Where in the World is One Health?

Fence Lines

This is a story about the wildlife-livestock interface along the western edge of South Africa’s Kruger National Park. It includes snapshots of my own research.

A 15-kilometer-wide veterinary buffer zone extends for 360 kilometers along the western edge of the Kruger National Park. Yet this is also an area of extreme rural poverty, where 2 million people live in close proximity. Where better, then, to deploy a One Health perspective? After all, my colleagues from the Onderstepoort Veterinary Medical faculty at Pretoria had some exciting ongoing projects with herders and health in the area. But it was in conversation with those colleagues that I became convinced that the bi-modal, veterinary-medical discourses that dominated their One Health solutions were limited by lack of reference to historical understanding.

Surprisingly, I found myself coming back to three questions: What are cattle? What are lions? What are the effects of fencing?

Cattle

Cattle, in this region of South Africa, are both a critical part of the rural economy and vectors for zoonotic disease. But cattle management is also bound up with the long history of colonial rule. In the minds of colonial administrators, rural Africans were subject to a fatal “cattle complex” that led them to increase herd size. Combating these irrational “native” habits was necessary to prevent overgrazing and the spread of diseases; on the ground, that meant strong fences, buffer zones, and veterinary culling. In 2007, while making a film about the life and times of Charlie Nkuna, an early African game scout, I stood on a hill in the Kruger National Park that was actually a huge mound grave for cattle from a neighboring village shot by veterinary authorities in 1934. Like most Nguni cattle in this region, each of these animals had a praise name. His father’s cows were in the grave, and Charlie recited some of their names to me: “Blanket, Bles, Tangaleni,” pausing between each to snap his fingers in memory of the gunshots he had heard as a child.

In the post-apartheid period, a One Health understanding can help to make sense of changing rural livelihoods, as the gendered division of labor between male cattle-keeping and women’s resource-gathering collapses. Yet that is not enough. Cattle have always been part of what might be called the human- wildlife-bovine assemblage, a multi-scalar set of associations. Under stress, when these connections are ruptured by disease control or politics, people struggle to find an appropriate language to describe that trauma. Increasingly, my research showed, they turned to occult explanations.

Lions

My informant Charlie Nkuna was an early African field ranger, who worked in the Kruger Park for 50 years. The loss of their cattle was the start of a series of traumatic adjustments his family was forced to make, adjustments that affected the entire human-wildlife-cattle assemblage. One day in 1973, Charlie’s daughter Senana disappeared. Fearing she had been attacked by a lion, he followed a blood spoor and came across a sight no parent should have to bear: the head of his daughter, who had apparently been killed and eaten the day before. Years later, Charlie he gave me an extraordinary explanation of this event. At first, he said, there had been a kind of balance in the relationship between people, cattle, and wildlife. In the 1970s, however, everything changed: the war in Mozambique produced a tide of refugees crossing the Kruger National Park illegally, easy prey for lions that became increasingly emboldened. Even more significantly, Charlie himself had been very successful in capturing poachers entering Kruger from neighboring villages. Perhaps, he told us, the changing lion habits and the attack on his daughter were the result of jealousy. Perhaps, in fact, these were not really lions at all, but sorcerers who had turned themselves carnivores to enact revenge. Therianthropy (the belief that humans can metamorphose into animals) is an ancient explanatory language that rises whenever there are traumatic changes in human-animal relations. We found it throughout the oral history interviews we did over five years with Mozambique refugees who crossed Kruger. Today, the idea of occult transmutation is present everywhere in exchanges with rhino poachers, 90% of whom carry magical potions in the belief that these that help them adopt the abilities of animals.

Fences

There is another feature of my research that calls into question a binary reliance on veterinary and medical discourses: the changing landscapes in which people and wildlife interact. South Africa has the largest hunting and game breeding industry in the world. The Kruger region has turned enthusiastically to cashing in on a massive boom in game prices for the US safari hunting market. Four hundred per cent profit margins were being realized in breeding specialized color morphs (“golden” wildebeest, “black” impala, and the like) and large-horned trophy animals. That had a serious impact on the spacing of human-wildlife interaction: large farms were divided into breeding camps, to secure heterozygosity, and these fragmented the landscape. Changes in the human-bovine-wildlife assemblage have also been facilitated by the expansion of private game reserves. Increasingly, in our analyses, we found villagers under pressure to turn their communal lands over to private safari companies. Two assumptions typically underlie these proposals: 1. an older, colonial logic that views communal rangeland as “degraded”; and 2. an underestimate of the value of these lands for resource harvesting by rural women. The exclusion of humans from these zones also affects human health. Rural South Africa has a seen a spike in non-communicable diseases associated with lifestyle changes: stroke, hypertension, diabetes, obesity. Resource harvesting in communal lands may provide a dietary buffer to these trends. My decades of research in South Africa have included a complex engagement with the One Health framework. More recently, however, it had led me to seek a more flexible understanding of human and non-human actors, whether in widespread beliefs about people turning into lions, or in the bones of cattle shot by veterinarians, bones that continue to speak from the grave.