Transhumance, Animal Diseases and Environment in the Cape, South Africa

Abstract

The focus of this article is on a paradox of kinds. I suggest that transhumance in South Africa was shaped not least by the imperatives of animal nutrition and health, including the avoidance of specific animal diseases. But the quest for improved disease control, especially by route of veterinary regulation, played a significant role in the gradual demise of transhumance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A secondary theme concerns the changing causes and character of movement as the livestock economy became increasingly commercial in the nineteenth century. Thirdly, some social and environmental aspects of transhumance and its curtailment - which were of considerable importance in South African history - are addressed.

Full text

SAHJ
Transhumance, animal diseases and environment in the Cape, South Africa
The Context of Transhumance
Livestock were central to African and settler societies in Southern Africa over a long
period. Transhumance, or trekking in South African settler language, was intrinsic to
white and black livestock management certainly up to the early decades of the twentieth
century. By transhumance, I mean the movement of people with livestock – a practice
common to many societies, especially but not only in regions with large areas of pasture
land held in common (or at least not privately owned). The practice is not restricted to
pastoralists, or those who specialise in livestock, and it takes a multitude of forms. I will
concentrate largely, but not exclusively on white livestock owners.
The focus of this article is on a paradox of kinds. I suggest that transhumance in South
Africa was shaped not least by the imperatives of animal nutrition and health, including
the avoidance of specific animal diseases. But the quest for improved disease control,
especially by route of veterinary regulation, played a significant role in the gradual
demise of transhumance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A secondary
theme concerns the changing causes and character of movement as the livestock economy
became increasingly commercial in the nineteenth century. Thirdly, some social and
environmental aspects of transhumance and its curtailment – which were of considerable
importance in South African history – are addressed. An older historiography, and in
particular the books of P.J. van der Merwe, which explored some of these themes, is
perhaps neglected in recent literature.1 But it is being taken up again in association with
new concerns such as the imposition of state authority in connection with livestock
enumeration and environmental conservation, as well as new insights into Afrikaner
ethnicity.2 And in conclusion, brief reference will be made to recent debates about
transhumance in Africa. Academic discussion tends to be critical of colonial and post-
colonial policies that have attempted to control or sedentarise pastoralists, or to blame
them for environmental degradation.3 The South African historical material might open
the way to modify this analysis – at least in respect of animal health.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German physician Lichtenstein enjoyed the
idea that even he, as a scientist in a large, official touring party, was to some degree subject
to the general restless movement of South Africa.
We were indeed become perfect nomades, sharing the lot of most of the inhabitants of
southern Africa, whom nature disposes, or compels, to stated changes of habitation. The
colonists are driven by the snow from the mountains down to the Karoo; the Caffre [Xhosa]
hordes forsake their valleys when food for their cattle begins to fail, and seek others where
grass is more abundant; the Bosjeman is fixed to no single spot of his barren soil, but every
night reposes his weary head in a different place from the former. The numerous flocks of
light footed deer, the clouds of locusts, the immeasurable trains of wandering caterpillars,
these, all instructed by nature, press forward from spot to spot.4

Lichtenstein, as in the case of many later authors, saw movement as `instructed by
nature’. Transhumance was often a response to seasonal ecological opportunities and
constraints, as well as irregular climatic variation such as drought. Pastures and water are
key resources for all ruminants. Wildlife, which move themselves, provide a pointer.
The best known example of mass animal movement in southern Africa was the irregular
springbok trek from Namaqualand and the southern Kalarhari to the wetter eastern Karoo
and sometimes in other directions.5 Millions of animals would trek in some years -
giving rise to spectacular descriptions. It was a complex phenomenon, affected both by
population dynamics and environmental factors. By the late nineteenth century this
irruption was terminated by hunting, the spread of commercial pastoralism and fencing.
Livestock generally move as they eat and they retain instinctive traits around food and
water procurement. If left to themselves, or when they go feral, they can cover
significant distances. When Anders Sparrman, the scientific traveller at the Cape in the
1770s, admired his Khoikhoi guides’ capacity to find water in a semi arid environment,
they told him that they were guided by the oxen.6 In the travel literature on the Cape,
there are many accounts of animals straying from outspans and camp sites in quest of
better pasture – a major headache for travellers of all kinds. Some nineteenth century
vets at the Cape believed that animals naturally sought a balanced diet. People compared
themselves to animals in their predisposition to transhumance. As a northern Cape
farmer told van der Merwe in the 1930s, ‘as die Karoo reen gekry het, loop ek weg soos
‘n perd’. [If it rained in the Karoo, I took off there like a horse]. 7
Livestock were more usually moved under human control in different seasons, or from
highlands to lowlands, or from winter to summer rainfall zones (roughly a line bisecting
the colony north-west from Port Elizabeth). Animals were moved less predictably during
droughts or to avoid diseases. The regularity of movement depended partly on ecological
conditions and the specific terrain. Some environmental changes were seasonal and
predictable while others were less so; livestock owners sometimes went ‘trekking about
“after the rain”’ or `chasing thunderstorms in the desert’.8 Different animals sometimes
required different strategies. The seasonal dynamics of herd and flock reproduction were
also important as ewes, for example, needed adequate food for lambing. Thus multiple
local patterns of transhumance evolved. The distances involved were sometimes, but not
always, related to the aridity of the land. Movements were likely to be over a longer
distance in the drier western half of the colony than the wetter eastern.
Most rural societies in southern Africa kept livestock, and these enabled some of them to
occupy, seasonally or permanently, areas with rainfall too low for cultivation. In turn
domesticated animals converted grasses and shrubs to the proteins that were central to
many human diets. Under the conditions of production prevalent in many areas up to the
early decades of the nineteenth century, mobility of animals, and to a degree of people
(and as a corollary instability in settlement) was required for a more stable supply of
food. Transhumance increased the number of livestock that could be kept throughout the
year. The practice was related also to social choices and constraints. To some degree, the
scale of mobility was influenced, in different societies, by their degree of dependence for
food on their herds and flocks. Hence it tended to be more pronounced in societies which

placed less emphasis on cultivation, such as the Khoisan and trekboers. Amongst
Afrikaners, it was associated with hunting and social freedom during particular periods of
the year.
Before discussing disease and transhumance in more detail, it is important to
contextualise and elaborate on the changing causes of transhumance. As the nineteenth
century progressed, it is increasingly problematic to think about the movement of
livestock simply in relation to relatively stable localised ecologies. One new factor was
environmental degradation, such as the deterioration of veld, or drying up of fountains
(springs), which was often cited as one of the pressures behind the movement of animals.
Secondly, the term ‘trek’, used by Afrikaners and adopted into English, also carried the
connotation of permanent migration, and this, in addition to seasonal transhumance, was
an important element in movement as settlement expanded in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The routes of trekboers into the eastern Cape, first to the area
around Graaff-Reinet and then to the Zuurveld were plotted not least around water and
grazing for the livestock. P.J. van der Merwe explored these interrelated processes in
discussing the environmental background to the early expansion of Afrikaner trekkers
northwards; he analysed the Great Trek of the 1830s partly in this context. Eric Walker
was also interested in the way that the pastoral economy and terrain shaped migration.9
This strand in the literature has perhaps been lost. For example, Norman Etherington, in
The Great Treks (2001), makes reference to the importance of cattle to early nineteenth
century societies, but does not explain how the dynamics of the pastoral economy shaped
treks.10
Thirdly, transhumance was inseparable from power relations as settlers, and some more
dominant African societies, stamped their authority over land, water, and transport
corridors. For example, settlers colonised the areas north of Graaff-Reinet by force over
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and in turn developed new forms of
seasonal transhumance.11 Conversely, the loss of control over land, for example in the
case of the Khoikhoi, spelt the demise of many of their transhumant routes. In the first
half of the nineteenth century, African chiefdoms such as the Zulu, Sotho, Mpondo and
Pedi were expanding their territories and their potential pastures. On the boundaries of
the Cape, the Bhaca and Hlubi – refugees from conflict in KwaZulu/Natal – in turn took
possession of new land in what became East Griqualand. Griqua movement, and the new
patterns of transhumance they established, were a result both of the loss and regaining of
territory. They moved from West to East Griqualand under pressure from settlers during
the 1860s. Their epic trek in fact took them, by chance, from semi-arid plains to richer
pastures. Initially they lost large numbers of animals in the grassy and mountainous
Griqualand East, but a brief window of political control offered new opportunities for the
exploitation of pastures.
Fourth, and as corollary of this point about the political dimensions of transhumance, the
management and movement of livestock were sometimes associated with conflict.
Conflict over grazing is often mentioned in relation to the competition between Boer and
Xhosa for the Zuurveld – the coastal zone on the eastern frontier of settler expansion in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. But there is little specific information in

