Human-Animal Relations and Livestock Disease Management in Postcolonial Zimbabwe, c.1980 to 2022

Abstract

The history of livestock disease management strategies in colonial Zimbabwe has generally revealed uneven and racialised access to conventional veterinary facilities that favoured white- over black-owned livestock. In light of this context, this article examines the human-animal relationships that emerged in post-colonial Zimbabwe when access to such facilities was liberalised in a new era in which communal livestock owners still had broken interrelations with the state. In articulating this, it also explores factors that precluded communal livestock farmers from raising 'healthy' livestock. Using qualitative methods, it discusses how the postcolonial state failed to provide robust state veterinary services, and demonstrates communal farmers' agency amidst loss to epizootics and enzootics. As this study will show, livestock diseases and the challenges they posed significantly impacted on how humans (communal farmers) determined which animals to raise and how to raise them. It concludes that livestock diseases and the human-animal relationships that emerged out of the quandary posed by the former, had a negative impact on state-communal livestock farmer relationships, and promoted the continued relevance of otherwise officially despised livestock knowledge regimes in Zimbabwe's communal areas.