1890s African rinderpest epizootic

"[1] It killed more than 5.2 million cattle south of the Zambezi,[2] as well as domestic oxen, sheep, and goats, and wild populations of buffalo, giraffe, and wildebeest.

Starvation spread across the region, resulting in the death of an estimated third of the human population of Ethiopia and two-thirds of the Maasai people of Tanzania.

[4] This formed the ideal habitat for tsetse fly and allowed them to expand from central and western Africa to the rest of the continent.

Despite the familiarity of Rinderpest to Europeans, it had ceased to become a problem in many countries, such as Germany, through modern veterinary policing and cross-border regulation of the cattle trade.

[6] It was carried by infected cattle imported from British Asia to feed the Italian soldiers invading Eritrea in East Africa.

A popular Ethiopian tradition asserts that the Italians deliberately inoculated their cattle with rinderpest as part of their campaign against Ethiopia.

[10] In addition, Africa experienced a series of unfortunately timed meteorological El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events between late 1880s to the early 1890s.

[11] Frederick Lugard, future Governor-General of Nigeria, is noted to have said, "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.

The disease swept across the northern provinces of Tigray and Shewa southwards, resulting in an estimated 90% mortality of the country's cattle population and wildlife, including bu¡aloes and antelopes.

Additional problems arose as the rinderpest also killed animals such as buffalo, Grant’s gazelle, and giraffes, meaning that predators like lions and hyenas had fewer alternatives when hunting.

Smallpox was exacerbated as the mass migration of people attempting to avoid the rinderpest outbreak led to increased infection.

Rinderpest is believed to have arrived in the Ouaddaï Region by 1891, and Parfait-Louis Monteil's expedition into West Africa encountered "cattle plague" in what is now Dori, Burkina Faso in April of 1891.

Despite the massive amount of cattle death among the Maasai, the epizootic was only shown concern by the Germans when the livestock around ports and military stations began to die.

[14] The German response to rinderpest often included border controls, as well as preventative slaughtering of otherwise healthy cattle, increasing dissatisfaction and anger among the local population.

Among the Maasai people, who were primarily pastoral cattle herders, rinderpest contributed to mass famine, and often forced them to rely on outside ethnic polities that practice agriculture, like the Wayambo.

"[7] The virus damaged various areas of society for pastoralists in Southern Bechuanaland, modern day Botswana, as cattle was crucial to their survival.

As a result of this, many communities turned to skinning and dried out the meat of the large number of carcasses to preserve them, however this was only a temporary solution to famine.

Cow manure was a useful material that was used in various ways in African countries, including to plaster walls and floors, and also as a natural fertilizer on the land.

The loss of cattle further affect agriculture by forcing farmers to find an alternative to manure and farm in new ways to bring yield.

[20] Rinderpest impoverished many hundreds of black peasant tenants and caused them to either be driven off the land or made them more indebted to white landlords.

This was seen as beneficial for many colonialists, who saw this as a way to move Africans away from traditional methods of farming and cattle herding to developing habits of industry and waged labor.

In addition, former cattle herders who, having lost their economic livelihoods, turned to hunting, which forced them to encroach into bush areas with increased populations of tsetse fly.

Horses, in combination with dogs, were used to aid in hunting of game, while donkeys were used as pack animals and helped restart trade and social networks.

The policy of many of the colonialists in Africa in response to the spread of rinderpest was the preventative slaughter of healthy cattle, often to protect European livestock.

[26] The efforts of the British South Africa Company to stamp out the disease using quarantines, trade bans, and extermination of healthy cattle that came into contact with suspicious herds was the primary cause of the Second Matabele War, in which the spiritual leader of the Northern Ndebele people (Matabele), Mlimo, incited the local population by stating that the settlers were responsible for the rinderpest epizootic, as well as the simultaneous locust plagues, and cattle diseases of the region.

There were few veterinarians on the ground to identify the disease, and observations of wildlife mortality, which was not considered a characteristic of European rinderpest, confused diagnoses.

The South African Republic and German government, largely in southern and eastern Africa, worked to find an effective vaccine.

Famine and civil unrest caused by political violence halted the eradication and led to future epizootics throughout the 1980s, primarily in the Horn of Africa.