the secondary literature on the precise relationship between pastures, transhumance and
conflict. Up till the late nineteenth century, Southern Africa contained a multitude of
polities with complex relations to one another. The boundaries between them were fluid
and this space, in particular, was contested and negotiated. The movement of animals
was a significant element in those power relations. Stock theft, which entailed rapid and
sometimes long-distance movement, could be a manifestation of, or strategy in, conflict.
Stolen livestock, raided livestock, animals claimed in tribute, in marriage, in settlements
of disputes all had to eat, find water, and be kept healthy. Large-scale movement of
livestock was intrinsic to warfare for much of the century. Animals were taken to places
of shelter or seized and moved as booty. This did not necessarily diminish as the
character of warfare changed in the late nineteenth century. The last and finally decisive
war against the Xhosa in 1877-8 led to captured cattle being spread through many
colonial districts. And the South African War of 1899-1902 saw extraordinary
intensification of animal traffic, required to move half a million British troops and their
equipment, as well as to supply them. On the Boer side, animals were needed to support
the guerrilla struggle.
Fifth and perhaps most important, transhumance was also intimately connected with
trade, commodification and markets. This applied even to pre-colonial trading, for
example long distance movements by the Khoikhoi who exchanged cattle for dagga,
tobacco and metal goods from Xhosa and Tswana.12 Most settler livestock owners sold a
portion of their animals annually, and increasingly Africans participated in the cattle
trade. Up to the early nineteenth century, before the development of military,
administrative and mining towns in the eastern Cape and the interior, livestock had to be
driven long distances to Cape Town.13 The early nineteenth century trans-Karoo routes
from Cape Town to Graaff-Reinet was dependent on the seasons and could be severely
affected by droughts. Subsequently, markets for meat gradually became more devolved,
but reaching them still often entailed a major journey of some days or even weeks.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, it was increasingly common for speculators, or
livestock dealers, to go to farms, or to rural traders, or to African settlements to purchase
animals. They needed to move large quantities of livestock quickly to new pastures or
urban abattoirs and they in turn became another branch of the transhumant economy and
culture. Farmers sometimes offloaded livestock before the dry season thus using the market
to diminish environmental risk. In effect, they transferred the risk to the speculator, but the
animals still had to be moved. Some farmers doubled as speculators. One giving evidence
to the 1894 Scab Commission, based in Cathcart, bought livestock as far afield as
Colesberg, Burghersdorp and Dordrecht - distances of up to 400 kms. It was not only the
marketed flocks and herds that had to be moved, but sometimes also the ox-wagons and
horses on which the drovers depended.
The switch to merino sheep after the 1820s, and their rapid increase to five million in the
1850s and a nineteenth century peak of about 12 million in the Cape by 1890, signified
the rapid commodification of livestock farming in the Colony, although this was less
marked in the arid northern and western zones.14 Merinos also created a major new
carrying trade. Almost all of their wool, which became the main cash crop of many rural

districts, was exported. This necessitated tens of thousands of ox-wagon trips from the
interior to the ports annually. Ox-wagons were also essential for the long-distance
movement of goods – a transport economy intensified but not created by the mineral
discoveries. The number of oxen recorded in the Cape increased rapidly in the second
half of the nineteenth century as did other animals used for transportation. While census
figures may not give the full picture, the increases recorded between 1855 and 1891 were
from 160,000 to 405,000 for oxen, 143,000 to 317,000 for horses, and 24,000 (1865) to
92,000 for mules. I would suggest, perhaps counter-intuitively, that long-distance
transhumance was increasingly related to markets and commodification rather than
environmental factors in the nineteenth century. The cattle drives from Texas to the
railheads that served Chicago’s meat market, from the 1860s to 1880s, and also those to
the southern ports are analogous market-linked patterns of transhumance.15
The pace of movement was limited by the ox-wagons, or by the shepherds on foot - about
20km a day on easy stretches. Any long distance traffic depended heavily on daily access
to pastures for all of these animals. Waggoners, called transport riders or kurveyors at the
Cape, carrying wool and other commodities along the corridor between Queenstown and
East London, tried to time their trips to coincide with the dry winter months when grazing
was at a premium in the interior, but higher rainfall kept the coastal grass fresher and
softer.16 This long distance commercial wagon route depended to some degree on seasonal
resources. The kurveyors, who were both white and black (umbexeshi wenqelo in Xhosa),
and many of whom had links with the agrarian economy, slept out on the move, alongside
their wagons.
In sum, changing patterns of transhumance through the nineteenth century were only
partly related to ecology and disease; they must be considered in a more complex
analytical frame. Animal health, rainfall, household requirements, commercial
considerations, markets, transport riding, conflict and theft avoidance could all be
calculations in a particular pattern or set of movements. Despite the increasing
sedentarisation of both white and black agriculture, the movement of animals probably
became more rather than less significant in the Cape economy and society. Can all of
these practices be called transhumance? Finding a norm is an elusive exercise. The
apparently classic patterns of east African pastoralists or the southern African Khoikhoi –
where whole communities moved on a number of occasions in the year with their animals
- were not generally replicated in South Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. It was
not the norm for whole African settlements to move regularly, but more common for
young men to be sent away with livestock to winter pastures or for longer periods, in the
Tswana-speaking chiefdoms, to cattle posts. Mobile trekboers survived up to the 1930s
in the arid lands of the northern and northwestern Cape and there were regular patterns of
transhumance from the western Cape mountains. But increasingly white farmers who
moved livestock became sedentary. Animals were sent with sons or clients or servants,
even if the owner accompanied them initially. Perhaps, on the one hand, we could
exclude daily movements to and from African homesteads or white farmsteads. This was
usually called kraaling in South Africa. On the other hand, we might exclude long
distance mail carriages pulled by horses that largely ate fodder. In between the two
extremes were many different examples, which changed through time.

