MYTHS OF THE PRISTINE - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Natures Salvation - page 83

ox trails south down the Rift Valley and west along herding routes through Sudan and Chad into West
Africa. Cattle in their millions suffered fever, diarrhea, lymphoid necrosis, and death. Within five years,
the virus had reached the shores of the Atlantic. The British colonial authorities tried to halt its advance
south by erecting a thousand-mile fence and shooting cattle. But within a decade it was in South Africa,
and its conquest of the continent was complete. 27
The virus spread to many cloven-hoofed wild animals, including buffalo, wildebeest, eland, giraffe,
and many species of antelope. The pandemic has been called the greatest natural calamity to befall
Africa. “Never before in the memory of man, or by the voice of tradition, have the cattle died in such
vast numbers; never before has the wild game suffered,” wrote Frederick Lugard, a British army captain
who traveled the caravan routes of northern Kenya in 1890 while scouting for an imperial invasion of
East Africa. “The enormous extent of the devastation can hardly be exaggerated.” 28
As the cattle died, so did humans. Herders had no livestock, and farmers had no oxen to pull their
plows or drive the waterwheels that irrigated their fields. Hungry people fell prey to native diseases
such as smallpox, cholera, and typhoid. “Everywhere the people I saw were gaunt and half-starved, and
covered with skin diseases,” wrote Lugard. “They had no crops of any sort to replace the milk and meat
which formed their natural diet.” 29 In places, the epidemic coincided with drought. Between 1888 and
1892, roughly a third of the population of Ethiopia—several million people—perished. In Kenya, mem-
bers of the Masai tribe still tell of the enkidaaroto , the “destruction.” Most of their cattle died, along
with the buffalo and wildebeest of the Serengeti. They fought wars over the surviving cattle and were
reduced to begging for meat from passing caravans. One elder later recalled that the corpses of cattle
and people were “so many and so close together that the vultures had forgotten how to fly.” 30 An Aus-
trian explorer, Oskar Baumann, who traveled through Tanzania in 1891, estimated that two-thirds of the
Masai died.
Until the arrival of rinderpest, Africa's richest and most aristocratic kingdoms were built on cattle.
But in that decade of carnage, the great herds were wiped out. Rinderpest depopulated and impoverished
Africa on a scale that even the slave traders had not managed. Famine decimated cattle-herding tribal
kingdoms like the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Soga in Uganda, and the Nama and Herero in southwestern
Africa. In northern Nigeria, the Fulani, “having lost all, or nearly all their cattle, became demented,”
according to a contemporary account collected by researcher John Ford. “Many are said to have done
away with themselves. Some roamed the bush calling imaginary cattle.” Much the same befell the Dinka
and Bari in Sudan and the Karamajong of Uganda. Many of these societies have never recovered. They
never had a chance. The disease served up the continent on a plate for colonial takeover. In its wake,
Europe's “scramble for Africa,” which had been underway since the 1880s, reached its victorious cli-
max. 31
With warrior tribes barely able to put up a fight, the Germans and British finally secured control
of Tanzania and Kenya. Lugard noted blandly that rinderpest “in some respects has favoured our en-
terprise. Powerful and warlike as the pastoral tribes are, their pride has been humbled and our progress
facilitated by this awful visitation. The advent of the white man had not else been so peaceful.” 32 In
southern Africa, the Herero succumbed to German occupiers, and the hungry and destitute Zulus were
forced to migrate to the gold mines of Witwatersrand, helping to create the brutal social divide between
black and white from which apartheid sprang.
The ramifications of the rinderpest epidemic did not stop with European takeover. The “cattle
plague” also opened the way for an invasion by an indigenous pest, the tsetse fly ( Glossina palpalis ),
which has always lived among wild animals in Africa's lowland tropical bush. It carries trypanosomias-
is, a parasitic disease that, like rinderpest, is lethal to cloven-hooded animals. Unlike rinderpest, it also