Why Did it Happen?: Religious Explanations of the "Spanish" Flu Epidemic in South Africa

34 Historically Speaking September/October 2008 Why Did It Happen? Religious Explanations of the "Spanish" Flu Epidemic in South Africa Howard Phillips« H ere Lie the Bodies of 75 Natives Who Died During the Epidemic—1918." This stark, collective epitaph on a plain memorial stone in a long-abandoned company cemetery 45 kilometers from Cape Town is one of the very few public reminders of South Africa's greatest natural disaster, the so-called "Spanish" influenza epidemic of 1918. In the space of six weeks it carried off some 300,000 South Africans, or 6% of die population. No calamity before or since in South Africa—not even HIV/AIDS—has been as swift and lethal as diis local outbreak of the global pandemic of that year. Traumatized by what one contemporary called a veritable "tornado of plague," grieving survivors struggled to recover socially, materially, emotionally, and psychologically. In a society in which religious beliefs were deeply embedded, most looked to religion for an explanation of the catastrophe that had ravaged their communities. As Max Weber pointed out, people are at their most religious when their lives and their livelihoods are under serious threat. Of what significance is this to historians? The answer is that to meet the intense popular demand for explanations of this disaster, an unusually large number of them were printed in journals and newspapers at the time, and so remain available to historians ninety years later to give insight into otherwise transient contemporary ideas about die cause of this calamity. If probed, these ideas can, in turn, reveal deeper beliefs about causation, why bad things happen, and the very nature of God—big existential questions that historians are not accustomed to ask about past societies. Moreover, in the case of South Africa the answers are possibly even more revealing, for the cultural heterogeneity of the diverse population meant that, even if one confines oneself to official religious explanations, a wide spectrum of these was recorded, stretching from four universalist religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, to traditional African religion. This makes possible comparisons among the explanations of the same phenomenon by several faiths and even by different denominations within a single faith, all at a time when religions across the board were being confronted by die challenges of modernity, modern science, and the faith-shaking experiences of the Great War. In short, such an investigation of the complex ways in which faiths responded to a dire, life-and-death crisis on the ground has the potential to shed light on much Demonstration at the Red Cross EmergencyAmbulance Station in Washington , D.C., during the influenza pandemic of 1918. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (reproduction number, LC-USZ62-126995). more than just how they sought to make sense of this particular visitation; they can illuminate, too, dieir core beliefs about their God. Within die South African Christian fold, for example, clergymen of the Calvinist Afrikaner Dutch Reformed Church saw God as all-powerful , the First Cause. The epidemic was obviously die result of "divine visitation," a moderator of the church told his congregation. To seek its ultimate source in the chance action of germs was as misguided as the dog that bites the stone thrown at it without realizing who the thrower was. Did die plague of lice visited upon Pharaoh's Egypt not demonstrate how God could transform the smallest things in nature into a potent instrument of divine will?' Even more revealing for the historian is that such explanations also sought to account for why God had sent the epidemic. Punishment for sin was the most common reason offered. What the sin was provided a sharp insight into what church leaders in 1918 felt was so reprehensible as to warrant divine punishment on such a scale. This in turn helps delineate their conception of the nature of God by setting out what human behavior they judged to be anathema to Him [sic]. As always, generic sins like immorality, drunkenness , and lax church attendance featured prominendy in the list of those that were said to have called forth God's wrath. One novel sin, though, was that of "worshipping science," a real si[g...