Transhumance and Disease
Transhumance, whatever its context, was closely tied up with animal nutrition; nutrition in
turn was imbricated with disease. Animal disease is quite often cited in sources as a factor
in explaining the many different localised patterns of movement. Khoikhoi herders north of
the Cape peninsula spent part of the year south of Saldanha bay on the coast, where the
grazing was rich. They did so to avoid the cattle disease called lamziekte by Afrikaners,
which caused lameness and death.17 It was later discovered to be a type of botulism,
contracted by cattle that consumed infected animal matter - particularly rotting carcasses.
Soils and plants in parts of the Western and northern Cape interior were deficient in
phosphorous and cattle tried to get the required minerals through eating bone and carcasses.
Some farmers followed earlier Khokhoi practice after they had displaced them, moving
animals to parts of the west coast seasonally.18 While neither Khoikhoi nor settlers knew the
cause in the nineteenth century, the disease was associated with drought and deficiency, and
transhumance to particular grazing resources was known as an effective prophylaxis.
Cattle owners in some coastal districts, especially in the midland and eastern Cape, were
similarly threatened. Xhosa chiefs on the western peripheries of their settlements moved
their livestock between coast and interior or between sourveld and sweetveld zones
seasonally. Peires records that they too did so to avoid botulism and ‘stiff sickness’.19 The
Xhosa blamed bad grass for illnesses. On occasion, chiefs actually moved their residence
within their zone of political authority. Chungwa, the Gqunukwebe chief, moved his
homestead westward across the Sundays closer to Uitenhage every year in the early
nineteenth century. Peires suggests that ‘transhumance knew no boundaries’, but – as noted
above - patterns of movement were circumscribed by political control and a major effect of
settler encroachment was to curtail African transhumance on this frontier.
Sour and sweetveld were inexact terms adapted from Europe and in widespread use by
colonists from the late eighteenth century. Sourveld referred to grass types in higher rainfall
areas, either nearer the coast or on uplands, which formed a denser sward. In summer
rainfall areas of the eastern Cape, it was rich in spring and early summer, but the grasses
quickly hardened on seeding and became indigestible to livestock. Sweetveld predominated
in dryer areas, where the grasses were often more patchy, and water could be a problem. It
remained more palatable for a much longer period, but was particularly susceptible to
overgrazing. Where these, or intermediate grass types, were relatively closely juxtaposed,
livestock were moved between them seasonally. African languages have terms for these
grass types. In Xhosa sourveld is called ijojo and sweetveld isandle; in Zulu, sourveld is
called ngongoni. The latter was adopted as the common English name for Transkeian
coastal sourveld, and for the species Aristida junciformis found in it.
Basil Samson examined in detail the ecological constraints shaping the differences in the
settlement and land use practices of African societies on the east coast and in the interior of
South Africa.20 On the eastern seaboard, cut through by a multitude of perennial rivers and
streams, settlement tended to be dispersed and a variety of pastures were generally available
close to the homesteads. In the drier, flatter interior, with fewer rivers, especially in Tswana

chiefdoms, settlement was concentrated. It was dangerous to keep large numbers of
livestock close by and cattle posts were essential. Tswana notables also sent cattle with
Bakgalagadi clients to exploit the Kalahari pastures after rainfall opened brief windows of
opportunity on the desert margins. Cattle diseases also played a role in encouraging these
strategies. For example, anthrax and lamsiekte were problems for the southern Tswana
settlement at Dithakong in the early nineteenth century when too many livestock were
concentrated around the main settlement - and the cattle posts were a means to avert them.21
It is not entirely correct to see grazing on the wetter eastern side of the Drakensberg as
primarily around the homesteads. In addition to the Xhosa example above, Mpondo chiefs
kept the high rainfall coastal zone of Lambasi free of habitation as a seasonal winter grazing
ground – at least in the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century - although
they did not move down there themselves.22 The Sotho and Hlubi communities of the
northern Transkei, moved their animals between the highlands in the spring, where ticks
were less prevalent and the sourveld grazing fresher, and lower ground in the dry winter.23
Jeff Guy argues that one factor in the emergence of a centralised state in Zululand in the
early nineteenth century was the need to avoid concentration of herds; conquest and
incorporation expanded the areas through which livestock could be moved.24 African
societies also adapted to contingencies. Some refugee Xhosa moved far from the main
settlements on the well-watered east coast in the late eighteenth century and established
themselves around the Gariep, Kareebergen and Pramberg in the semi arid interior.25 Here
they raided and traded in cattle, and also adopted the local transhumant patterns: they moved
seasonally from mountains to flats and those located at Schietfontein settlement, near the
Kareebergen, lived so migrant a life that they used reed huts in the manner of the Khoikhoi.
Beyond the Cape, Zulu livestock owners on the borders of the tsetse belt moved cattle from
the lowveld before the summer rainy season to higher land to avoid trypanosomosis. John
Ford suggested that one species of fly expanded its lowveld range, and apparently the rate
of transmission of trypanosomes, during the wet season.26 Seasonal migration to avoid
tsetse was commonplace in Africa. Annual movement from the lowveld to the highveld
became a central strategy in livestock management in the Eastern Transvaal, and later
farmers would purchase farms in both zones. This migration persisted into the 1950s in an
organised way.
It is problematic to conceive of Afrikaner frontier farmers as trekboers, or at least to
assume that they remained so for the whole of their lives. The frontier moved on quickly,
leaving more settled districts in its wake – and transhumance often took a more regular
localised pattern as new areas were claimed. In the winter-rainfall western mountains of
the Roggeveld and Bokkeveld, farmers with properties in higher zones migrated down to
the state owned trekvelden or their legplaats on the Karoo flats in the winter, from around
June to October, to escape the damp cold and the veld impoverished by frost.27 This
sequence was reported by travellers from the late eighteenth century, and its remnant
were found in operation by van der Merwe in the 1930s. Farmers said of the winter, ‘dan
ryp die veld dood’ [then the veld freezes dead]. 28 Few had sufficient shelter for their
sheep. In the shadow of the mountain, frost could stay till mid-morning; if sheep were

kept too long in the kraals they did not get sufficient grazing. If they were taken out of
the warm kraals onto frosty ground they were believed to get dikkop.
Geeldikkop manifested itself in facial lesions, yellowing and sensitivity to the sun; the
nostrils choked with mucus, lips hardened, the eyeballs could burst, and the liver
malfunction.29 Often fatal, it was commonly associated with the plant dubbeltjie doorn,
(Tribulus terrestris), although this linkage was only conclusively shown in the 1930s.
Animals were relatively safe if they grazed on the fresh green plants of this species,
which grew rapidly after rains, but particularly susceptible to the disease if they grazed
on the wilted leaves, especially in particular soils. The spread of dubbeltjie doorn was
associated by the 1920s with soil erosion and drought, particularly an intense drought in
1928 in the northwest Cape, which also led to more ‘rondtrek’ by farmers.30 The plant
spread rapidly after small showers and when it was the only edible green food could
cause major damage. Thus avoidance of geeldikkop – even if its cause was not clearly
established - did depend on carefully timed transhumance. In the Bokkeveld mountains,
sheep were also seen as susceptible to opblaas-siekte and krimpsiekte during winter. The
latter was generally a disease associated with goats, called nenta in the eastern Cape, and
caused by poisonous plants of the genus Tylecodon.31
Although the western Karoo was too dry for permanent settlement without artificial water
sources, Karoo bushes were thought excellent for animal nutrition - `a remedy, if [stock]
were diseased, which speedily restores them to health’.32 The belief in the healing powers of
Karoo shrubs remained strong throughout the nineteenth century. In the winter rainfall
area, the Karoo generally received enough rain to sustain the flocks for a few months. It
was a maxim amongst sheep farmers that, even if they did not move long distances, `the
oftener their place of feeding is changed, the better they thrive'; bad, or worn out pasture and
drought was seen to have an immediate impact in the manifestation of disease, especially
scab.33
Van der Merwe, who interviewed many livestock farmers in the Western and northern Cape
in 1938-9, noted that the trek was less regular than sometimes portrayed and perhaps even
less so at the time he wrote, when it was dying. 34 Those farmers who switched to woolled
sheep found their flocks could better withstand cold winters if they provided fodder. But the
expense of investment into fodder, shelter and fencing was still prohibitive for some. Two
centuries of experience also taught the farmers that the Karoo in winter was an ideal location
for lambing – it was warmer and dryer. The Karoo was an ‘ideale toevlugsoord vir die
veeboere van die ysige berge’ [an ideal place of flight for the stock farmers of the icy
mountains].
Bokkeveld farmers told him that they did not have enough calcium [kalk] in the sourveld of
the mountains for bone development, and the Karoo provided this. If they did not move,
they said, sheep bones ‘broke like glass’. He also noted that the language of explanation of
trekking had changed through the years. Widespread consciousness about overstocking and
veld degradation had led to increasing emphasis on this as a justification for movement,
even though advocates of veld conservation saw transhumance of all kinds as a major
problem. The trek, like many other localised patterns, could be relatively short, and usually

