Anthrax in South Africa: Economics, Experiment and the Mass Vaccination of Animals, c. 1910–1945

During 1923, the South African government began to issue free vaccine for the immunization of cattle against anthrax. Five years later, it introduced compulsory annual vaccination in parts of the Transkeian Territories, an area reserved for occupation by Africans. Thereafter, the state sought to extend both compulsory and discretionary vaccination. In 1942, scientists at the government’s Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute announced that they had issued 6million doses of vaccine during the previous year. Approximately half the cattle in the country were being immunized annually with a special product which scientists at the Institute had recently devised. The scale of vaccination was unprecedented within the country and the annual issue of anthrax vaccine far surpassed the amount supplied for any other animal disease. It was a major state intervention in rural society. Nevertheless, vaccination against anthrax in South Africa is absent from the historiography, while published contemporary accounts are few. The history of anthrax control in South Africa, which concerns public policy and technical innovation, relates to the wider historiography of medicine, science and technology in the British Empire. If Daniel Headrick has interpreted various innovations in science and medicine as ‘‘tools of empire’’, which enabled colonists to conquer indigenous populations and overcome hostile environmental conditions, historians have more recently been concerned with the ways in which western medicine assisted colonial administrations in extending social control over the colonized. Medical science underpinned militaristic public health policies and sanitary measures, in which vaccination,