Mad Dogs and Meerkats by Karen Brown

Author:Karen Brown [Brown, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Africa, South, Language Arts & Disciplines, Library & Information Science, Cataloging & Classification, Literary Criticism, Ancient & Classical, Science
ISBN: 9780821419533
Google: 4SlBgZLo_JMC
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2011-05-10T02:39:24+00:00

Rivers Are No Boundaries (2):The Smoldering Kunene Frontier

A sense of mystery also surrounded the southward dissemination of rabies into South Africa’s mandated territory of South West Africa. Around the same time that the virus was infiltrating the railroads of Bechuanaland, rabies was also making its presence felt in that country’s western neighbor. The sparse historical evidence that exists suggests that rabies outbreaks occurred in the nineteenth century in southern Angola and along the Kunene River, which formed part of the border with South West Africa. European accounts recorded that the Herero people named the year 1887 “Otjorun-dumba,” or the “year of madness,” as frenzied dogs bit cattle and sheep.33 In the 1920s and 1930s missionaries and doctors living in the regions just south of the Kunene River, in Ovamboland and Okavango districts, identified suspected cases of rabies in humans as well as in dogs, cattle, horses, pigs, monkeys, and hyenas. One of the worst affected areas was Kuring Kuru (now Nkurenkuru) in the Okavango province, where in 1935, a rabid dog bit eighteen Africans and a sister working at the Finnish Missionary station. Africans resorted to killing large numbers of dogs.34

Population movements were commonplace in the region and could have played a role in propagating rabies. In Ovamboland, herders typically practiced transhumance, driving their animals to the best regional pastures at different times of the year. The Kunene floodplain was also susceptible to periodic droughts, forcing people and animals to travel in search of food. Dreadful famines struck in 1915, as well as between 1929 and 1933. In the early 1930s some people migrated southward in search of food and work in the heartland of South West Africa. Some flocked to towns, while others found employment on private farms or on government-funded public works schemes to alleviate poverty, which included dam building and road construction. The fragile ecology of the region provided a geographical context for migration to alternative locations to the mines. Hunger could have been instrumental in precipitating the spread of rabies in South West Africa in the early 1930s.35

An increase in cases generated research. A letter of April 1938, from a veterinarian named Emilio Martin to Alexis Thomas at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute, gave some interesting insights into local knowledge about the disease. According to Martin, who was based at Pereira d’Eca (Ondjiva) in southern Angola, scientists first isolated rabies from a dog in 1930. After that there had been a number of cases in humans who had lived along the Kunene River and who had sustained bites from a variety of wild animals, including hyenas, dogs, and jackals. Africans living in that district called the disease engüengo, which meant “madness of man and dogs.” They realized that “if a human being is bitten by a[n] engüengo dog he sometimes becomes engüengo.” People who were attacked consulted “specified sorcerers” whose “science and gift to treat the disease” were handed down from father to son. The sorcerers sucked the wound and applied a concoction made of chewed roots and rinds of unspecified plants.

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