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This chapter examines how European colonizers under siege from the deadly tsetse fly deferred to African hunters in the absence of any remedies of their own. It considers the disruptive role of European colonial partition, mobilities, and settlements; in particular, it shows how this “ecological imperialism” led to the displacement of Africans from lands they had tamed, with the Europeans settling in areas where Africans had sequestered pestilent insects like tsetse fly. When the pests struck back and there was no ready biomedical or chemical solutions, the colonial state turned to the African hunter to help slaughter forest animals, starve the tsetse fly of its food source (blood), and kill the deadly trypanosome protozoan the insect transmitted from forest animal reservoirs to livestock. The outbreak of trypanosomiasis becomes coproduced “through a conjunction of bodies, technologies, and cultural practices,” demonstrating how an insect subverted and indeed mediated the much-vaunted powers of imperialism and colonialism and held hostage those who are supposed to be the lord of the African.

This chapter examines how European colonizers under siege from the deadly tsetse fly in Africa turned to the professoriate of the hunt in the absence of any remedies of their own. Until the appearance of trypanosomiasis drugs and residual insecticides in the late 1950s, there was no other method besides “game destruction” to starve the tsetse fly and deny it its primary vehicle for mobility: big forest animals. Similarly, in the absence of ready-made technological solutions to tropical pests and pestilence, Rhodesian settlers turned to African hunters and deployed them as a weapon of tsetse control. In this particular case, the state employed the hombarume or maphisa who lived nearest the tsetse-infested areas, arming them with guns and sending them into the forest. The more animals these hunters slaughtered, the more they would be rewarded. In deferring to the vahloti and availing them the space, animals, and guns, the state became magocha, a rich vein of meat supply to the village.

This chapter looks at disease control in a part of Sudan that was arguably the Gezira's polar opposite. Located at the heart of the country, the Gezira was an environment ordered, although never completely, by colonialism and capitalism. Sleeping sickness appeared on a physical frontier. The tsetse fly that transmitted the disease was confined to an economically insignificant and politically unstable region that was extremely remote from Khartoum, where political officials were either serving and where military doctors provided civil medical services until well into the inter-war period. This chapter argues that political, economic, geographical, and epidemiological factors were crucial in shaping disease control efforts in Sudan. Mapping — of tsetse flies, rivers, villages, and geographical landmarks — was the crucial preliminary to disease control, and provided intelligence about little known territory. This chapter progresses from early research expeditions, through the imposition of strict measures to eradicate the epidemics, to the eventual embrace of tsetse fly control in the late 1930s. It shows that sleeping sickness itself had a high mortality rate.

Experimental studies show that glossinid tsetse flies and tabanid horse flies do not like to land on striped surfaces. To extend these findings, rates of tail swishing and being bothered by insects were recorded for zebras and other herbivores in Katavi, and for zebras and non-striped equids in the Berlin zoo. Zebras were not immune from insect annoyance. Examining the effects of stripes on tsetse flies, striped and unstriped canonical traps and cloth squares were erected in the field but there was no benefit of stripes, however tsetse flies are often attracted by movement. To examine tabanids’ reaction to striping, black and striped canopy ball traps and later canopy traps with balls wrapped in zebra or wildebeest pelts were erected in the field. Striped canopy traps captured markedly fewer tabanids. Movement was investigated by walking in suits, in animal pelts, and by driving with pelts on the car but there were no strong effects of striping on flies. Suggestions that white pelage reduces reflected polarized light compared to dark pelage could not be replicated. The working hypothesis is that white and black stripes lower luminance reflected off zebras and reduce the animal’s salience or disturb fly landing responses.

The seven equid species and twenty subspecies have different striping patterns on various parts of their bodies. These areas were each coded for stripe number and intensity. Species’ and subspecies’ geographic ranges were then mapped. These were then overlaid with maps of woodlands, temperature isoclines, historical predators, tsetse flies and proxies for tabanid fly activity, as well as equid group sizes. The percent of species’ and subspecies’ ranges that overlapped with each factor were then compared with their measures of striping in phylogenetically controlled analyses. Striping on the face, neck, flank, rump, legs and shadow stripe severity is associated with six or more consecutive months of tabanid biting fly activity but with no other factor. Belly stripe number is associated with tsetse distribution. Furthermore, zebras have thin pelage and are thus susceptible to probing biting flies, and tabanids carry four diseases fatal to zebras. A separate intraspecific analysis of plains zebras by other researchers showed that striping is associated with temperature and was interpreted as cooling the animal on its back bu,t for other parts of the body, with foiling ectoparasites that carry diseases. Both multifactorial studies showed that warm humid conditions conducive to tabanid reproduction are associated with striping.