less than 150 km. But farmers from the Onder-Roggeveld, just south of Calvinia, trekked
300 km to the Kareebergen.
Those based in Namaqualand, the coastal zone of the northwestern Cape, could also be on
the move for longer periods over longer distances. Despite its aridity, Afrikaners took up
much of this land by the mid-eighteenth century, especially south of Port Nolloth and
Springbok, and some were still trekking in the 1930s. Here water was the determining
factor in transhumance and this produced a less regular pattern of migration.35 Most
Namaqualand farmers specialised in goats, which required particular care during the
lambing season. Their trek was from a winter to a summer rainfall area further inland in
what was called Bushmanland. They exploited the variety of environmental conditions by
crossing the line between rainfall zones. In the winter rainfall area of Namaqualand, the
grasses and even the bushes had deteriorated by December, as the hot dry summer drew on.
When rain fell in Bushmanland, it did so between January and April. Trekking enabled
farmers to keep a more constant level of livestock. It also saved the veld in their home
areas.
Farmers perceived that diseases increased in Namaqualand from September, especially
krimpsiekte.36 Bushmanland, in the interior, was known for the paucity of poisonous plants
and the nutritional value of bushmangrass.37 Most headed for the fountains at Pella,
Pofadder and other places close to the Gariep river. Wildlife also congregated around the
fresh green pastures south of the Gariep so that hunting, venison, and biltong were important
attractions. When settlement began in Bushmanland, initially around Pella, in the late
nineteenth century, a reverse trek began towards the coast during the dry inland winter. If
animals stayed there through the winter and ate too much dry grass, farmers believed that
they would get digestive problems and galsiekte; they also need bushes rich in salt and
phosphates, which were lacking in the interior of the northern Cape. This trek, also became
market related, in that the railway line snaked up the west coast and animals could be
fattened and transported to Cape Town.38
In the eastern Cape, a summer rainfall area, some farmers in the Sneeuberg, north of Graaff-
Reinet town, took sheep down to the warm, dry plains of the Camdeboo, south of the
settlement in the dry winters. This pattern of movement was established by the 1770s,
although it was disturbed for some decades by conflict with the Khoisan, whom the settlers
were displacing.39 It became established in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Some landowners tried to purchase farms that included the different grazing types on their
own land. As in the western Cape, sheep thrived on the Karoo shrubs and sweet grasses of
the Camdeboo when there was sufficient water. When the indigenous people had been
displaced to the north of the Sneeuberg, farmers also moved seasonally in that direction to
what became Middelburg, Richmond and Burghersdorp districts, and by the early nineteenth
century they were crossing the Gariep into the grasslands of the Free State.40
Similarly, those who had property on the Karoo flats sought pastures on the mountains in
the summer. Horses were sent to the Sneeuberg from the Camdeboo to avoid horsesickness,
caused by the culicoides midge, although that was not then known.41 Similar patterns can be
found, certainly in the late nineteenth century, around other upland, mountainous areas such

the Winterberg, which straddled Cradock, Bedford, Adelaide, Tarkastad and Queenstown
districts. As one English-speaking farmer said, they did so to `spare out veldt in the summer
months’.42 In parts of upland, grassy Barkly East, farmers moved livestock down to the
lower-lying borderlands of the Transkei in winter.43 This could cause problems in that
animals were susceptible to tickborne diseases in the lowlands and losses sometimes also
increased when animals returned to the higher grasslands.
Livestock were moved in emergencies to avoid infectious diseases during epizootics such as
lungsickness in the 1850s and 1860s. Avoidance was significant for African horsesickness,
and there were parts of the Cape, such as the Hantam mountains in Calivinia, which were
particularly favoured for horses because they seemed free from the periodic outbreaks of the
disease.44 This was observed in the eighteenth century and the Dutch East India Company
reserved land there as a common seasonal retreat. The rainfall in the Hantam was also
heavier than in the areas around and it was better supplied with fountains. Jacobus van
Reenen, the largest landholder in the district in the early nineteenth century, specialised in
horse-breeding.45 Outbreaks were generally seasonal, but more devastating epizootics
spread irregularly from the diseases endemic South African home in the eastern lowveld of
present day KwaZuluNatal and Mpumalanga. These reached a far larger area than
seasonally affected regions. Most farmers had too few horses to organise transhumance
around them, but some did move horses to avoid seasonal deaths.
Farmers in the Karoo and the eastern Cape bushveld moved their sheep locally to drier
areas to avoid geilsiekte in sheep, which they believed to be caused by rich grass,
following rains – especially when it wilted. The range of heartwater on the borders of the
eastern Cape grasslands depended on the ecological conditions suitable for the bont tick,
which could change, seasonally and for longer periods. Neither vets nor livestock owners
knew specifically about this link until the 1890s, though a few suspected it before.
However, losses from heartwater in some districts, such as Fort Beaufort, once relatively
free of the disease, became acute by the 1870s; some farmers had a sense of the moving
boundaries of the disease and how to avoid it.46 Concern about this disease was a
significant factor in the appointment of the 1877 Commission; this together with the
appointment of the first government vet has left particularly good records for that decade.
Sheep were moved from an area south of Graaff-Reinet in the 1870s because of blue
tongue, which had not been prevalent before. This disease is also transmitted by a midge.
While sheep are most susceptible, cattle, which are not affected, act as hosts. Livestock
owners had to adapt to occasional locust swarms, which ate grass - although they spared
most Karoo shrubs. Livestock were moved to avoid poisonous plants, such as nenta;
although it was not clearly identified, it was thought to predominate in kloofs. Ox-wagon
drivers altered their routes to avoid dronkgras (which weakened their oxen. Vleis, or
shallow, often seasonal, ponds, were by the 1870s a known source of liver fluke and thus
avoided for periods or fenced off. Many were drained or used for cultivation.
Records of transhumance up to the early twentieth century suggest that some patterns
were intimately related to animal nutrition and health in general, and specific diseases in
particular. They could be shaped by deficiencies in the grazing, by poisonous plants, or
insect borne diseases. Livestock owners did not necessarily have a clear knowledge of

causes or even sometimes the specific character of the diseases they were avoiding, but
many learnt by practice and observation. Some held to environmental interpretations of
animal disease, and this could reinforce their patterns of transhumance and avoidance.
Colonists drew some of this knowledge from Africans.
The Demise of Transhumance: Processes and Arguments
In this section, I would like to explore some of the reasons for the demise of
transhumance and also the arguments mounted against it. It is not my intention to make
definitive judgement about its benefits and costs. However, it is interesting to raise
questions as to whether transhumance was in fact advantageous for animal health
throughout the nineteenth century. The early government veterinary scientists at the
Cape, as well as a number of officials and commercial livestock farmers, perceived that
there was a crisis of animal health by the 1870s. They cited the spread of specific
diseases, the generally poor condition of livestock, and stabilisation or fall off in numbers
in some districts, after decades of rapid increase. Some also believed that veld
degradation was partly responsible for failing animal health. But many of the
transhumant routes described above continued up to this period, and I have suggested that
if the new commercial traffic is included, animal movements may have been approaching
a peak.
One way of explaining this coincidence may be to suggest that transhumant methods of
livestock management, relatively effective in controlling disease when space was
available and animal densities low, were undermined by the rapid increase in livestock
numbers and the expansion of commercial farming. But death rates of animals might not
have been lower in earlier times. Elphick suggests, for example, that the transhumant
Khoikhoi found it difficult to maintain their herds and they seem to have faced cycles of
growth and rapid loss.47 Transhumant trekboers took over a century to build their flocks
to about 1-1.5 million at the beginning of nineteenth century.
Transhumance in its older forms contributed to providing a food supply and managing
certain diseases, in the absence of investment into livestock farming. But the question is
whether even then it did not contribute to the spread of other diseases which, together
with the environmental constraints of water supply and pastures, limited the growth of
herds and flocks. By the second half of the nineteenth century, livestock movements of
all kinds probably did facilitate the spread of disease, and together with global transfers
by ship triggered new epizootics. Clearly, we need to distinguish between localised
movement for disease avoidance and long distance movement. But the government vets
in this period pointed to transhumance of all kinds, together with nightly kraaling, as
playing a major role in problems of animal health. The Cape was subject to recurrent
epizootics in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 1850s, glanders,
horsesickness and lungsickness caused devastation. Lungsickness remained endemic as
did scab in sheep. Redwater diminished the cattle herds in the 1870s, with a recurrence in
the early 1880s, while rinderpest (1896-7) and east coast fever (1902-13) devastated them.

