Colonisation and Smallpox Response in the South-Western Transkei, 1878–1896.

Between the 1870s and the beginning of the twentieth century, the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope underwent an accelerated elaboration and extension of its bureaucratic, legal, and spatial elements. This was part of a broader high-modern transformation that sought to make human geography ‘legible’ and open to state isntervention. Power over health and sickness formed an important component of this. Few groups of people experienced these changes as rapidly as isiXhosa-speakers in the area between the Kei and Mzimkhulu rivers that became the Transkeian Territories. Communities in the south-western areas closest to the Kei saw the most extensive engagements with colonialist measures regarding land, labour, education, and, of course, health. Their experiences provide useful case studies of this advance. Although historians of medicine and public health in South Africa have hitherto paid scant attention to the development of a colonial medical establishment in this area and its interventions before the twentieth century, a unusually well-documented case of smallpox mitigation shows how biomedical interventions before 1900 changed from accommodation to dictation in this colonial context and highlights some of the ways in which Africans sought to limit this intrusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]