Conflict at the Cattle Dip: Livestock Taxes and the Sinews of the State Across a Century

Abstract

Inside one of the small portacabins that houses the government vets working in the KwaZulu–Natal provincial Department of Agriculture in Msunduzi/Pietermaritzburg, you might still find a small cabinet display telling the history of cattle dipping in South Africa. I saw it in 2019, whilst conducting fieldwork in the Midlands region, just after the display had been rescued from a skip by a couple of government vets, horrified that senior officials had decided to close down the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Agriculture’s Museum display, quite literally consigning their institutional knowledge to the dustbin of history.