It is an irony, that a major argument against transhumance was also related to animal
health and that as the state acquired the power to impose veterinary medical controls, so
the veterinary and scientific understanding of prophylaxis gained authority and was
gradually imposed.
It would be wrong to see veterinary measures as the only influence in curtailing
transhumance. As in the case of the practice itself, we should be aware of the multiplicity
of processes and causes. Just as power over land facilitated the movement of animals, so
its loss could curtail it. Most independent Khoikhoi transhumance was destroyed along
with their societies by the early nineteenth century although small communities retained
access to land in the northern Cape and around mission stations. For much of the
nineteenth century, British missionaries and officials (but not only them) railed against
the social costs of transhumance for blacks and whites. A more settled agriculture was
linked to ideas of civilization, control, progress, improvement, investment and education.
They could do little about it for long period, as in some frontier areas their authority was
‘tentative’.48 The north-western Cape in particular was long seen as lawless, retarded in
its embracement of wasteful farming practices and neglectful of the ‘spirit of
“improvement”’.49 Mission schools (some multiracial), itinerant circuit schools, farms
schools, poor schools and boarding schools all tried to cater for mobile Afrikaners. The
state and the church increasingly argued for the link between the old pastoral practices,
poverty and social retrogression. By the early twentieth century this was also the
Afrikaner elite consensus and the Carnegie Commission (1929-32) echoed the moral
turpitude associated with trekking. A central recommendation was that ‘social isolation
has to be lessened, as the effective means towards counteracting the force of tradition’
and ‘improved school education’ had to be an important part of this.50
Privatisation of land and the sale of public or crown lands, as well as survey and fencing
stopped some transhumant flows. This was not their main purpose – rather sale provided
income for the state, a greater likelihood of investment and improvement, and a means of
sorting out disputes over communal land rights. Equally important, springs were
privatised in the process as an important focus for the new farms. Officials believed
investment in water provision, would obviate the need to migrate – which in turn militated
against investment.51 They wanted, as the surveyor general noted in 1860: `enterprising
landowners, the makers of dams, the builders of houses, and cultivators of soil’.52 The
gradual spread of private property limited the options for those who were not owners,
both white and black. However, the impact was localised and privatisation of land was
coterminous with expansion of trekking in some zones. Alienation of crown land, including
areas that were part of trekvelden for some communities, began in the eighteenth century
and continued throughout the nineteenth century. 53 Some landowners continued the
practice by purchasing more than one farm in different areas. Similar strategies were
followed in the Eastern Transvaal and `large numbers of sheep were sent by Free State
farmers down to Natal’, where farms were leased, or purchased.54
Transhumance is sometimes associated with poverty and communal ownership but
ironically, wealthier farmers could more easily protect their access to trek farms. It is
also possible that increasing numbers of people farmed without owning land, partly by

transhumance, during the nineteenth century as rural populations increased and pastoralism
intensified.55 Using sources from the 1890s, Tamarkin records estimates indicating that
there were still a significant number of rondtrekkers in northern and northwestern distrcts,
more than a third of farmers, and a majority of farmers without land. These included the
sons of landowners.56 In Beaufort West it was estimated the threequarters of the sheep
moved out of the district in times of drought.
Forms of enclosure had a long history in the Cape, but once barbed wire became available,
fencing spread rapidly as a means of defining and protecting private property, as well as
excluding people and animals. Equally important, fencing made it possible to control
livestock on the farm, leave them out at night, and rotate camps. Between 1891 and 1911,
the extent of land fenced in the Cape increased from five to 20 million morgen (about 17
million ha.).57 Fencing both made trekking difficult and diminished the need for trekking.
Even in the vast farms of Bushmanland, van der Merwe found that some large landowners
felt it was a worthwhile investment. Those who had invested in fenced camps in the 1920s
and 1930s had stopped trekking and directly related the two.58 Dams, wells and boreholes
also allowed effective occupation of more private farms in the former trekvelden. Once
private landholding and fencing became more general landowners began to view the
seasonal appearance of remaining trekboers as ‘’n plaag, net soos sprinkane’ [a plague, just
like locusts]. 59 As a senior vet commented in 1928, ‘the time of trekking with livestock,
especially on a large scale, is past. Most of the land is now densely inhabited, and has so
many fenced farms, that trekking with cattle has become impracticable’. 60
Railways were a major factor from the 1880s, but with uneven outcomes. They certainly
reduced the need for long-distance ox-wagon transport along the main routes. But
wagons were still required for transport to railheads, and for carriage on farms and in the
African reserves. White farmers were sufficiently powerful to win rebates for the
transport of livestock by rail. Not only was the railway system widely used to send
livestock to market, but also for rail transhumance during droughts and even on a
seasonal basis. In the 1927-8 drought in the northwestern Cape, farmers used the railway
system for repeated movement of hundreds of thousands of livestock in search of water
and pasture.61 This in itself could result in large numbers of deaths because of inadequate
facilities at the stations, and long journeys with insufficient water. One farmer scouted
18,000 miles by car to look for grazing before moving animals by rail. The old Eastern
Transvaal migration between highveld and lowveld was partly displaced by rail
transhumance, with subsidised rates.62 In the 1932-3 drought, probably the most serious
in the first half of the twentieth century, an estimated eight million sheep, certainly over
10 per cent of the national herd, were moved by rail. By the 1930s, sheep were taken
from the western Cape mountains to the Karoo by lorry as well as overland. Families no
longer moved because school had claimed the children, and dried fruit production created
further demands around the main homestead. Van der Merwe heard that the
improvement of houses decreased the incentive for women to trek. Tent life, with all of
its inconveniences, was ‘nagenoeg dood’ [as good as dead]. 63
To this social and economic critique of transhumance, botanists and progressive farmers
added concerns about the destructive impact of tramping on vegetation and soil.64

Transhumance was associated with gulleys and soil erosion. Sustenance for oxen, herds
and flocks on the transport routes was increasingly a problem. Frequent movement of
livestock was seen as depleting the veld by tramping. It was also bad for the animals,
weakening them and reducing their weight. Moreover it was seen to contribute to
selective grazing which destroyed the most nutritious vegetation, prophylaxis against
disease and worms. If animals were kept in one place and allowed to graze freely night
and day in a fenced enclosure, they would eat a wider range of species more evenly. This
argument echoed down the years.
Veterinary Regulation and Transhumance
Against the background of this multi-pronged critique, vets pinpointed the role of trekking
in spreading disease, because infected livestock would carry their scab or germs with them
and `clean’ areas could not be protected. The Cape government employed a veterinary
surgeon in 1876 and subsequent to that, under both the Cape and Union governments, the
veterinary section of the Department of Agriculture was largest and the best funded. The
sequence of epizootics leant urgency to veterinary strategies and prompted a series of
interventions, uneven in their scale, that increasingly tied livestock down to a locality.
Control over movement was not the only method of dealing with diseases. From the mid-
nineteenth century, for example, farmers had used methods of inoculation as a prophylaxis
against lungsickness.65 Vets pursued inoculation for other diseases throughout the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Such techniques were rudimentary, most effective in the case of lungsickness, and could
also spread disease. The early vets, as also those in Britain, relied on the method of
quarantining infected herds, and slaughtering animals that displayed symptoms.66 Duncan
Hutcheon, senior government veterinary surgeon for the 1880s and 1890s, was closely
attuned to the infectious character of disease. In 1881 a Contagious Diseases Act on the
British model was passed to control movement of animals in and out of proclaimed zones of
infection. Prompted by an outbreak of lungisckness amongst goats, this was the first
potentially effective legislation. Local Boards composed of an official and two registered
landowners were empowered to quarantine individual farms and slaughter.67 There were
limits to government authority, however, in that the vet could only play an advisory role.
Afrikaner opposition was as much to do with compulsory slaughter as with controls over
movement, although farmers wished to defend that right, not least in response to disease.
Hutcheon worked with some English speaking farmers in the affected districts to implement
the Act locally.
The eastern Cape faced a serious epizootic of redwater in cattle in the early 1880s and
Hutcheon was convinced that the disease was spread mostly by ox-wagons along the main
trekking routes from the coast to interior. He did not know the cause of the disease and
believed it was infectious – in fact it was tickborne and its range was limited by ecological
conditions. Hutcheon worked with farmers to try to stop wagon traffic and isolate farms and
commonages considered as the core areas of infection. He was ultimately unsuccessfully in
imposing the 1881 Act because of opposition by farmers and transport riders. The

