Provincializing foot-and-mouth disease: The construction of the African buffalo as disease reservoir in Botswana, 1961-1976

Global foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) control policy is largely based on nineteenth century British ideas of the disease. This partiality risks creating the impression that these ideas of the disease are universal. In this article, therefore, we provincialise the notion of FMD by describing how veterinarians came to know the disease in colonial and post-colonial Botswana. Specifically, we focus on the 1960s and 70s to write a postcolonial, more-than-human history that details how the African buffalo was identified as the reservoir host for the disease. We point to the local interactions between veterinarians and the buffalo, but also describe the ‘external’ pressure that veterinarians felt to find a culprit. As such, we present a geographically nuanced and historically informed understanding of FMD that challenges the assumed universality of British ideas of FMD, and exposes the ways in which these ideas shaped and continue to shape environmental and socio-economic realities in Southern Africa.