Rinderpest Impact On African Americans

Cattle populations were devastated and African buffalo extirpated from most of their range in southern and eastern Africa. The African buffalo, formerly the most characteristic and abundant ungulate of the African plains, was reduced to a few small, scattered relict herds (Sinclair, 1979). Despite intensive control efforts over the past century, rinderpest is still enzootic within East Africa, with periodic outbreaks occurring among livestock and wildlife populations in the region (Dobson, 1994). The importance of buffalo as a food resource for African hunter–gatherer societies was surpassed, however, by the immense importance of domesticated cattle to pastoral and agricultural societies of eastern and southern Africa. Cattle have served for centuries and in some instances perhaps millennia, as the principal source of food, wealth, and motive energy for the Nilotic and Bantu peoples of Eastern and Southern Africa.
The rinderpest epidemic effectively dispossessed indigenous African peoples of food resources, traditional livelihoods, and wealth and property in ways that were potentially more disruptive to traditional cultural milieus than the physical displacement from traditional territories and the political and economic subjugation of African peoples by European colonial