This chapter shows that vanhu vatema understood mobility as the centerpiece of their interactions with the insect. It commences from a view of vatema's management of mhesvi as a site of innovation, illustrating the centrality of mobility in interactions between vanhu and zvipukanana. The chapter strategically deploys the travel accounts of vachana writing in the nineteenth century about their encounters with people living with and despite mhesvi. The strategy herein is to read these travel accounts as acts of witnessing to, and confessions about, ruzivo rwemhesvi (knowledge of tsetse) among the people living in the lands between and along the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. The chapter maps mhesvi-infested areas and mhesvi management techniques—namely, forest clearance, selective culling of mhuka, strategic settlement of vanhu, use of repellents, movement by night, and inoculation. At the end of the day, African mhesvi management was about mobilities management.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It begins with a discussion of the term mhesvi, the name that vedzimbahwe—the people associated with the zimbabwe (stone building) culture from which the name Zimbabwe came—gave to the insect that Setswana speakers (vedzimbahwe's neighbors to the west) called tsetse. After encountering the insect for the first time and being told its name, white travelers then publicized tsetse fly as the official name of the insect. The chapter then sets out the book's purpose, which is to position mhesvi in such a way that the trajectory of knowledge production concerning it can be recovered.

This chapter explores the processes of translation through which ruzivo rwevatema (knowledge of black people) entered the pantheon of ruzivo rwevarungu (knowledge of varungu or vachana) and, later, state tsetse and trypanosomiasis control and research policy. The chapter first examines European travelogues, which show that such ruzivo and practices were the foundation of what became science and means and ways of tsetse control. It suggests that certain ruzivo rwevatema and practices formed the foundations of what vachana then called science, even while dismissing vatema as only good at creating and peddling myths and legends. Empirically, the specific stratagems that vachana built on were controlled moto (fire), specifically, kupisa sora or burning grass, forest clearance, prophylactic settlement, erecting buffer zones, cleansing chambers, and tsetse gates. The concept of cleansing is used in the chidzimbahwe sense of kuchenura, from the root word chena (clean, white), in contradistinction to tsvina (dirt) or chakasviba (dark).

This chapter examines what one government official called “an intelligence system of tsetse”—a thoroughly intrusive infrastructure and procedure of knowing this chipukanana (principally its mobilities) in the most complete way possible. This anthropomorphic formula for intrusive knowing sought “to live and breathe and think with” mhesvi; to do so entailed “a lifetime of affectionate study.” This meant placing a peripatetic chipukanana under surveillance, to know how much time it spent in different parts of the habitat at different times of the year; how much time it spent feeding, sleeping, or simply in vigilant mode, waiting to pounce on anything that moved. Maps—of where it slept, bred, roamed, ate; its boundaries; strong points and weak points—were essential to successful operations against it.

This chapter builds on and contributes to literature on arboricides or herbicides, which currently is strongest in the United States, where some of the chemicals and equipment used to deny ndedzi shelter originated. It considers two stratagems, both derived from past and prevailing practices of vanhu vatema of killing mhesvi and exposing it to its predators. One involved using moto (fire)—specifically, late-season burning—to achieve maximum destruction and expose to predation all mhesvi in their adult phase, their zvikukwa (the insect at its worm or pupa stage, what vachana called puparia; singular chikukwa), and their zviguraura (literally, “the one that has cut off its intestines,” what vachana called larva). The second strategy was the mechanical clearance and chemical phytocides of the forest for the same purpose.

This chapter considers one of the stratagems developing out of an intelligence system of mhesvi, trapping systems. This approach was based on the underlying principle that the chipukanana had very small reproductive potential, that a slight reduction in the chipukanana's reproductive rate or increase in its mortality rate was enough to control its entire population. To do so, mhesvi had to be attracted to artificial baits laced with killing or sterilizing agents. These “attractant studies” targeted mhesvi's mobilities, sensory system, and feeding behavior; once attracted, the next step was to trap the flies and, once trapped, kill or sterilize them.

This chapter focuses on the deployment of huntsmen called magocha to eliminate mhuka, the primary bloodmeal source of mhesvi, and thus starve it. It opens with an interview with one such magocha. These huntsmen were known in society as magocha (the ones who are always roasting meat) due to the massive amounts of meat at their disposal. Next, it examines the relationship between magocha and the white tsetse field officers (TFOs) who supervised them and the work of indiscriminate and discriminate hunting. Because many technical aspects of the hunting itself have already been discussed elsewhere, the chapter instead focuses on the perspectives of vatema covered only thinly or not covered in the earlier work.

