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Title
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‘The Tsetse Fly as a Vegetarian’? Animal Conservation, Plant Destruction, and Attempts to Understand Trypanosomiasis in South Africa
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Abstract
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In the 1930s, a suggestion was made in the Journal of the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire that the tsetse fly could live entirely on the “latex and juices” of plants. It was hypothesized that non-pathogenic trypanosomes were extracted from succulent Euphorbia plants and transformed within the fly to pathogenic trypanosomes that infected both humans and animals. If this were true, it was argued, it would be a remarkable breakthrough that would save people from killing game and livestock infected with trypanosomiasis – the “scourge” of Africa. By simply eradicating the plants that the tsetse allegedly fed on, they would be able to solve the problem of animal health. Several experiments were conducted to prove the “vegetable theory,” only for them to find that this potential miracle solution to the tsetse problem had no real basis and was quickly discredited. But this particular “vegetable theory” was just one of many that placed plants in the firing line of trypanosomiasis research in the first half of the nineteenth century. The destruction of vegetation became a key priority for tsetse control, and ideas around burning and discriminative clearing to eradicate fly habitats were more often prioritized over game elimination. This reveals something of a contradiction in early conservation initiatives: researchers worked to save animals at the expense of potentially significant plants and plant ecosystems. Even tsetse expert Charles Swynnerton called “bush-areas […] utterly useless,” demonstrating that, despite researchers’ interests in emergent ideas of ecology, plants were clearly seen as less important, let alone anything to be protected. By reorienting our gaze toward plants in histories of colonial tropical medicine and trypanosomiasis research, this paper aims to investigate the following questions: where was African plant conservation in the first half of the nineteenth century, and what exactly were animal conservationists and tropical medicine researchers aware of? Were plants part of an emerging idea of the ‘ecology’ of tsetse control, or simply what stood in the way of a solution to trypanosomiasis? Ultimately, this paper will demonstrate that conservation was an uneven and unequal practice in twentieth-century Africa, particularly in its intersections with tropical medicine.
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Date
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25 November 2026
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Conference
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'Colonial/Postcolonial plant and animal agencies and interactions’, CRASSH, University of Cambridge
Katherine Arnold