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Fierce species: Biological imperialism

The concepts of biological or ecological imperialism and biological exchanges highlight the role of biological invaders in environmental change. The European conquest of the Americas, for example, was as much a product of the (uninten- tional) introduction of Old World biological species as of military might. Biolog- ical invaders from the Old World, including smallpox germs, sheep, cattle, horses and a host of plants, accompanied European conquerors, decimating New World indigenous human, animal and plant populations, destroying the local natural environment, and transforming the Americas into a Neo-Europe.1 As part of the Old World, Africa has long been regarded as immune from biological imperialism from Europe. In addition, Africa was seen—implicitly or explicitly—as being complicit in the Old World’s biological imperialism in the New World because several of the invading species were carried on the ships that brought African slaves to the New World—for example, malaria, yellow fever and trypanosomiasis.2 Not only was Africa considered immune to European biological imperialism, but tropical Africa’s own particular disease environment

1 Crosby, The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism. 2 Kiple, The Caribbean Slave.  chapter  was portrayed as a formidable obstacle to European intrusions, as illustrated by its reputation as the ‘White Man’s Grave’. A range of diseases, including malaria, sleeping sickness, schistosomiasis, bilharzia and river blindness, mired European military, political, economic and ecological conquest.3 Various Eurasian and American species introduced in Africa, however, behaved much like invasive species. Like smallpox in the Americas, bovine pleuronomia (lungsickness or cattle TB) and rinderpest (cattle plague), spread like wildfire when they were introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century, deci- mating domestic cattle and other susceptible domestic and wild animal species in Africa. The impact of lungsickness utterly destroyed South Africa’s Xhosa soci- ety in the s.4 Moreover, European biological and nonbiological imperialism also unleashed indigenous species from their ‘natural’ niches in Africa and trans- formed them into plagues and pests, vermin and weeds as well as unintended col- laborators with the colonial invaders because they disturbed precontact ecosys- tems. One example is sleeping sickness in Africa, an endemic disease that turned into a deadly epidemic during the era of colonial conquest.5 Thus, the notion of biological imperialism appears to be more appropriate to Africa than sometimes has been acknowledged. In north-central Namibia, the biological invaders included microbes that introduced at least three major human diseases (influenza, measles and the plague) and three animal diseases (lungsickness, rinderpest and foot and mouth), as well as two new animal species (the horse and the donkey). In addition, during the colonial era, several species of animals were (re)classified as vermin. Indigenous species that under thenew circumstances had opportunistically infested the environment were recast as both the cause and the effect of new ecological and biological imbalances that were associated with imperialism and colonialism, including such wild animals as lions, leopards, cheetahs, wild dogs and elephants, as well as domestic cattle and goats.

3 Curtin, Disease and Empire. 4 Van Onselen, “Reactions to Rinderpest in Southern Africa”; Peires, The Dead Will Arise. 5 Lyons, The Colonial Disease; Headrick, Colonialism, Health and Illness in French Equatorial Africa; Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, pp. –; Kjekhus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History; Suret-Canale, Afrique Noire, pp. , –; Hartwig and Patterson, Disease in African History.