The rinderpest pandemic in Africa, which spread at the end of the 19th century, became a defining event because of its impact on indigenous communities, domestic animals, wildlife, settlers, administrators, colonial officials and the ecology of the African savannas (Plowright, 1982; Morens et al., 2011; Sunseri, 2018).

Although it is clear that this epidemic did not represent the first appearance of the disease in Africa, the enormous number of animals killed at the turn of the twentieth century made this the most dramatic and widespread event ever recorded on the continent; it also contributed to the famine described in the most realistic and in-depth manner by Pankhurst for Ethiopia (Pankhurst, 1966).

The previous waves of rinderpest in Africa were most likely caused by the introduction of livestock from Europe and Asia, regions in which the disease was widespread between the 17th and 18th centuries; however, the disease remained relatively contained and appears to have undergone spontaneous, near self-limiting extinction in some settings (Rowe and Hødnebø, 1994; Sunseri, 2018).

Descriptions of episodes attributable to rinderpest in Egypt and in other countries are recorded already at the beginning of the 19th century, but the virus never spread in so extensive and destructive a manner as during the great African rinderpest pandemic (Rowe and Hødnebø, 1994; Sunseri, 2018).

It is now a widely accepted view that in 1885 an Italian expeditionary force occupied the port of Massawa (present-day Eritrea); following the importation of infected cattle from India to supply these troops, the virus entered the continent in 1888 and subsequently spread (Morens et al., 2011; Sunseri, 2018) with an epidemic front advancing thousands of kilometres in just a few years. The rapid westward and southward advance of the epidemic front (Figure 3) reflects the connectivity of trade routes and transhumance systems, reinforcing the risk-channel synthesis in Table 2 that links mobility, market nodes and watering point congregation to accelerated transmission.

Although the chronology of spread remains important, the main explanatory issue is not simply where the virus moved next, but why transmission proved so efficient across some regions and slowed in others.

At the time, conditions were clearly favourable for large-scale dissemination, and the introduction of the disease into the Horn of Africa appears to have triggered the wider pandemic spread (Sunseri, 2018).

Military expeditions, the herds of the colonies and of the indigenous communities, and wildlife–in particular buffalo and antelope–propagated the virus across the continent; the geography of the Sudan played a crucial role, offering a corridor westwards along the routes of nomadic herds and of trade flows (Rowe and Hødnebø, 1994; Sunseri, 2018).

Meanwhile, the disease spread rapidly in eastern Africa until it met the ecological barrier of the miombo woodlands (Brachystegia spp.) in the present-day United Republic of Tanzania, where it halted temporarily. The disease flared up again subsequently–probably carried by wildlife–eventually reaching Zimbabwe and South Africa and leaving behind a trail of dead animals, human suffering and devastation (Plowright, 1982; Prins and Weyerhaeuser, 1987; Marquardt, 2005).

The disease then took root in some parts of Africa (Eastern, Central and Western), with periodic outbreaks in the following decades (Plowright, 1982; Morens et al., 2011).

West and Central Africa also illustrate the long tail of rinderpest dynamics and the uneven geography of control. Residual foci after JP15 and the mid-1980s recrudescence in West Africa underscore how gaps in routine surveillance and vaccination could re-seed outbreaks across interconnected Sahelian trade and transhumance systems. In these settings–including Fulani/Peul pastoral zones spanning multiple national borders–effective control depended less on fixed territorial quarantines than on negotiated access to herds, market-linked reporting and synchronised cross-border action (Roeder and Rich, 2009).

Beyond this chronology, the African rinderpest pandemic is best understood through the interaction of ecology, mobility and political economy. Environmental variability, geography and animal movements–including trade, military logistics and pastoral mobility–interacted with livestock–wildlife interfaces to shape the speed and direction of spread. In particular, rainfall variability concentrated domestic cattle and wild ungulates at shared watering points, where intensified contact and exposure to infectious material created repeated opportunities for transmission. Animals infected at these sites could then carry the virus onward along roads, tracks and open rangelands, accelerating the epidemic front across connected savanna systems (Plowright, 1982; Prins and Weyerhaeuser, 1987; Marquardt, 2005). This mechanism corresponds to the ecological interface risk channel summarised in Table 2 and helps explain why high-contact nodes and seasonal congregation windows are relevant not only to understanding historical spread of rinderpest, but also to contemporary PPR and FMD control.

