Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa

Chapter 1: Travelers and Doctors: The Mystery of Rabies in Colonial South Africa

Chapter 1 Travelers and Doctors The Mystery of Rabies in Colonial South Africa Notwithstanding the heat of the climate, the canine madness, with its concomitant and remarkable symptom the hydrophobia or dread of water, is totally unknown. John Barrow, 18061 Considerable alarm has been recently excited in this neighbourhood, by manifest and indubitable symptoms of Canine Madness. Stephen Kay, 18272 The epigraphs—by John Barrow, private secretary to the first British governor of the Cape Colony, George Macartney, and by Stephen Kay, a British missionary in the eastern Cape—reflect the conflicting views about whether rabies existed in South Africa during the first part of the nineteenth century. Doctors, settlers, and travelers who visited the region commented either on the surprising absence of the disease or else its sporadic and dangerous presence. These debates continued until the first recorded epidemic in South Africa, which broke out in Port Elizabeth in 1893. Until then controversy was rife because there were no diagnostic tools to confirm whether a person or animal had become a victim of the rabies virus. Diagnoses were based on clinical symptoms, in particular evidence of hydrophobia in humans and aggressive changes in behavior in dogs that had become “mad.” It was not until the 1880s and the development of Louis Pasteur’s method of determining rabies by inoculating brain material from possible victims into laboratory rabbits that scientists could make a judgment either way. If the deceased had succumbed to rabies, then the laboratory animals would contract it too. Since the 1880s diagnostics have The Mystery of Rabies in Colonial South Africa |  improved greatly, and it is now possible to identify the particular type of rabies virus that was the cause of death.3 For most of the nineteenth century , however, there was no conclusive biomedical proof of rabies mortality , perpetuating the medical question: Did rabies exist in South Africa in the early nineteenth century? If it did not exist, the reason for that needed to be explored. This question was not peculiar to South Africa. Rather it emphasized how little was known about the rabies situation in Africa in general at the turn of the nineteenth century. In his article on the history of rabies in Ethiopia, Richard Pankhurst has shown that European travelers who visited that country during the nineteenth century were divided as to whether the disease was widespread or even present prior to the serious epidemic in Addis Ababa in 1903. However, Pankhurst argued, Amharic medical texts of the eighteenth century indicated that Ethiopian communities had a knowledge of rabies, which they associated with dogs. They also recorded a range of treatments, using plants that were often prepared as emetics and purges to try to flush the disease from the human body. It was the inability and failure of Europeans to interact sufficiently with local knowledge and languages, Pankhurst suggested, that generated this mystery about the prevalence of rabies in Ethiopia.4 In southernAfrica,however,there were no ancient or indigenous manuscripts that Europeans could draw on to ascertain the historical presence or absence of rabies, even if they chose to engage with folk knowledge. Nor could they learn from any written records how African communities had responded to rabies outbreaks, if they had occurred before the colonial period. In South Africa, African medical knowledge was handed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next. There were some similarities with the Ethiopian case as described by Pankhurst, in that many Europeans who visited southern Africa either neglected or were incapable of tapping into these rich oral traditions. This has resulted in great lacunae in our historical understanding of African ideas surrounding disease and medicine,including their knowledge as to whether animals could be carriers of diseases. This chapter explores the recorded debates surrounding the existence of rabies in South Africa and considers how they influenced European ideas about Africa’s disease environment. In the early nineteenth century much of Africa was still unknown to Europeans, and the Cape was one of the few parts of the continent where white settlers had become established in any numbers. Disease had been one of the main reasons for this, as yellow fever and malaria, in particular, took their toll on European lives, especially in West Africa. By 1800 West Africa had gained the epithet “the  | Travelers and Doctors white man’s grave,” and in the European psyche had become the “worst of...