Mad Dogs and Meerkats

A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa

Karen Brown

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780821443675
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Geografía histórica

Through the ages, rabies has exemplified the danger of diseases that transfer from wild animals to humans and their domestic stock. In South Africa, rabies has been on the rise since the latter part of the twentieth century despite the availability of postexposure vaccines and regular inoculation campaigns for dogs.

In Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa, Karen Brown links the increase of rabies to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Her study shows that the most afflicted regions of South Africa have seen a dangerous rise in feral dog populations as people lack the education, means, or will to care for their pets or take them to inoculation centers. Most victims are poor black children. Ineffective disease control, which in part depends on management policies in neighboring states and the diminished medical and veterinary infrastructures in Zimbabwe, has exacerbated the problem.

This highly readable book is the first study of rabies in Africa, tracing its history in South Africa and neighboring states from 1800 to the present and showing how environmental and economic changes brought about by European colonialism and global trade have had long-term effects.

Mad Dogs and Meerkats is recommended for public health policy makers and anyone interested in human-animal relations and how societies and governments have reacted to one of the world's most feared diseases.

CHAPTER 1

Travelers and Doctors

The Mystery of Rabies in Colonial South Africa

Notwithstanding the heat of the climate, the canine madness, with its concomitant and remarkable symptom the hydrophobia or dread of water, is totally unknown.

John Barrow, 1806¹

Considerable alarm has been recently excited in this neighbourhood, by manifest and indubitable symptoms of Canine Madness.

Stephen Kay, 1827²

The Epigraphs—by John Barrow, private secretary to the first British governor of the Cape Colony, George Macartney, and by Stephen Kay, a British missionary in the eastern Cape—reflect the conflicting views about whether rabies existed in South Africa during the first part of the nineteenth century. Doctors, settlers, and travelers who visited the region commented either on the surprising absence of the disease or else its sporadic and dangerous presence. These debates continued until the first recorded epidemic in South Africa, which broke out in Port Elizabeth in 1893. Until then controversy was rife because there were no diagnostic tools to confirm whether a person or animal had become a victim of the rabies virus. Diagnoses were based on clinical symptoms, in particular evidence of hydrophobia in humans and aggressive changes in behavior in dogs that had become “mad.” It was not until the 1880s and the development of Louis Pasteur’s method of determining rabies by inoculating brain material from possible victims into laboratory rabbits that scientists could make a judgment either way. If the deceased had succumbed to rabies, then the laboratory animals would contract it too. Since the 1880s diagnostics have improved greatly, and it is now possible to identify the particular type of rabies virus that was the cause of death.³ For most of the nineteenth century, however, there was no conclusive biomedical proof of rabies mortality, perpetuating the medical question: Did rabies exist in South Africa in the early nineteenth century? If it did not exist, the reason for that needed to be explored.

This question was not peculiar to South Africa. Rather it emphasized how little was known about the rabies situation in Africa in general at the turn of the nineteenth century. In his article on the history of rabies in Ethiopia, Richard Pankhurst has shown that European travelers who visited that country during the nineteenth century were divided as to whether the disease was widespread or even present prior to the serious epidemic in Addis Ababa in 1903. However, Pankhurst argued, Amharic medical texts of the eighteenth century indicated that Ethiopian communities had a knowledge of rabies, which they associated with dogs. They also recorded a range of treatments, using plants that were often prepared as emetics and purges to try to flush the disease from the human body. It was the inability and failure of Europeans to interact sufficiently with local knowledge and languages, Pankhurst suggested, that generated this mystery about the prevalence of rabies in Ethiopia.⁴

In southern Africa, however, there were no ancient or indigenous manuscripts that Europeans could draw on to ascertain the historical presence or absence of rabies, even if they chose to engage with folk knowledge. Nor could they learn from any written records how African communities had responded to rabies outbreaks, if they had occurred before the colonial period. In South Africa, African medical knowledge was handed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next. There were some similarities with the Ethiopian case as described by Pankhurst, in that many Europeans who visited southern Africa either neglected or were incapable of tapping into these rich oral traditions. This has resulted in great lacunae in our historical understanding of African ideas surrounding disease and medicine, including their knowledge as to whether animals could be carriers of diseases.