The words of the South African Minister of the time vividly illustrate this mechanism of contagion linked to the watering points (cit. in Marquardt, 2005): “There are three watering points there: Maritsani, the Setlagoli basin and the Maribogo River […] at each of these centres more than 12,000 head of cattle water. They come from a radius of eight–ten miles and traverse the same ground to reach the water. Now the only plan would be to kill every animal that drinks there, but the government hesitates despite the increasing revenues”.

The relationship between pastoralism and rinderpest was not simply one of exposure to infection. It was mediated by mobility systems, colonial governance, veterinary knowledge and the social legitimacy of control measures. Earlier interpretations often personalised blame or relied on rumours and culturally biased explanations, obscuring the material mechanisms through which the disease spread and the unequal burdens imposed by control. A more useful reading is therefore to see rinderpest as both an epidemiological event and a crisis of governance: one that exposed the limits of coercive quarantines, fixed territorial controls and poorly contextualised veterinary interventions in mobile pastoral settings (van Onselen, 1972; Gilfoyle, 2003; Schneider, 2012).

van Onselen (1972) addressed various aspects of the disease, reporting different interpretations of the spread of the pandemic, often in the form of narratives and rumours. These stories frequently fuelled local unrest and hostility between colonisers and herders: some Europeans believed that the disease was spread by Africans, while the latter were convinced that rinderpest was a product of the cruelty and arrogance of the European settlers.

Contemporary accounts provide important insights into the social, economic, political and veterinary responses to the disease, but there seems to have been little effort to understand the technical mechanisms of the spread of rinderpest (Gilfoyle, 2003).

Not infrequently, interpretations of the epidemic called upon an autonomous entity: an animistic and anti-scientific worldview, still widespread in sub-Saharan Africa at the end of the 19th century. This perspective allowed colonial authorities and institutions to avoid engaging in disease-control activities or to do so with little determination (van Onselen, 1972).

Had such control activities been implemented more effectively, they might have limited cattle mortality or at least reduced the scale of the damage.

However, in some cases effective measures were imposed. A clear example is the containment system adopted in Namibia, where the authorities established quarantine corridors/cordon fences around the pastoral territory known as “Hereroland” (Schneider, 2012). In South Africa stamping out (sanitary culling) was also used (Hutcheon, 1897).

Over time, in line with advances in knowledge, interpretations moved away from mono-causal explanations, contextualising the effects of the disease and adopting more scientific approaches (Gilfoyle, 2003).

Consequently, rinderpest came to be understood as one of the many factors responsible for the poverty of the time and as a component of a complex history of social, economic, political and environmental challenges faced by sub-Saharan Africa.

Among the few Authors who undertook this retrospective inquiry, Gilfoyle (2003) stands out for the clarity of method and the holistic approach: he highlighted the technical and scientific aspects and focused attention on how rinderpest steered veterinary science in new directions up to bringing about the containment of the disease (Gilfoyle, 2003).

By the second half of the 20th century, the literature began to reflect a more balanced understanding of the spread of rinderpest and its consequences. In Africa, the first counter-actions were carried out in various phases and on territories corresponding to aggregations of nations and/or colonies. It is important to remember that this took place at a time when many liberation and independence movements were engaged in armed struggles, with entirely different priorities.

At the beginning of the 1960s, some international donors decided to support a regional vaccination programme against rinderpest in Africa. Between 1961 and 1976, six phases of the Joint Project 15 (JP15) (Figure 1; Table 1) were carried out in the intertropical belt. This overall initiative significantly reduced the incidence of the disease, coming very close to eradication. However, despite the belief that the disease had disappeared, some herds remained infected and these residual outbreaks inevitably led to a recrudescence of rinderpest in West Africa in the mid-1980s (FAO, 2010).

From 1986 to 1998, JP15 was followed by the Pan-African Rinderpest Campaign (PARC), developed by the Organisation of African Unity–Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources (OAU-IBAR) and largely supported by the European Commission; implemented from 1986 to 1998. This campaign aimed to eradicate the disease from the African continent through technical assistance, mass vaccinations, vaccine quality control (with the support of the Pan-African Veterinary Vaccine Centre–PANVAC), epidemiological and diagnostic research, and quarantine areas (Tambi et al., 1999; FAO, 2010; Tounkara et al., 2011).

