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 actually have saved the lives of most people in the region.
Now how can I say that when I consider the levels of, say, infant mortality? Or even the loss of life from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade?
Lets go back several hundred years to about 1490. This is the period when Columbus landed in what is now Central America. He was wowed by what he saw. He returned to Spain resolved to come back to the Americas. This time around however, he was coming back with a rather sinister plan. He was going to kill off the indigenous population and claim the land for Crown and Church. This was sanctioned by both the Church and the Queen. After all those native Americans were nothing but heathens.
The plan went without a glitch and the Spanish and Portuguese took over most of Central and South America and in the process literally exterminated millions of Native Americans.
A similar process took place in North America with the English being the primary perpetrators. At the end stood the indomitable USA among the ashes of millions of Native Americans.
Now, SSA was been “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 the Europeans exterminate most Africans like they did in the Americas and take over the land?
One argument is that once black Africans were seen as an optimal manual labor force, the wish was not to exterminate them bit to transfer as many of them as possible to the Americas. The transfer process itself was close to being an extermination but the numbers were so great that they got enough people over to the the cotton and sugarcane fields of the Americas.
The other 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 total extermination of the people of SSA was therefore indirectly prevented. Now the loss of African lives in the form of the slave trade still went on.
However most of these lives were transplanted into live misery to the other side of the Atlantic.
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.
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 Columbus-like extermination.
References
1. American Holocaust – the Conquest of the New World – Stannard 1993
2. Encyclopedia of Africa – Appiah & Gates 2010
3. http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/