Separation And Control: Environmental Interventions And The Tsetse Problem In Colonial Uganda

Throughout the twentieth century the idea that areas of human settlement should be kept separate from areas of wilderness has shaped the evolution of both conservation and disease control strategies in Africa. This article focuses on the history of evolving approaches to the tsetse fly in Africa, and its associated diseases, by considering the experience of the kingdom of Bunyoro in Uganda in the late precolonial and colonial periods. The evidence from Bunyoro provides some support for the thesis developed by John Ford in his seminal 1971 study, The Role of the African Trypanosomiases in African Ecology, that communities in precolonial Africa adopted interventionist strategies of local environmental management such as bush clearance, fire, grazing, and hunting in order to try to control the tsetse fly. The example of Bunyoro strongly reinforces Ford’s argument that such techniques required relatively high levels of human and livestock population density and stability to operate successfully. The colonial period (1900–62) was associated with environmental problems in Bunyoro in large part because human and stock populations fell so drastically from the 1890s to the 1930s. The focus in this article, however, will be on three other, sometimes conflicting, characteristics of colonial policy that tended to produce negative environmental outcomes not only in Bunyoro, but to varying degrees across the European empires. First, colonial environmental interventions consistently tried to remove African populations from areas that were considered to be natural wildernesses. Second, ecological policy in the various colonies was to some extent homogenized in response to metropolitan imperial agendas, rather than responding to local environmental conditions. Third, in contrast to these unifying trends, colonial environmental policy was skewed by limited funding and the rivalries and often conflicting priorities of different governmental departments. It is important to contrast the cautious excellence of much of colonial trypanosomiasis research with the often confused and ill-planned policies adopted on the ground in peripheral districts like Bunyoro. Colonial ideologies of nature and conservation were never monolithic, and so ecological interventions were frequently applied unevenly and inconsistently, with unfortunate consequences.