An Interspecies Contact Zone: Locusts and Humans in Colonial Burundi, 1929–1941

In interwar Burundi, successive waves of gregarious locust swarms preyed on fields and grazing grounds, exacerbating the vulnerability of its (non)-human inhabitants. The locusts also constituted an acute governance issue for the Belgian colonial administration, which struggled to devise efficient modes of acridian destruction. By using locust being-in-the-world as a vantage point, this article 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. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .