The Game Factor: Tanganyikan Rinderpest Campaigns, Fence Ecology and the Wildlife Threat to Southern Africa, 1938–1956

This article examines imperial politics surrounding rinderpest epidemics along the south-western Tanganyikan border, made urgent by the appearance of the virus in migrating wildlife in 1939. Between 1938 and 1945, the British Colonial Office and governments of eastern and southern Africa undertook vaccination campaigns along the Tanganyika–Nyasaland–Northern Rhodesian border with the goal of protecting the cattle of southern Africa. Since the First World War the Tanganyikan veterinary department had the principal task of ensuring that rinderpest did not reach southern Africa, where settler-dominated herds were susceptible because they had been free of the virus since the turn of the century. While vaccine breakthroughs promised to eradicate rinderpest in cattle, the appearance of the virus in wildlife near the south-western border undermined rinderpest eradication efforts at a time when the world war demanded large quantities of beef for Allied forces and to feed African workers. The inter-territorial veterinary departments therefore constructed a wildlife fence between Lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika and undertook game slaughter to stop the virus. Using the concept of fence ecology, which examines the politics of fence construction and its effects on human–nature relationships, this article explores southern African interventions in the Tanganyikan rinderpest campaigns during and after the war, when the Colonial Office worried about its inability to eradicate the virus within its own colonies. The failure of the Nyasa–Tanganyika fence had implications for post-war rinderpest campaigns, which shifted focus to the Serengeti plains of northern Tanganyika, conflicting with the development of national parks.