Kingwilliamstown Redwater Board did, however, advocate closing four districts under the
Act to all outside cattle while allowing free movement within this area. The Cape Mounted
Riflemen were required as guards.68 In the face of opposition, the state could not police
exclusion effectively. The causes of redwater were not understood and the veld seemed to
remain infected so that it could not so easily be stamped out by quarantine and slaughter.
Hutcheon concentrated especially on trying to isolate the transport corridors. The
Contagious Diseases Act was not specifically designed to halt transhumance, and once
animals were clean, it was again possible to move them. But the implications of the Act
were clear, should it be widely implemented, given the frequency of disease outbreaks.
Conflicts within rural white society came to a head over the state’s attempts to eradicate
scab from sheep. While the affliction did not kill directly, it debilitated animals and
greatly reduced wool yield and quality. Scab had followed sheep globally and there was
a copious literature on its treatment. Cape farmers had experimented over some decades
with dipping or washing their animals in tobacco and chemical solutions. Yet treatment
was of limited value as long as diseased animals could be moved at will. Movement of
livestock was of such importance to many sheep farmers, especially Afrikaners in the
dryer northern and western Karoo districts, that agreement could not be reached in the
Cape parliament on compulsory controls. In these districts also, farmesr largely kept
sheep for meat rather than wool and were less affected by scab. But Afrikaner farmers in
many other districts, including wool-farming districts were opposed to it.
Scab Acts requiring dipping and isolation were frequently discussed, but the measures
passed in 1874 and 1886 were permissive. In the latter case, farmers in a specific district
had to agree to implementation before the legislation was proclaimed. Controls could
then become binding. By 1888 after two years of the implementation, seventeen districts,
mostly in the Eastern Cape and mostly with a strong anglophone element, had accepted
the Act. They housed about five to six million sheep; government reports suggested that
the incidence of scab had declined from 15 to one per cent. Hutcheon, interviewed by
the Scab Commission in 1893, argued that there was a ‘vast improvement in the … whole
of the districts in which the scab act is in force’.69 The quality of wool also improved.70
Diseased animals could not be grazed on public outspans in proclaimed districts and the
regulation was so stringent that a permit was required to move infected sheep by rail.
Upcountry sellers in non-proclaimed districts had difficulty marketing their sheep.
Enterprising landowners and speculators took advantage of this. Walter Rubidge, a
leading advocate of scab control, farmed 9,000 sheep and goats, but also bought `a good
many sheep from all parts of the Colony’.71 He purchased them cheaply from scab-infested
districts, dipped, cleaned and fattened them on the boundaries of proclaimed districts, and
was able to arrange for their movement and sell them on at a higher price.
Scab eradication highlighted conflicts over knowledge about disease transmission and
avoidance. Many Afrikaners related scab to drought.72 They cited as evidence that not all
sheep got scab, which suggested it was not contagious. Scab was discussed as
`spontaneous’ or susceptible to spontaneous generation, rather than infectious. In this
view, shared by some English as well as Afrikaner farmers, sheep could not be cured of
scab, as it would return – not necessarily seasonally but after a period of time - `as long

as there are Merino sheep’. 73 An analogy for them was the periodic and unpredictable
outbreak of horsesickness. Other causes cited included ‘heat in the system’, so that once
scab had entered the bloodstream, it would break out from time to time. No-one could
avoid a little scab, some said, while a leader of the anti-Scab Act campaign, D.P. van der
Heever, was sure that ‘it is utterly impossible to eradicate scab out of a flock’.74 Many
also believed that healthy sheep seldom got scab. They talked of scab as a disease of
poverty amongst sheep, a term related to nutrition. The logic of their position was that
transhumance was good for the prevention of scab because it minimized the impact of
drought and poverty. `You have to go to the Karoo place’, one farmer noted, to prevent
scab; with dipping and restrictions sheep became ‘too weak to stand against the natural
causes which make scab reappear’.75 `In the early days’, another claimed, ‘when there
was plenty of Government ground, there was great scope for trekking; there was no
dipping, but with a little more scope the scab cured itself’.76 Moreover losing a few sheep
from scab was seen as better than losing a great many sheep from drought. Hutcheon
accepted that ‘drought acts as a predisposing cause’ – as did wet years and a lack of ‘soda
and potash’ in the vegetation.77 But he also thought that the combination of drought and
transhumance spread scab.
By the 1880s, effective dipping regimes had evolved. Scab mites or acari were killed by
a first dipping. Their eggs could survive and hatch out eight to ten days later so that a
second dipping was required. Acari could survive off sheep for up to a month and eggs
for longer, especially in dry old kraal manure, so that repeated dipping for about a year
was necessary to clear areas fully. The problem was reinfection by scabby sheep. For
supporters of the Act, transhumance ensured that scab was effectively transmitted
backwards and forwards from nodes of infection each year. But many farmers were
prepared to flout the 1886 regulations and, as one said when questioned as to why he let
scabby sheep go over his farm: ‘I don’t think it is as contagious as it is said to be’.78 Even
the 1894 Act, which Rhodes’s government pushed through, had many loopholes and a
series of articles in the Cape government’s Agricultural Journal charted some of its
inadequacies. The South African War (1899-1902) negated many of the regulations, and
the 1903 drought intensified trekking. Sheep inspectors vital to enforce the Act were in
short supply and, as in the case of the 1881 Act, local Scab Boards achieved control of
appointments and in districts opposed to the Act, policing was lax. Farmers found it
difficult to get permission to move animals quickly, whether for sales or in droughts, and
so some flouted the law. Fines were sometimes an insufficient deterrent; it could be
cheaper to get scabby sheep to market and pay the fine. Some English speakers wanted
compulsory dipping and higher fines rather than control over movements.79 Disease
regulation also began to create a bureaucracy and increasing surveillance that were
anathema to opponents of the Acts.
The white settler conflict coalesced around the Scab Act, rather than transhumance per
se, because this was a single piece of legislation and the focus of a major commission and
parliamentary debates. Tamarkin argues that ‘the crisis, engulfing the Afrikaner sheep
farmers and drawing them into the political arena, affected, so many of them believed,
their very survival’.80 Opposition to scab controls was not simply a class based issue.
While leaders of the Afrikaner Bond, who were then Rhodes’s political allies, supported