We also recognise that campaign delivery can impose short-term burdens on mobile communities–through opportunity costs, altered movement decisions, or tensions around enforcement and compliance. In settings where rinderpest was not perceived as the primary constraint on livelihoods, such disruptions could affect trust and participation. These trade-offs underscore the value of delivery platforms that are socially legitimate, locally mediated, and coupled to routine services rather than standing alone as episodic campaigns. Eradication rested not only on vaccine availability and logistics but on approaches that worked with, rather than against, mobility. Community-based animal health workers, negotiated access to herds at seasonal grazing and watering points, and flexible deployment that tracked transhumance calendars all proved decisive. Programmes that recognised customary authorities and pastoral institutions shortened the “last mile” to remote herds and increased trust in surveillance and reporting.

Sustaining these gains, however, required delivery platforms adapted to pastoral mobility. Community Animal Health Workers (CAHWs) and other locally embedded paraprofessionals were especially important where conventional staffing models could not reliably reach remote herds, but their effectiveness depended on an enabling environment of training, supervision, supply chains, data reporting and clear accountability within national veterinary services.

As an initial result, livestock mortality was progressively reduced and herd sizes increased: for example, in Ethiopia and Sudan the number of cattle recorded in 2015 increased by 136% and 190%, respectively, compared with the 1985 census, according to the FAOSTAT series (FAOSTAT, 2023).

To complement the narrative evidence with routinely available quantitative signals, FAOSTAT time series were used for a small set of comparable indicators in selected pastoral and agropastoral countries.

For example, across the 49 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (World_Bank_Group, 2026), cattle stocks more than doubled, increasing from approximately 113 million head to approximately 285 million head between the start of the first coordinated vaccination and surveillance programmes (1961) and the declaration of rinderpest eradication (2011).

Over the same period, total milk production increased more than threefold, rising from about 6.7 million tonnes/year to about 24.1 million tonnes/year (Figure 4), providing a parsimonious output proxy that maps more directly onto livelihood pathways than headcounts alone. Figure 4 therefore provides a simple, comparable signal that productivity proxies moved alongside long-run disease control, while also motivating the need to test whether production gains keep pace with herd growth under recurring shocks and endemic disease pressure.

It is very likely that the progressive reduction in rinderpest incidence and geographic spread, associated with successive anti-rinderpest programmes (Table 1), contributed to these marked improvements in livestock production. Table 1 also helps distinguish periods dominated by vertical campaigns from phases in which surveillance and routine service capacity were strengthened.

Taken together, these indicators help distinguish herd recovery from welfare translation: increases in animal numbers may occur without proportional improvements in production where endemic disease pressure, constraints on market access, insecurity, or climatic shocks continue to limit productivity. This is directly relevant for current FMD and PPR control strategies, suggesting that programme performance should be assessed not only through vaccination and outbreak metrics, but also through a minimal set of downstream, comparable indicators (herd structure across species and production proxies) that capture whether control efforts are yielding measurable livelihood and system benefits.

Finally, the programmes contributed to a new model of animal health by strengthening public veterinary services and, in some contexts, expanding the role of private actors and cost-sharing arrangements (FAO, 2010). Beyond disease elimination, eradication efforts contributed to longer-term capacity building in some contexts, including investments in training and veterinary education. In Ethiopia, for example, veterinary education capacity expanded markedly; the number of veterinary schools increased from 1 to 15 between 2005 and 2015 (Mayen, 2006).

These spillovers were not automatic, but where embedded in national systems they improved the ability to address other endemic and transboundary diseases. The durability of eradication gains therefore hinges less on the absence of rinderpest alone than on whether routine, trusted and accessible animal-health services can be sustained amid recurrent shocks. The formal recognition of community-based animal-health providers has historically been contested and, in some settings, delayed within regulatory frameworks–despite their practical importance for reaching mobile and remote populations; recent WOAH guidance (WOAH, 2024) reflects an evolving consensus on competencies and supervision. Beyond aggregate benefit–cost ratios, household-level incentives mattered: easing movement permits after vaccination, providing fair compensation for sanitary culling where applied, and reducing market frictions at border posts encouraged compliance. Where corridors and markets reopened predictably, herders could rebuild animal capital and diversify income (milk, live-animal trade, fattening), reinforcing the virtuous cycle between disease control and livelihoods.

Lastly–and without any claim to exhaustiveness–programmes aimed at consolidating the results of JP15 and PARC and supporting the path towards eradication are recalled: the PACE programme and the Somali Ecosystem Rinderpest Eradication Coordination Unit (SERECU), the latter crucial for the final verification of the absence of viral circulation in the Horn of Africa (AU-IBAR/SERECU, 2007; FAO, 2010; 2011).

