MYTHS OF THE PRISTINE - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Natures Salvation - page 84

attacks humans, in whom it is called sleeping sickness, a disease that causes fever and, without treat-
ment, organ failure and death. Before the arrival of rinderpest in Africa, the tsetse fly and the disease it
brought were confined to small areas of the continent, mostly in the Congo rain forest. Tsetse flies loved
cattle but also needed lush vegetation to deposit their larvae. But for centuries, the continent's huge
cattle herds had kept the fly in check by grazing the grass close and eating tree seedlings. Rinderpest
changed that.
Initially the rinderpest epidemic was bad news for tsetse flies, because it killed their animal hosts.
But without cattle and other grazing animals, the bush grew fast. Within a season or two, the pastures
were transformed into woodland and thickets of thorns, where the tsetse could flourish. Meanwhile, wild
animal populations rebounded from rinderpest much faster than cattle, so the flies quickly had an animal
host to feed on. The landscape was suddenly ideal for the flies, and they spread fast. So did trypano-
somiasis and sleeping sickness. Cattle could not return to graze down the bush. Huge areas of Africa's
former cattle pastures—from the highlands of East Africa to the Zambezi and Limpopo valleys in the
south—quickly became tsetse-infested bush.
The economic damage of this transformation was huge. While rinderpest passed through and largely
disappeared, the tsetse takeover prevented millions of cattle-herding people from recovering the wealth
they had lost during the epidemic. The impact on human health was even worse. Sleeping sickness was
unknown in East Africa before the rinderpest epidemic. But in the aftermath, an estimated four million
people died in Uganda alone. Sleeping sickness has persisted ever since on a scale not seen before, with
some ten thousand deaths a year. And the threat it poses to cattle means that some of the most fertile
parts of Africa are still virtual no-go areas for humans and cattle alike. No wonder some conservationists
call the tsetse fly “the best game warden in Africa.”
An alien virus, introduced by humans, did all this. But here is the final point. The rinderpest virus
and the tsetse takeover it triggered led to an ecological revolution against people and cattle and in favor
of wildlife across Africa. It created the bush landscape where Roosevelt conducted his “great adven-
ture”—a landscape from which cattle had recently been banished and where vegetation and wild animals
were newly resurgent. It became the incomers' archetype of “unspoiled” Africa. But far from being a
pristine landscape, it was a recent product of the invasion of a virus brought by humans.
It is no accident that the idea of turning large areas of empty Africa into game reserves, first for
hunting and later for conservation, took hold in the aftermath of the rinderpest disaster. Roosevelt, who
had been a pioneer in creating national parks in the United States during his time as president, headed
a movement to do the same in Africa. Another key figure in the move to conserve Africa's supposedly
Pleistocene landscape was Julian Huxley, founding head of UNESCO in the late 1940s and later a
founder of the World Wildlife Fund. He described the East African plains as “a surviving sector of the
rich natural world as it was before the rise of modern man.” 33
This new generation of conservationists persuaded colonial authorities to create Africa's great na-
tional parks and reserves—the Serengeti and Masai Mara, Tsavo and Selous, Kafue, Okavango, Kruger,
and others—from which, they decreed, humans and their cattle had to be excluded. The German bio-
logist Bernhard Grzimek—who produced the famous topic and film Serengeti Shall Not Die —worked
indefatigably to expel the Masai from the Serengeti. “A National Park must remain a piece of primordial
wilderness to be effective,” he wrote. “No men, not even native ones, should live inside its borders.”
The Serengeti “cannot support wild animals and domestic cattle at the same time,” said Grzimek, even
though it had long done just that. These eco-pioneers did not realize, or did not care, that half a century
earlier many of these “pristine” parks had been open cattle pasture. 34