This chapter discusses the abandonment of “tsetse control operations” as the war of self-liberation intensified, into the fog of war in which the methods designed for mhesvi and other pests are extended to those vatema viewed as varwi verusununguko (freedom fighters) and those designated magandanga (terrorists). This does not mean all vatema and all vachena shared the same perspective or that all freedom fighters behaved consistently with that description but the majority did. This lumping together of “problem animals” and “problem people” into “vermin beings” justified the extension and slippage of instruments and methods from zvipukanana to the dehumanized munhu, whose elimination constituted a form of pest control.

This chapter discusses the deliberate replacement and overcrowding of vatema as forest-clearing agents and shields against ndedzi. It focuses on the use of fencing and forced resettlement of vatema as methods of “tsetse control.” The argument is that vatema and their zvipfuyo were deployed as methods of pest control and to act as an outer ring of early warning systems to protect vachana's cattle ranches. The chapter reflects on the meaning of a humanity experienced and lived under conditions of animalization, wherein vatema are dumped at the unhealthy margins, to live not just like but with other mhuka as vachana helped themselves to their healthy lands on the watershed.

The Germans faced over fifty revolts against their rule. Bwana Heri surrendered because of hunger, not defeat, just when he had united most of the inland tribes to fight the Germans. In 1891, Mkwawa ambushed a column of Germans at Lugalo near the Ruaha Gorge and he continued fighting until 1898. The biggest revolt, the Maji Maji rebellion, 1905-8, also ended with famine, not least because the Germans destroyed sources of food. These years were accompanied by diseases and pests which attacked people, cattle, or crops, and lead to famines in the 1890s, around 1908, and again during the First World War when between 1914 and 1920 a German army remained undefeated, living off the land. By 1920, the people were worse off than in 1850—with less food, fewer skills and fewer cattle. Large areas became depopulated allowing the tsetse fly, which attacks both humans and cattle, to return.

This chapter discusses the method of killing the mhesvi from within its body. The argument made is that attacking mhesvi from within represents the applied value of the knowledge of mhesvi's bionomics and internal mobilities, both internally (nyongororo moving within its body) and in situations of intimacy (nuptial flights). The first section deals with research (from the 1920s to the 1970s) on parasitization—the destruction of the mhesvi through deliberately promoting the proliferation of nyongororo naturally found in its body. These hutachiwana either were naturally lethal to mhesvi or could be genetically engineered to be so. The second type of research focused on sterilizing the chipukanana through the capture and release of sterile males by means of chemical sterilants and gamma radiation.

This chapter focuses on ground spraying. It is organized into three sections. The first concerns the strategic deployment of inbound spraying equipment to perform or operationalize specific objectives and outcomes. The second section looks at the work of spraying, focusing on the meeting point between mushonga wezvipukanana (pesticide), mushini (spraying machine), and sprayman, known in the villages as mafrayi (fly man). The final section is a case study of a spraying campaign involving three neighboring countries: Southern Rhodesia, Portuguese East Africa, and the Union of South Africa. The purpose of the campaign was to stop the advance of mhesvi from the Rio Savé region of Mozambique into the Savé-Runde area, potentially threatening northeastern South Africa.

This chapter takes the mobility discussion in a totally different direction—away from trains, from vanhu (humans) and means and ways as the central actors, to mhesvi subverting the transport systems that vanhu contrived. This is to further the thesis of this book—the idea of mhesvi as mobile workshop, this time as a passenger taking a ride on pedestrians, disabling ox wagon transport, riding on automobiles and on bicycles, and forcing vanhu to institute mechanisms and infrastructures of traffic control. On the surface, traffic might be interpreted as automobiles, bicycles, and foot movements—yet such movement is, at any other time, innocuous. What rendered it worth controlling was mhesvi, the real “traffic” that had to be controlled because it carried hutachiwana.

Parasites and diseases vary regionally, and therefore so does human physiology. For example, people who live in malarial areas have a different hemoglobin than do people who live outside malarial regions. Some diseases have probably slowed conquerors, because they were not adapted to the diseases of the invaded regions. Yellow fever, for example, prevented the French from building the Panama Canal, and therefore from invading Panama. On the other hand, the invaders brought new diseases into the conquered regions to which the residents were not resistant. These diseases, as much as superior firepower, aided the conquests.