In this open access article published in Environment & History, FORAGENCY PI Benoît Henriet studies how locust invasions in interwar Burundi exacerbated the vulnerability of its (non)-human inhabitants and constituted an acute governance issue for the Belgian colonial administration. By using locust being-in-the-world as a vantage point, this paper analyses the complex interactions between insectile hazards and the segregated human communities who had to face them. It delves into the differing perspectives of Burundian peasants and colonial administrators, and looks at the connected modes of containment that emerged across the colonial divide. On a conceptual level, the article proposes the concept ‘interspecies contact zone’ as a framework to make sense of more-than-human encounters occurring in the fraught context of colonial societies.
Photo credits: Locust destruction campaign in the Territory of Usumbura in 1932. State Archives of Belgium, African Archives, BUR 295.