This chapter explores the recorded debates surrounding the existence of rabies in South Africa and considers how they influenced European ideas about Africa’s disease environment. In the early nineteenth century much of Africa was still unknown to Europeans, and the Cape was one of the few parts of the continent where white settlers had become established in any numbers. Disease had been one of the main reasons for this, as yellow fever and malaria, in particular, took their toll on European lives, especially in West Africa. By 1800 West Africa had gained the epithet “the white man’s grave,” and in the European psyche had become the “worst of the world’s pathogenic spaces” due to its “plague-ridden climate.”⁵ During the eighteenth century, negative views about tropical environments and their diseases had become increasingly engrained in the Western imagination, because of high mortality rates, which fueled insecurities about individual survival, and questions about the long-term viability of European colonization outside the temperate zones. In discussions about rabies in southern Africa, writers often referred to the region as tropical. This mixture of epidemiological facts and imaginings contributed to the invention of “tropicality,” which the historian David Arnold has identified as a “way of defining something culturally alien to, as well as environmentally distinct from, Europe and other parts of the temperate world.”⁶ Similarly, Nancy Stepan has argued that the idea of tropicality was as much about forging a European identity as it was a physical space. Northern Europeans compared the climate, geography, and disease of their own countries with those of other lands and focused on the variations, effectively “othering,” and, by implication, declaring overseas environments inferior or more threatening. The term “tropical,” in Stepan’s words, “signified a place of radical otherness to the temperate world, with which it contrasted and which it helped constitute.”⁷

During the nineteenth century, ideas about tropicality evolved in response to the great increase in European knowledge about the African continent, brought about by the activities and writings of explorers, travelers, hunters, and missionaries. The eminent missionary doctor David Livingstone, for example, first visited southern Africa in the 1840s and subsequently regaled Western audiences with his tales of hitherto undescribed places and peoples and the wonders of the Victoria Falls. Significantly, in the context of this history, Livingstone engaged in debates about the existence of rabies in South Africa. The memoirs of travelers such as Livingstone, as well as accounts by doctors and settlers who submitted articles to local South African newspapers, informed not only colonial understandings of rabies but also influenced the ideas of doctors and veterinary surgeons based in the metropole.

The Case against the Existence of Rabies in South Africa before 1893

In his memoir, Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa, John Barrow commented on the surprising absence of rabies in the Cape. He had landed in Cape Town on 4 May 1797 to take up employment as the private secretary to Governor Macartney,⁸ who immediately ordered him to carry out a political and economic survey of the colony to assess its overall value to the British crown. The book that followed was a recollection and analysis of the situation in the Cape, which the British had seized from the Dutch in 1795.⁹ Napoleon’s annexation of Holland in that year raised fears that the French would also take over the Dutch colonies, including the strategically important Cape of Good Hope, which stood as a victualing station on the sea route between Europe and Asia. At that time India formed the centerpiece of Britain’s imperial and commercial ambitions, and securing this sea route was integral to British foreign policy.

In his work, Barrow noted the general healthiness of the Cape environment, rendering it particularly suitable for British occupation and settlement. Disease had so far proved a barrier to European settlement in parts of Africa, so his analysis of local diseases was important in planning further colonization. Barrow’s account was also notable because he was probably the first writer to bring up the issue of rabies in southern Africa, and he discussed it in relation to European ideas about the etiology of infectious diseases at the turn of the nineteenth century. Based on his European experiences, Barrow’s familiarity with rabies was limited to dogs, and it was only in the context of canine rabies that he questioned its existence.

Rabies killed hundreds of people and probably thousands of canids in Britain and western Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time when recorded cases of the disease were on the rise. Europeans lived in fear of rabies as a cause of death, and it was often the subject of public health policies. These policies included the culling of stray dogs, canine confinement orders, and licensing.¹⁰ Strays were a real and symbolic manifestation of untamed nature and uncontrollable diseases, and therefore something to be feared. In Britain, police and local residents tried to protect themselves from rabies by killing seemingly ownerless dogs. Frequent public spectacles, especially in the urban areas, helped keep the image of raging dogs and tortured hydrophobics alive in the popular imagination.¹¹

In his writings, Barrow described the types of dogs that roamed the thoroughfares and also put forward his own medical explanations for the absence of rabies in South Africa. He viewed Cape Town’s dogs as “the most lean and miserable looking creatures I ever beheld,” generally neglected by their African or Afrikaner owners.¹² Many dogs were forced to scavenge for food, mingling with hyenas and “wolves” in the streets, and competing for edible refuse and offal discarded by urban butchers. Dogs came into close contact with other foragers, so the potential for animals to contract rabies, if it existed in Cape Town, was high. Barrow’s social narrative reflected the views of middle-class commentators from early nineteenth-century Britain who regarded rabies as the curse of working-class neighborhoods, based on the assumption that poor people neglected the health and welfare of their dogs, underfed them and engaged in “uncivilized” and brutal sports such as dog fights.¹³ Barrow was equally unimpressed by the dogs he encountered in the eastern Cape. There African communities owned large herds of cattle and “dogs in innumerable quantities,” which were “painful to look at.”¹⁴ The historian Jacob Tropp has shown that such narratives formed part of a growing critique of African dog keeping, which was symptomatic of colonial fears about unmanageable dogs, by analogy reflecting a colonial angst about the state’s ability to govern African people.¹⁵

