THE SPINE LESS CACTUS

At the time of Union (1910), opinions were sharply divided in South Africa on the value of spiny O. ficus-indica. But in the next couple of decades, a new option opened up for advocates and users of cactus. Spineless cactus varieties (now called cactus pear) were bred that seemed to be far more productive than the South African kaalblad. At the same time, the Union Department of Agriculture, which commanded increasingly sophisticated capacity for research, initiated a series of investigations and experiments on wild prickly pear. Officials were determined, once and for all, to clarify whether opuntia could make a major contribution to livestock production and whether it could be useful for other industrial purposes. This chapter explores the application of science to opuntia, as well as the plant's systematic adoption by some leading livestock farmers in the Karoo.

Plants can be malleable both in nature and in human hands. This biological capacity to modify changed the social balance of interest around cactus. At the very moment that many wealthier landowners seemed to be uniting against opuntia, their interests and attitudes diverged again in the early decades of the twentieth century. The story is, however, more complex. Just as these experiments on usage were developing under the aegis of one branch of the Department of Agriculture, so another, the entomological section, was finding common cause with the advocates of eradication. Entomologists were beginning to advertise their capacity to deal with unwanted, wild prickly pear through completely different methods. Their campaign is the subject of the next chapter.

In the reconstruction period after the South African War (1899-1902), the agricultural bureaucracies of the Transvaal and Free State, as well as the betterestablished departments in the Cape and Natal, expanded quickly. A number of specialists were employed. Joseph Burtt-Davy was an energetic British botanist who trained and worked in California in the 1890s before coming to the Transvaal in 1903. He was typical of a new generation of South African scientists, most from outside the country, who had wide international networks. Burtt-Davy was an avid collector of indigenous plants. He made a number of important field trips and wrote extensively on trees.