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Radical History Review 80 (2001) 76-100



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Of Oxford Bags and Twirling Canes:
The State, Popular Responses, and Zulu Antimalaria Assistants in the Early-Twentieth-Century Zululand Malaria Campaigns

Aran S. MacKinnon

[Maps]

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When I was young many of these diseases were unknown because the white man had not penetrated into the land. The more he digs himself into the land and the life of the people, the more trouble and diseases we have.

Disease is deliberately caused by the white man to decimate the race, to undermine our well-being, to impoverish and compel us to serve as his laborers. Disease never comes of itself. It is caused.

--Excerpts from H. I. E. Dhlomo's play Malaria.

In June 1932, during the height of a severe malaria epidemic, Zulu families in the sugarcane farming district of Eshowe chased "Native Anti-Malaria Assistant" Nicholas Bhengu away from their homes as he attempted to distribute quinine and advise them about antimalaria precautions. 1 In his report to Dr. George Park Ross, assistant medical officer for the Union of South Africa in charge of the antimalaria campaign in Natal and Zululand, Bhengu warned that hundreds were dying from [End Page 76] malaria infections and thousands more were suffering from fevers. Yet people refused to listen to official entreaties to protect themselves. 2

Near the coastal sugarcane estates, assistants Richard Tshabalala and George Dube claimed they could no longer carry out their work because of people's hostility to the government. They reported that local Africans perceived the South African Department of Public Health's (DPH) efforts to reduce mosquito larvae breeding areas by pouring slicks of paraffin into streams and water supplies as a white-settler means of "poisoning" the Zulu in order to take their land and cattle. 3 Rumors that malaria was caused by whites, and that quinine caused sterility and abortions, spread rapidly through Zululand. 4 It is hardly surprising that the Zulu were suspicious of the state's apparent indifference to their plight. Dr. J. A. Mitchell, the director of the DPH, responded to public criticism of the department's slow and ineffective response to the 1929-33 epidemic by arguing that "you cannot expect us to put quinine into the Natives' mouths." 5

The story of malaria epidemics in early-twentieth-century Zululand highlights the challenges that the Zulu people faced when the rapid penetration of commercializing white agriculture and the actions of an increasingly interventionist state combined with a public health crisis. At the local level, the Zulu, who were struggling to lessen the impact of intensified South African state intervention in the rural areas during the 1930s and 1940s, were pitted against regional Native Affairs Department officials, public health doctors, medical missionaries, and mission-educated Africans employed as "Native Anti-Malaria Assistants" by the state. The ambiguity in wider patterns of Zulu dealings with the state was evident in their involvement in the antimalaria campaign. Zulu people were highly suspicious of official motives for malaria control because of their previous experiences with conquest, land loss, and repression that were rooted in the colonial context. The Zulu sought to condition and control the forms of modern public health with which they were confronted by trying to integrate Western medical measures into their own patterns of health care and healing. For the Zulu, the problems of Western medical approaches used to combat malaria were a product of both the structural inequities of South African society and the differences of approach to health and healing between Zulu and white officials. The public health measures developed in Zululand had significant implications for official policies aimed at dealing with malaria elsewhere in South Africa. 6 What is remarkable about these campaigns is not so much the constraints imposed by the state, but rather how the Zulu strove both to use the epidemics as a platform for broader resistance and to make aspects of modern health care their own.

The antimalaria campaign of the early 1930s was a...

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