Culturally and economically, dogs were an integral part of African communities. In 1497 the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama recorded that San hunter-gatherers in South Africa had dogs. Later reports and reminiscences showed that many people in the interior, both African and Afrikaner, kept them also. Throughout southern Africa, people valued dogs for security and guarding, for hunting and for rooting out vermin. According to the British traveler William Burchell, who visited southern Africa in the 1810s, it was important to have a pack of various types of dogs because individual canids had different skills. Some were used for protecting people and stock against human interlopers and wild beasts. Others were kept for their loud barks that could frighten off intruders. The more courageous and ferocious dogs were prepared to take on vicious carnivores such as lions, jackals, leopards, and African wild dogs. Bushmeat was an important food source, and dogs with a good nose and a speedy gait were indispensable for tracking and pursuing game.¹⁶

John Henderson Soga, a Presbyterian missionary who preached in the Transkei in the late nineteenth century, explained the importance of hunting in the lives of the Xhosa people of the eastern Cape. Soga was the son of Tiyo Soga, the first ordained black Presbyterian minister in South Africa, and his Xhosa background placed him in a unique position to discuss local practices of dog keeping. He recounted how the Xhosa supplemented their diet with game and also hunted for sport. Like settlers, they prized particular types of dogs that were useful to them, such as the i-twina, an indigenous type of greyhound, ideally suited for the chase.¹⁷ In some societies people believed dogs could combat witchcraft. The Mpondo, for example, kept large numbers of dogs to ward off the tokoloshe. These were witches’ familiars, dwarflike beings with baboon faces, who featured in Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho folklore as emissaries of evil or misfortune.¹⁸ Indeed, dogs could be familiars themselves, bearing “a message of malice” from their owners, especially if they actively sniffed at people or were found urinating in someone’s house or jumping on someone’s roof.¹⁹ The cultural meaning of dogs in African societies was therefore multifarious and could vary from dog to dog and from community to community.

Dogs were not necessarily pets in the modern meaning of the term, coddled and continuously fed with succulent meats and eventually packaged dog biscuits, first pioneered by James Spratt in Britain in the 1860s.²⁰ Dogs kept as pets were the prize possessions of the rich, but in the rural areas and the poorer neighborhoods dogs lived off scraps and whatever food they could find. Burchell, like Barrow, noted how scraggy and emaciated many domestic dogs were. Writing about the “Bachapins” (the Thlaping) who lived on the northern border with present-day Botswana, he suggested, “They feed them so sparingly that they barely preserve them from starvation; giving them nothing but the bones, and not always these, as the more spongy parts, such as the ends of the leg bones, are frequently eaten by the men, after being pounded into small particles.”²¹ In the arid districts of the northern Cape and Botswana food was in short supply, and it seemed that the bones and offal that in Britain individuals would have normally thrown to the dogs were greedily devoured by ravenous people. Barrow’s and Burchell’s accounts showed that surviving as a dog, as well as a human, could be difficult in both urban and rural settings.

Nevertheless, Barrow and Burchell were convinced that “canine madness” was absent from the Cape, despite the large numbers of dogs and the possibility of transmission through communal scavenging and fighting with wild animals. Burchell reported that “hydrophobia or canine madness . . . is unknown in these regions” and that he never encountered it during his five years in the Cape (1810 to 1815).²² Barrow gave more details and believed that despite the heat of the climate, canine rabies and hydrophobia in humans were totally unknown.²³ Barrow was interested in the Western medical debates about the cause of diseases, and he saw a definite link between hydrophobia in humans and the bite of a rabid dog. He used his observations in the Cape to disprove the idea that hot temperatures somehow increased a dog’s susceptibility to rabies: “That canine madness is not owing to heat of climate, as we are apt to suppose in England, may be inferred from its non-existence in Egypt, in the islands of the East and the West Indies, and other tropical situations, as well as at the Cape of Good Hope.”²⁴ In Britain, outbreaks of rabies tended to be associated with hotter weather—the so-called dog days of July and August. During these months, British municipalities often published notices warning people of the disease and responded to suspected cases by killing stray dogs.²⁵ Such reasoning suggested that rabies should have been rampant in the Cape. But nineteenth-century understandings of rabies were complex and often contradictory, as illustrated in Barrow’s counternarrative that suggested that heat had little if anything to do with outbreaks of rabies. Nonetheless, there was little evid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Introduction. A Modern Plague
• Chapter 1. Travelers and Doctors
• Chapter 2. Death in “Little Bess”
• Chapter 3. Crossing the Zambezi
• Chapter 4. Beware of the Wild “Cats”
• Chapter 5. Rabid Dogs and Frenzied Jackals
• Chapter 6. Terror Hits the Streets
• Chapter 7. The Virus Lives On
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index