, veterinarian disease and pastures. It furthermore discusses the scientific and technical debates and the tensions that surrounded this strategy, while also assessing some of its results.