Maintaining the health of flocks and herds in the marginal rangelands of the Greater Horn of Africa has taken on a wider significance in recent years as catastrophic loss of livestock to drought and disease inevitably compromises societal reproduction and creates in the process a fertile recruiting ground for international terrorism. Roland Minor is a Cambridge-educated veterinarian whose career since 1963, spent mainly in this region, has encompassed the postcolonial continuities of Uganda’s reasonably efficient if somewhat thinly spread state veterinary service and the project-based intervention of the international development industry in Ethiopia and Sudan. Although written in an anecdotal style for a more general readership, this engaging and well-written autobiographical account of over forty years of wide-ranging service in the field nevertheless contains useful insights into the politics of animal care that may serve to put meat on the bones of scholarly enquiry beyond the narrow field of veterinary science. Minor holds contentious views, expressed here in a trenchant style, on the debilitating effects of endemic state corruption as well as the myopia of aid agencies whose often self-serving bureaucracies and short institutional memories condemn them to repeat many of the errors of earlier times. Nor does intrusion by African politicians into purely veterinary matters escape censure: one chapter is devoted to describing Minor’s frustration as a private practitioner in 1970s Mombasa dealing with an outbreak of canine rabies in the face of official refusal to admit to the presence of the disease, lest disclosure risk damaging Kenya’s growing tourist industry. He does, however, pay tribute to the half century of international effort that in 2011 brought about the total eradication of rinderpest. This is an important story in itself, within which veterinary science has a central role, touching as it does on the origins of the first pan-African institutions in the late 1940s as first the colonial powers and later emergent African states came together to discuss the single most important issue of common interest on which they could find ready agreement.
The book joins a small number of similar publications by veterinarians whose professional careers have also been engaged in the battle against this and other livestock diseases in Africa, of which Jack Wilde’s Science and Safari (Cambridge, 2005), Patrick Guilbride’s Far Away Cows (Lewes, 1998) and Hugh Cran’s And Miles to Go Before I Sleep (Ludlow, 2007) are recent examples.
Surprisingly, in view of the substantial investment by colonial governments in laboratory and field services during the half century before international agencies began to set their own rules for the development of Africa’s pastoral assets, veterinary efforts to control disease and improve livestock within conservationist and developmental agendas in East and Central Africa have received relatively little attention from historians. It is also difficult to discern where veterinarians are located within the debates surrounding the role of experts and scientific expertise. Neither Joseph Hodge’s Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Ohio, 2007) nor Helen Tilley’s Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago, 2011) have much to say about the veterinary services in the colonial period. In the case of the former British dependencies, this may be at least in part due to the weakness of institutional and scientific ties between the African periphery and the metropolitan center. Veterinarians across Africa in these times were more reliant on continental networks of knowledge based on their main research establishments at Onderstepoort, Fort Lamy, and Kabete/Muguga. Minor’s scandalized account of the indifference with which he was met when offering his valuable firsthand experience of foot-and-mouth disease to Britain’s state veterinary service during the disastrous 2001 epizootic is a small but telling illustration of this long-standing disconnection.
Another differentiating factor which may also be worthy of further investigation is the distinctive nature of veterinary expertise as practiced in an African context where the political power of the state is often at its weakest and intervention has a direct and immediate bearing on pastoralist livelihoods, placing greater emphasis on the persuasive power of the veterinary art rather than its science. Minor’s many experiences would appear to suggest that veterinarians in Africa as practical scientists governed by the laws of economics have always had to be generalist “foxes” rather than expert “hedgehogs.”
The book is laid out in a series of chapters in chronological order beginning with an account of the author’s early years in Argentina and education in England. It moves on to his many and varied governmental and United Nations postings as well as his years in private practice, and ends with his retirement at Lamu on Kenya’s northern coast. There are good in-depth descriptions throughout of places and peoples, together with maps and several photographs that help to orientate the reader. Minor also provides many pleasing character sketches to bring the story to life. Also of assistance to a non-veterinary readership are clear explanations of technical terms and the clinical details of the many diseases to be found in Africa. True to the vocational nature of his calling, he displays a refreshing independence of spirit throughout, with distinct quixotic tendencies in his many dealings with officialdom, all of which adds spice to the narrative. In the same vein, however, there is more than one example of somewhat intemperate score settling which slightly mars an otherwise informative and highly enjoyable piece of writing.