the Act, many Afrikaner farmers with large livestock holdings, especially but not only in
the western and northern districts of the Colony, opposed the Act. The Cape
Government, and Hutcheon in particular, who remained in office till his death in 1907,
were aware of many of the loopholes and gradually tightened implementation. After
1910, the Union government pursued a similar strategy with strong commitment. Barney
Enslin, the Boer war general who became Chief Inspector of Sheep, saw the main trek
routes as `prolific sources of scab’.81 The consequences were gradual stabilization and
more sedentary pastoral strategies. Scab legislation, perhaps more than the contagious
diseases legislation reinforced the slow changes that were manifest in pastoral practice,
most notably the gradual shift away from transhumance.
The South African war led to profligate importation and movement of livestock, as large
new armies had to be supplied, causing lungsickness and tuberculosis to spread in cattle.82
But in the following decade, controls over cattle movement began to replicate those over
sheep, not least in response to the tick-borne east coast fever. The Animal Diseases Act of
1906 stipulated that farmers could, for the first time, be compensated at 50 per cent of
market value for slaughtered animals. This won wider support for government strategies
and was extended to African owners in the Transkeian Territories in 1910. Officials were
given greater powers to declare areas infected and impose quarantine. Rapid expansion of
trade with the African occupied Transkeian Territories created a new anxiety about sources
of infection. By 1906-7 over a thousand wagons crossed the Kei bridge per month despite
the recent opening of a railway line. Traffic was restricted initially because this was
perceived to be a route for lungsickness. Simultaneously, the threat of east coast fever
resulted in a ban on livestock movements from Natal, where the disease had broken out,
with massive losses, in 1906.
Newfound understanding of tickborne diseases offered dipping as a prophylaxis, but the vets
felt that there was some chance that the progress of disease could actually be halted. A
double fence was built in 1908 between the Cape. Over 100 Cape Mounted Riflemen and
200 African constables were appointed as guards.83 But border policing was successful for
only a couple of years and east coast fever jumped boundaries in 1910. Once it started to
ripple through Cape herds, with death rates of up to 80 per cent in some coastal districts,
compulsory dipping and stringent controls over livestock movements were imposed. They
remained in place in affected, largely eastern, districts for some decades.84 These curtailed
many transhumant practices, especially amongst African livestock owners, as well as ox-
wagon traffic. Within the African reserves, where forms of customary tenure persisted,
animal movements were less constrained by private property. But Africans were being
compressed into reserved land and cultivation expanded during the period up to the 1930s.
Winter grazing on maize stubble in local fields became more important in the Transkei and
this, together with disease regulation, restricted livestock movement.
As in the case of scab, eradication of disease by quarantine and dipping, rather than explicit
control of transhumance, was the cutting edge of justification for intervention, but the two
were closely related. It is difficult to periodise the ending of transhumance. There were
countervailing processes up to the end of the nineteenth century and even in the early
decades of the twentieth century, farmers in some districts found ways of moving large

numbers of livestock to distant pastures, especially during major droughts such as 1932-3.
Cattle posts remained a feature of Tswana communities on communal land. But the social
features of transhumance amongst the great majority of white and black livestock owners
had largely ebbed. It was less significant as a means of disease control. The state, the much
enhanced veterinary services, and an inceasing majority of livestock owners saw
stabilisation and dipping as far more effective. Inoculation against some diseases was
becoming available.
Much of the recent discussion of transhumance in Africa tends to be critical of colonial
and post-colonial policies which have attempted to control or sedentarise pastoralists. A
strong strand in the literature emphasises the salience of local knowledge, and argues for
less interventionist approaches. In part this is a rights based approach, which echoes
claims by pastoralists for land and for their cultural practices. The literature emphasises
the political marginality rather than power of transhumant societies. New range ecology
adds a critique of ecological concepts of equilibrium and suggests that achieving such a
balance is a chimera in Africa. It offers instead the idea of disequilibrium in rangelands
that fits well with non-interventionist approaches and the social defence of pastoralists.
But the South African case might suggest different perspectives. Clearly, veterinary
regulation and the curtailment of transhumance were associated with the rise of capitalist
patterns of production, with state authority, scientific approaches, and with white
dominance over a great deal of farmland. This was accompanied by a rapid rise in
livestock numbers, in black as well as white hands, and very likely an overall
improvement in animal health.85 The epizootics that characterised the period from
lungsickness in the early 1850s to east coast fever in the early 1910s dwindled. Average
yields of wool from sheep, for example, roughly doubled in the half-century after the
Scab Act. The reasons for these processes are complex but it is likely that veterinary
interventions played a major role. For African livestock owners the outcome was more
ambiguous. They still held about half the cattle in the country in 1930, and very
significant progress was made in combating disease in their herds and flocks. But in the
Transkei, for example, where livestock numbers reached a peak in the early 1930s, winter
deaths increased.86 The control over disease were relatively secure for some decades but
were not permanent achievements. They began to erode in the homelands during the late
apartheid era. Rigorous state veterinary regimes are no longer pursued in the new, post-
1994 South Africa. Livestock owners have to take far more responsibility themselves.
Especially in the former homelands, localised forms of transhumance have re-emerged.
The question is whether these are appropriate for intensive livestock production or animal
health.

1 P. J. van der Merwe, Die Noortwaartse Beweging van die Boere voor die Groot Trek (1770-1842) (The Hague, 1937; P.J.
van der Merwe, The Migrant Farmer in the History of the Cape Colony 1657-1842, translated by Roger B. Beck (Athens,
Ohio, 1995), first published in Afrikaans, Cape Town, 1938; P.J. van der Merwe, Trek: Studies oor die Mobiliteit van die
Pioneersbevolking aan die Kaap (Cape Town, 1945).
2 Dawn Nell, “You Cannot Make the People Scientific by Act of Parliament”: Farmers, the State, and Livestock
Enumeration in the North-western Cape, c.1850-1900’, unpublished MA dissertation, University of Cape Town (1998);
William Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770-1950
(Oxford, 2003); Mottie Tamarkin, ‘Volk and Flock: Ecology, Culture, Identity and Politics among Cape Afrikaner
Sheep Farmers in Late 19th Century’, unpublished ms., forthcoming UNISA press. Thanks to the author for permission
to use this.
3
Katherine Homewood and William Rodgers, ‘Pastoralism, conservation and the overgrazing controversy’, chapter 5 in
D. Anderson and R. Grove, (eds.), Conservation in Africa (Cambridge, 1987); K. Homewood and W. A. Rodgers,
Maasailand Ecology (Cambridge, 1991); Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns (eds.), The Lie of the Land: Challenging
Received Wisdom on the African Environment (Oxford, 1996).
.
4. W.H.C. Lichtenstein, Travels in Southern Africa in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806 (Cape Town, 1928), first
published 1812, 1815, vol.1, 414.
5 Christopher Roche, ‘”Ornaments of the Desert”: Springbok Treks in the Cape Colony, 1774-1908’, unpublished MA
dissertation, University of Cape Town (2004).
6 Anders Sparrman, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope towards the Antarctic Polar Circle Round the World and to the
Country of the Hottentots and the Caffres from the Year 1772-1776, edited by V.S. Forbes (Cape Town, 1977), 14, 19.
7 van der Merwe, Trek, 139.
8 R. W. Willcocks, The Poor White, Report of the Carnegie Commission on The Poor White Problem in South Africa,
vol 2 (Stellenbosch, 1932), II-9; Beinart, Rise of Conservation, 54.
9 Eric Walker, The Great Trek (London, 1948), 82-3, first published 1934; J. S. Marais, Maynier and the First Boer
Republic (Cape Town, 1962), 1, first published 1944.
10 Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815-1854 (Harlow, 2001).
11 Susan Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier (Cambridge, 1999).
12 Gerrit Harinck, ‘Interaction between Xhosa and Khoi: Emphasis on the Period 1620-1750’ in Leonard Thompson
(ed.), African Societies in Southern Africa (London, 1969), 164-5; Monica Wilson, ‘The Sotho, Venda, and Tsonga’ in
Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson (eds.), The Oxford History of South Africa, vol.1 (Oxford. 1969), 149.
13 S. D. Neumark, Economic Influences on the South African Frontier (Stanford, California, 1957).
14
Figures from censuses and Cape Statistical Registers.
15 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991) and for disease problems J. F.
Smithcors, The American Veterinary Profession: Its Background and Development (Ames, Iowa, 1963).
16. Cape of Good Hope, Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into Diseases in Cattle and Sheep in this Colony
( G.3-1877), 21.
17 Andrew B. Smith, Pastoralism in Africa: Origins and Development Ecology (London, 1992), 194-5; Nigel Penn,
The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18 th
Century (Cape Town, 2005);
W. Beinart, Vets, Viruses and Environmentalism: the Cape in the 1870s and 1880s, Paideuma, 43 (1997); Daniel
Gilfoyle, ‘A Swiss Veterinary Scientist in South Africa: Arnold Theiler and the Explication of “Lamsiekte” in Cattle’,
unpublished paper, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford (2003)
18 Lichtenstein, Travels in Southern Africa, I, 122.
19 J.B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence (Johannesburg,

