An Unusual Kind of Town: Cattle Disease, Zoonosis, and Public Health in Colonial Salaga (Northern Ghana).

In the early decades of colonial rule (1900 to c.1930), Salaga, a town in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), experienced frequent outbreaks of anthrax, a zoonotic disease of cattle and humans. This article examines this unusual incidence of cattle diseases in a commercial town that was not even located in the Sudan savannah belt in the Northern Territories, ideal for livestock. The article argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, Salaga, a town that had prospered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a major entrepot for slaves and kola nut, found itself without a major trade commodity. In response to a revolt of the people of eastern Gonja against Asante rule, Asante after 1874 moved its kola trade from Salaga south to Kintampo. The declaration of the Northern Territories as a British Protectorate in 1900 ended the trade in slaves. Salaga decided to rebuild its local economy on cattle trade, as the caravan trade that had brought slaves down from the Niger Bend and Hausaland also brought cattle. This pitted the merchants and residents of Salaga against the colonial administration, that had designated the Northern Territories a labor reserve for the south. This economic conflict, and the irregular cattle herding and slaughtering practices at Salaga gave entry to cattle diseases as a major public health hazard and turned colonial veterinary knowledge and policy into contested sites. Resolution came from 1930, as the colonial government showed new commitment to developing the Northern Territories as a zone for cattle export and gained local endorsement of colonial veterinary science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]