Rinderpest eradication provides a fully observed example of how a transboundary animal disease can reshape–and be reshaped by–dryland livelihoods. This narrative review has shown that rinderpest epidemiology cannot be separated from the institutions, mobility calendars and market relations that organise pastoral production. Seen through this lens, “equitable One Health” depends on designing animal-health systems that work with variability and mobility rather than treating them as anomalies.

Eradication success relied on delivery and governance, not vaccines alone: surveillance and vaccination worked best when aligned with seasonal movement patterns and when locally legitimate intermediaries reduced transaction costs and strengthened trust.

Campaigns can eliminate a pathogen, but durable gains require routine service platforms that remain accessible to mobile and remote populations and that can address multiple endemic infections, not only emergency targets.

Eradication left transferable capacities–diagnostics, early warning, coordination and field delivery experience–that can support other priority diseases (e.g., PPR, FMD and avian influenza) if they are maintained beyond emergency funding cycles.

At the same time, eradication benefits were uneven. In many settings, persistent endemic infections, limited access to routine veterinary services and recurrent shocks (drought, insecurity and market volatility) constrained who could convert herd recovery into sustained wellbeing. Recognising these constraints shifts attention from aggregate benefit–cost ratios to distributional outcomes and to the governance choices that determine who is reached. Finally, a rinderpest-free world still requires preparedness: rapid rule-out of look-alike syndromes and careful stewardship of any authorised rinderpest virus-containing material. Looking forward, increasing climatic variability is likely to intensify congregation pressures around scarce resources; strengthening participatory surveillance and routine animal-health services–without undermining pastoral mobility–will be central to sustaining pastoral resilience.

Taken together, these successes and shortcomings provide concrete guidance for today’s control and progressive control programmes: by learning from where rinderpest strategies failed (e.g., exclusionary movement restrictions, weak routine services, fragmented cross-border coordination) and where they worked (mobility-aware delivery, trusted local intermediaries, and durable surveillance systems), FMD and PPR interventions can be designed to be both more effective and more equitable in pastoral settings.

Experience from eradication also shows that indiscriminate movement prohibitions often amplified livelihood losses, encouraged avoidance of official controls, and reduced reporting. Better results came from working with mobility: negotiating access to herds along agreed corridors, using market and corridor checkpoints for two-way risk messaging, and applying movement measures only when necessary–proportionate, time-limited and targeted to clearly defined risk periods or routes. For FMD and PPR, this argues for mobility-sensitive plans that protect transhumance while still reducing high-risk contacts.

Seasonal rainfall patterns concentrate animals and traders at watering points, grazing bottlenecks and markets, creating predictable peaks in contact and transmission. FMD and PPR control can exploit this seasonality by aligning vaccination, sero-surveillance and communication with local mobility calendars: prioritising high-contact nodes, timing booster doses before aggregation windows, and using market days to reinforce reporting and biosecurity without disrupting access to water and pasture.

CAHWs and other paraprofessionals remain essential to reach remote or highly mobile “cold spots,” but their contribution is sustainable only when embedded in an enabling system. This requires formal recognition, defined scopes of practice, competency-based training and certification, structured veterinary supervision, reliable cold-chain and supply logistics, and routine integration of syndromic reporting and sample referral into national information systems. In FMD and PPR programmes, tiered task allocation (e.g., vaccination support, case detection, sample transport, referral) combined with auditing and feedback loops can extend coverage without diluting professional standards.

Rinderpest-era laboratory networks, early-warning arrangements and coordination platforms (including ecosystem-based approaches such as SERECU) provide practical templates for today’s transboundary control. Multi-country PPR and FMD initiatives benefit when neighbours share data protocols, use compatible diagnostics, conduct joint outbreak investigations, and agree synchronised vaccination calendars along livestock corridors and trade routes–shifting from isolated national campaigns to coordinated regional action.

Eradication improved milk yields, draught power and trade, yet welfare gains were not uniform where routine services were thin and other endemic infections remained unmanaged. A key lesson for FMD and PPR is that vertical campaigns should deliberately leave behind affordable, multi-disease service platforms–follow-up vaccination, basic clinical care, outbreak reporting and referral–that continue to function after external funding declines. Making this transition explicit helps prevent post-campaign backsliding and supports resilience during drought, insecurity and market shocks.

Finally, rinderpest control shaped human nutrition and income, wildlife populations and landscape governance because it interacted with rules over corridors, grazing access and water points. Making these linkages explicit strengthens an equitable One Health approach for FMD and PPR: one that jointly optimises animal health outcomes, livelihood security and the governance of shared resources at livestock-wildlife interfaces, rather than treating disease control as a standalone technical exercise.