How Vanhu Managed Tsetse
How Vanhu Managed Tsetse
This chapter shows that vanhu vatema understood mobility as the centerpiece of their interactions with the insect. It commences from a view of vatema's management of mhesvi as a site of innovation, illustrating the centrality of mobility in interactions between vanhu and zvipukanana. The chapter strategically deploys the travel accounts of vachana writing in the nineteenth century about their encounters with people living with and despite mhesvi. The strategy herein is to read these travel accounts as acts of witnessing to, and confessions about, ruzivo rwemhesvi (knowledge of tsetse) among the people living in the lands between and along the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. The chapter maps mhesvi-infested areas and mhesvi management techniques—namely, forest clearance, selective culling of mhuka, strategic settlement of vanhu, use of repellents, movement by night, and inoculation. At the end of the day, African mhesvi management was about mobilities management.
Keywords: vanhu vatema, mobility, tsetse fly, mhesvi, vatema, vachana, travel accounts, ruzivo rwemhesvi
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