Sub-SaharanAfrica (SSA) seems to be the crucible of disease. Most of our modern day epidemics seem to emanate form this area – HIV, Ebola – to mention just two that have had significant mortality.
Disease in SSA is however nothing new. The region has always had numerous infectious and vector-borne diseases.
I seek to argue that the prevalence of disease in SSA might have changed the course of it’s history.
Lets go back several hundred years to about 1490. This is the period when Columbus landed in what is now Central America and initiated the massive migration of Europeans to the New World, as it was called. Through the activities of the migrant Europeans and disease they introduced, millions of native Americans were literally wiped out.
Now, SSA was “found” around this same time period. It ultimately became a the source of manual labor for the cotton and sugar cane plantations in the so-called New World. So why didn’t SSA see the same level of migration of Europeans like the Americas saw?
One argument is that black Africans were seen as an optimal manual labor force and so their bodies were priced over their lands. Some have also argued that SSA was more densely populated than the American continent. Yet another is that the Africans mounted a much stronger resistance against the Europeans than the Native Americans.
The argument, which I tend to favor, is the role of disease and specifically malaria. Malaria, a disease to which most indigenous Africans develop some form of immunity to over time, is devastating for anyone contracting it for the first time. It killed quite a number of European settlers.This dampened any desire for an exploration of the continent. A glimpse of what could have been is seen in South African a region with a climate and disease profile much kinder to the Europeans settlers.
Malaria as a disease was known since the time of Hippocrates. In the ancient times, it was attributed to bad air. The term Malaria was coined in Florence by the historian and chancellor of Florence Leonardo Bruni in his Historia Florentina around1400:
Avuto i Fiorentini questo fortissimo castello e fornitolo di buone guardie, consigliavano fra loro medesimi fosse da fare. Erano alcuni a’ quali pareva sommamente utile e necessario a ridurre lo esercito, e massimamente essendo affaticato per la infermità e per la mala aria e per lungo e difficile campeggiare nel tempo dell’autunno e in luoghi infermi….
After the Florentines had conquered this stronghold, after putting good guardians on it they were discussing among themselves how to proceed. For some of them it appeared most useful and necessary to reduce the army, more so as it was extremely stressed by disease and mala aria (bad air)…
It was introduced into England 1740 by Horace Walpole:
“There is a horrid thing called the malaria, that comes to Rome every summer, and kills one”, and into medical literature by John MacCulloch in 1827.
So Europeans knew of malaria and found out about other diseases that killed them in droves like dengue, yellow fever and the bugs that caused dysentery. Even David Livingstone, the Explorer and Missionary, died form malaria and dysentery. The cattle that the Europeans tried to raise were also killed off.
Unlike in the America, in Australia, the Polynesian islands and part of South Africa where European diseases killed off the natives, the opposite occurred in SSA.
A true exploration of the continent started in the mid-1800s and this was shortly after quinine was discovered to be a cure for malaria. And then you saw the true face of European colonization.
For Native Americans and Africans from the sub-saharan region, the “discovery” of their respective continents by the European explorers of the 15th century has spelled nothing but misery. For most, the misery still continues.
Unlike the Native Americans, most Africans still have control of their lands, even if they are still massively exploited by richer nations and their own corrupt leaders.
Even as disease continues to be a major factor in the lives of most people in SSA, let’s not forget that malaria might have been the one thing that saved us from extermination.