Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa. 2018. The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.
Review by Michael Beach
Among many threads, Mavhunga makes a point around ‘thingamication’. He shares examples throughout the book on colonial (and later) white perspective on African people as objects of study, control, labor, and information.
One striking example was the use of fences in building corridors through tsetse infested areas. Local labor was used alongside a thing called a bulldozer to clear forest where the land was too steep for the machine. They were also used to put in fencing, then funneled through those fences and ‘de-flying’ stations while moving along the fenced paths (182). The roads themselves were also a product of African labor, mostly built to allow for traffic between white-owned farms as well as for Africans to get from their homes to work in mines or on farms. These same Africans were able to move through traditional paths in ways that avoided infested areas during infested times before the belief that roads and fences were necessary.
Another particularly difficult approach from the perspective of Mavhunga was government creation of villages as a prophylactic. This effort removed people from their ancestral homes to gather them in new communities in between white-owned farms. Clearing and building up these small towns forced elimination of tsetse habitat (as well as habitat for nature in general), lowering the threat to sparse white-owned farms. The towns became a form of human shield. This approach lead to overcrowding of people in the buffer zones, and over burdening of the soils around the new towns (153). Mavhunga gives examples of eventual movement patterns adopted by officials that were not all that different than those previously employed by locals, but instead of preventative movement efforts these were about damage control (161).
I’ll share one more human-as-object example. When authorities added chemical efforts to ‘mechanized phytocides’ (141) Africans again became a tool for the effort. While pilots sprayed less effectually from the thing called an airplane, African workers called ‘spray boys’ were given backpack pneumatic sprayers to go directly into the infestation. This put them as risk both from the fly and from the chemical poisons. Mavhunga offers a great deal of insight over several chapters about which chemicals were used during various periods and the effect on the fly, the plants, the environment, wildlife, and humans who both applied the poison and lived on the affected land. Decision makers only backed off aggressive use of chemicals when whites in the area began to complain after the shift from organic to synthetic pesticides (152).
Review by Michael Beach
Among many threads, Mavhunga makes a point around ‘thingamication’. He shares examples throughout the book on colonial (and later) white perspective on African people as objects of study, control, labor, and information.
One striking example was the use of fences in building corridors through tsetse infested areas. Local labor was used alongside a thing called a bulldozer to clear forest where the land was too steep for the machine. They were also used to put in fencing, then funneled through those fences and ‘de-flying’ stations while moving along the fenced paths (182). The roads themselves were also a product of African labor, mostly built to allow for traffic between white-owned farms as well as for Africans to get from their homes to work in mines or on farms. These same Africans were able to move through traditional paths in ways that avoided infested areas during infested times before the belief that roads and fences were necessary.
Another particularly difficult approach from the perspective of Mavhunga was government creation of villages as a prophylactic. This effort removed people from their ancestral homes to gather them in new communities in between white-owned farms. Clearing and building up these small towns forced elimination of tsetse habitat (as well as habitat for nature in general), lowering the threat to sparse white-owned farms. The towns became a form of human shield. This approach lead to overcrowding of people in the buffer zones, and over burdening of the soils around the new towns (153). Mavhunga gives examples of eventual movement patterns adopted by officials that were not all that different than those previously employed by locals, but instead of preventative movement efforts these were about damage control (161).
I’ll share one more human-as-object example. When authorities added chemical efforts to ‘mechanized phytocides’ (141) Africans again became a tool for the effort. While pilots sprayed less effectually from the thing called an airplane, African workers called ‘spray boys’ were given backpack pneumatic sprayers to go directly into the infestation. This put them as risk both from the fly and from the chemical poisons. Mavhunga offers a great deal of insight over several chapters about which chemicals were used during various periods and the effect on the fly, the plants, the environment, wildlife, and humans who both applied the poison and lived on the affected land. Decision makers only backed off aggressive use of chemicals when whites in the area began to complain after the shift from organic to synthetic pesticides (152).
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