Colonialism, Cattle, Pastoralism, and Progress: From local origins to global herds

Abstract

Colonial intrusion in British East Africa led to the application of progressionist ideas on traditions of managing livestock, land, and agriculture. With special reference to the Maasai experience, this overview examines foundation myths and origin stories, linking them to the impact of divisive approaches to livestock and landscape. It draws on restitution work developed in partnership between Maasai communities and Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, as well as some nascent exploration of the history of British farm interventions in Tanganyika in the mid-twentieth century. The paper will conclude with some provisional thoughts about the need for local cattle cultures to be better represented within conversations about future land and livestock challenges. 

This is the first event in a series to launch the IAS major project Interest in cattle: value, risk and security in eastern and southern Africa.  

This project, which will run up to Easter 2026, with fellows resident in Durham from January to March 2026, takes an innovative approach to questions of value and well-being in eastern and southern Africa. It will bring together scholars from diverse disciplines - from public health to history and anthropology, all of whom share an interest in cattle. Cattle, we suggest, lie at the intersection of multiple, distributed, strategies for securing the future. They are an everyday resource in livelihood strategies; a target of bio-security interventions informed by contemporary One Health approaches; a way to build and reaffirm horizontal social ties; an investment opportunity for those who seek to accumulate – and they are the centre of an enduring aesthetic which valorises them as things of beauty as well as cultural and economic resources.

The project will enable us to develop and refine a series of questions around these intersecting forms of interest in cattle – and to draw on historical experience as well as contemporary research in producing a series of outputs that will inform current debates, encourage engagement with the complex questions raised by the place of cattle in our more-than-human world, and enable and guide future research on this topic.

ADDITIONAL EVENTS

17 March 2025, 13.00 – 14.30
Seminar Rm 1, Department of History (HS110)
Professor Samuël Coghe (Ghent University)
Title to follow

7 May 2025, 13.00 – 14.30
Institute of Advanced Study
Professor Salome Bukachi (University of Nairobi)
The Unseen Histories of One Health: Tracing the Colonial and Post-Colonial Footprints of Disease Control

19 June 2025, 10.00 – 17.00
Institute of Advanced Study
Launch event and workshop – details to follow