Admire Mseba (Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Southern California) will present on "The Challenges of Collaborative Locust Control in Late Twentieth Century Southern Africa, 1960s-1980s," followed by a discussion.
In the mid twentieth century, a plague of red locusts infested most of Southern Africa except the region’s southernmost tip. Threatening livelihoods across Belgium’s, Britain’s, and Portugal’s empire in Africa south of the equator, the plague, combined with advances in ways of knowing the pest, produced frenetic efforts at cooperation to control it. The result was the establishment, in 1949, of the International Red Locust Control Service (IRLCS). The workings of this organization and the broader work of locust control was, however, soon caught in the politics of decolonization. In the early 1970s, this cooperation completely unraveled because. The independent member states were unwilling to continue cooperation with racist regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola. This talk discusses this entanglement of struggles against settler colonialism, international cooperation, and environmental control in late twentieth century Southern Africa—themes that scholars rarely address in a single narrative. It draws on archival materials from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, the South African National Archives (in Pretoria), the Free State Provincial Archives (in Bloemfontein), the National Archives of Zambia, the British National Archives (at Kew) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) archives in Rome, Italy.
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