William Beinart & Karen Brown 
African Local Knowledge & Livestock Health 
Diseases & Treatments in South Africa

A much needed examination of contemporary approaches to animal healing in South Africa, and the role of local knowledge.


Understanding local knowledge has become a central academic project among those interested in Africa and developing countries. In South Africa, land reform is gathering pace and African people hold an increasing proportion of thelivestock in the country. Animal health has become a central issue for rural development. Yet African veterinary medical knowledge remains largely unrecorded. This book seeks to fill that gap. It captures for the first time the diversity, as well as the limits, of a major sphere of local knowledge.


Beinart and Brown argue that African approaches to animal health rest largely in environmental and nutritional explanations. They explore the widespread use of plants as well as biomedicines for healing. While rural populations remain concerned about supernatural threats, and many men think that women can harm their cattle, the authors challenge current ideas on the modernisation of witchcraft. They examine more ambient forms of supernatural danger expressed in little-known concepts such as
mohato and
umkhondo. They take the reader into the homesteads and kraals of rural black South Africans and engage with a key rural concern – vividly reporting the ideas of livestock owners. This is groundbreaking research which will have important implications for analyses of local knowledge more generally as well as effectivestate interventions and animal treatments in South Africa.


William Beinart is Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, African Studies Centre, University of Oxford; Karen Brown is an ESRC Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford.


Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press

Jadual kandungan

Introduction: African Local Knowledge and Veterinary Pluralism

Ticks, Tick-borne Diseases and the Limits of Local Knowledge

‘The Grave of the Cow is in the Stomach’: Environment and Nutrition in the Explanation and Prevention of Livestock Diseases

Transhumance, Animal Diseases and Environment

Plants and Drugs: Medicating Livestock

Medicinal Plants: Their Selection and their Properties

Animal Health and Ideas of the Supernatural

Gender, Space and the Supernatural

Conclusion