African Knowledge and Livestock Health: Diseases and Treatments in South Africa
Abstract
The talk focusses on the book I published with Karen Brown in 2013 exploring local knowledge in relation to veterinary ideas and practices among African livestock owners in South Africa. It is, in a sense, now history – based on extensive interviewing from 2008 to 2011 and so I should not speak in the present tense. We thought that this was a particularly significant sphere of knowledge, deeply rooted in African societies in the region in which millions of people participated. Livestock ownership may even have expanded among black South Africans since 1994 because land reform has given significant access to new land, much of which is used for livestock. Although state-led scientifically policies have been enforced for well over a century, we nevertheless found widespread understandings of disease and treatment that derive from a changing indigenous knowledge, especially environmental and nutritional understandings of disease and treatment, including plant medicines. But whatever these may have been in the deep past, we found also – as is discussed in much medical history – plural or hybrid patterns of local knowledge absorbing elements of state/scientific practice. Our approach attempts to understand their interaction. We also tried to develop a multi-facetted approach, discussing supernatural and gendered understandings of health and healing, of ancestors and slaughter – all elements in building a broader picture of local knowledge. We did not hear that ‘witchcraft’ was a significant element in local explanations, but found quite widespread use of ideas that we call the ‘ambient supernatural’ – umkhondo in isiXhosa/isiMpondo and mohato in seTswana.
Bio
William Beinart is emeritus professor at the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford and St Antony’s College. Books include: Environment and Empire, with Lotte Hughes (2007), Prickly Pear, with Luvuyo Wotshela (2011); African Local Knowledge with Karen Brown (2013); Rights to Land, with Peter Delius and Michelle Hay (2017); The Scientific Imagination in South Africa, with Saul Dubow (2021). Captured on Camera: East African Wildlife in British and American Popular Culture, with Katie McKeown (2026), is pending.