1981), 9.
20 Basil Sansom, ‘Traditional economic systems’ in W.D. Hammond-Tooke (ed.), The Bantu-speaking Peoples of
Southern Africa (London. 1974).
21 Nancy J. Jacobs, Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History (Cambridge, 2003), 44, 62-3.
22 W. Beinart, The Political Economy of Pondoland 1860-1930 (Cambridge, 1982).
23 William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa (London, 1987), 203.
24
Jeff Guy, ‘Ecological Factors in the Rise of Shaka and the Zulu Kingdom’ in Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore (eds.),
Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (London, 1980), 112; Martin Hall, The Changing Past: Farmers,
Kings and Traders in Southern Africa, 200-1860 (Cape Town, 1987).
25 Elisabeth Anderson, A History of the Xhosa of the Northern Cape 1795-1879 (Cape Town, 1987).
26 John Ford, The Role of the Trypanosomiasis in African Ecology: A Study of the Tsetse Fly Problem (Oxford, 1973),
481.
27
Van der Merwe, Trek, 130ff; Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels at the Cape of Good Hope 1772-1775 edited by V. S. Forbes
(Cape Town, 1986).
28 Van der Merwe, Trek, 126-29.
29 Karen Brown, ‘Poisonous Plants: Veterinary Science and Grassland Ecology c1900-1950’, unpublished paper,
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford (2004).
30 State Archives, Pretoria, Department of Agriculture (PTA LDB), 2327/3435 I, P. R. Viljoen, Deputy Director of
Veterinary Services to Secretary of Agriculture, 7.3.1928, ‘Droogte Toestande – N.W. Kaap Distrikte’.
31 The best summary of nineteenth century veterinary knowledge of ‘nenta, Krimpsiekte or Cerebro-Spinal Meningitis’
is in D. Hutcheon, ‘Veterinary: Nenta’, Agricultural Journal of the Cape of Good Hope, XIV, 13, 22.6.1899, 862-873.
32. Lichtenstein, Travels in Southern Africa, vol.1, 122.
33. Lichtenstein, Travels in Southern Africa, 130; William Paterson, A Narrative of Four Journeys into the Country of the
Hottentots and Caffraria in the Years One Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy-Seven, Eight, and Nine (London, 1789),
47.
34 Van der Merwe, Trek, 129-32.
35 Van der Merwe, Trek, 171-2.
36 Van der Merwe, Trek, 203.
37
Van der Merwe, Trek, 186ff.
38
Van der Merwe, Trek, 214.
39. Peter E. Raper and Maurice Boucher (eds.), Robert Jacob Gordon: Cape Travels, 1777 to 1786 (London, 1986), vol.1,
81. Kenneth Wyndham Smith, From Frontier to Midlands: A History of the Graaff-Reinet District, 1786-1910
(Grahamstown, 1976), 19-22; Newton-King, Masters and Servants.
40 van der Merwe, Die Noortwaartse Beweging.
41. Raper and Boucher (eds.), Gordon, vol.1, 83.
42 G3-1877, 89, 100

43 Cape of Good Hope, Parliamentary Papers, Report of the Scab Disease Commision, 1892-94 (G. 1-1894), 8, 89, 391.
44 Dan Gilfoyle, ‘Ways of Knowing: Method and Quantification in the Investigation of Some Viral Diseases of Animals
in South Africa, c 1905-1945’, unpublished paper, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine (2004); Christian
Andreas, ‘African Horsesickness’, unpublished paper, University of Oxford, 2006.
45 Lawrence G. Green, Karoo (Howard Timmins, Cape Town, 1955), 220.
46 Beinart, Rise of Conservation; Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary Science and Public Policy’.
47 Richard Elphick, Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa (Ravna Press, Johannesburg. 1985).
48 Nell, ‘Farmers, the State and Livestock Enumeration’, 36.
49 Nell, ‘Farmers, the State and Livestock Enumeration’, 2.
50 Report of the Carnegie Commission on The Poor White Problem in South Africa, vol 1, Joint Findings and
Recommendations, xii.
51. Cape of Good Hope, Blue Book, 1859, JJ3-4, Report of the Civil Commissioner, Calvinia.
52 Cape of Good Hope, Copy of Correspondence with the Divisional Councils of Certain Divisions in which
“Trekvelden” Exist on the Subject of the Future Disposal of Those Lands (G.30-1860), 1, Charles Bell,
53 Penn, The Forgotten Frontier; Dawn D’Arcy Nell, ‘Land, Land Ownership and Land Occupancy in the Cape Colony
during the Nineteenth Century with Specific Reference to the Clanwilliam District’, unpublished B.A. Honours
dissertation, University of Cape Town (1997), chapter 3.
54 Cape of Good Hope, Report of the Select Committee on the Scab Bill (A.5-1884), 52.
55 Nell, ‘Farmers, the State and Livestock Enumeration’, 31.
56 Tamarkin, ‘Volk and Flock’.
57 Lance van Sittert, ‘Holding the Line: The Rural Enclosure Movement in the Cape Colony, c.1865-1910’, Journal of
African History, 43, 1 (2002), 116.
58 Van der Merwe, Trek, 219.
59 Nell, ‘Farmers, the State and Livestock Enumeration’, 60, fn 279.
60 PTA LDB, 2327/3435 I, P. R. Viljoen, Deputy Director of Veterinary Services to Secretary of Agriculture, 7.3.1928-
‘die tyd van trek met vee, veral op groot skaal, verby is. Meeste dele van die land is nou dig bewoon, bevat soveel
omheinde plase, ens. Dat trek met vee onpraktiese geword het’.
61 PTA LDB, 2327/3435 I, P. R. Viljoen, Deputy Director of Veterinary Services to Secretary of Agriculture, 7.3.1928.
62 Beinart, Rise of Conservation, 262.
63 Van der Merwe, Trek, 151-2.
64 Beinart, Rise of Conservation.
65 Daniel Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary Science and Public Policy’. .
66 Beinart, Vets, Viruses; Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary Science and Public Policy’, 76ff.
67 Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary Science and Public Policy’, 82.
68 Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary Science’, 132.
69

G.1-1894, 715.
70
Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary Science’, 112.
71
G.1-1894, 155.
72 Tamarkin, ‘Volk and Flock’, 18ff.
73 G.1-1894, 370, 563
74 A.5-1884, 59.
75
G.1-1894, 397. See also 147.
76
G.1-1894, 188. See also 125.
77
D Hutcheon, Scab: Its Nature, Cause, Symptoms and Treatment’, Agricultural Journal of the Cape of
Good Hope (April 1908), 436.
78
G.1-1894, 397.
79
G.1-1894, 145.
80 Tamarkin, ‘Volk and Flock’, 4.
81 See Union of South Africa, Department of Agriculture reports for the 1910s, eg. U.G.2-1915, Union of South
Africa, Report of the Department of Agriculture, 1913-14, 64, 83.
82 Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary Scienc and Public Policy’
83
Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary Science’, 328.
84 Beinart, Political Economy of Pondoland; William Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles,
85
Beinart, Rise of Conservation.
86 Beinart, Political Economy of Pondoland, 173.