The Historical Ecology of Malaria in Ethiopia: Deposing the Spirits by James C. McCann (review)

James McCann’s The Historical Ecology of Malaria in Ethiopia is a thoughtful contribution to African environmental and disease history. McCann draws on a number of metaphors to frame his evidence and make his argument about human relationships with malaria and malaria control: a three-dimensional chess game, mosquitoes as Valkyries, and a central metaphor of a complex elusive dance. Throughout McCann’s important body of work on Ethiopian and African environmental history, he sticks close to the evidence. In the case of this history of malaria in Ethiopia, there is a scarcity of evidence, and distances remain too great between evidence and metaphors. The metaphors are evocative and effective in hinting at the complex, unstable, shifting history of malaria as a local disease, but McCann leaves it up to the reader to flesh them out. The dance metaphor, for example, is not meant to imply an intimate graceful collaboration among people, mosquito, and pathogens. This is a dance to the death, fluid and graceful but a dance only in a pugilist’s sense of the term, with perhaps a hint of the danse macabre. As to the dance partners, this is more a history of mosquitoes than of pathogens or a social history of malaria.

The short chapters are chronological vignettes illustrating interesting, different, but not clearly connected pieces of malaria history in modern Ethiopia. The first chapter examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European accounts of fever, possibly malaria, and the use of quinine bark, mixed with more contemporary Ethiopian voices. The sources add to the history of Europeans’ early adopting of local knowledge about the disease and its control. The subtitle of the book, “Deposing the Spirits” refers to an anthropologist’s 1965 account of a procession of thirty Ethiopians near Lake Tana carrying the spirits of malaria out of the area in broken gourds and pieces of pots. The theme of mobility works with the dance metaphor. Issues of movement—of merchants traveling from lowland to highland areas, of mosquitoes appearing and disappearing depending on climate and season, of the comings and goings of Italian soldiers and DDT spraying trucks—appear throughout the text. As with the procession, McCann presents intriguing evidence in the context of intriguing metaphors, although the theme of mobility and the dance metaphor could have been developed more fully.

Chapter 2, “Mindscapes of Malaria,” includes the very interesting link between the long history of malaria and malaria science in Italy, and the short Italian colonial occupation of Ethiopia. Chapter 4, “Tragedy of the Jeep, 1958–1991,” follows 108 U.S.-made jeeps in DDT spraying operations. The brevity of the Italian occupation meant that disease control efforts received more planning than implementation. There is little local evidence of exactly how and where DDT was used, or about local experiences with the transition from a decade of insecticide and drug controls to the political and environmental disruptions of the Derg regime.

Chapter 5, “Malaria Modern,” is a detailed first-hand account of the author’s 2005–2011 Rockefeller Foundation–funded project on the agroecological link between mosquitoes and maize pollen. McCann introduced this subject in Maize and Grace (Harvard, 2009), which is based on his history of the 1998 malaria epidemic in northwest Ethiopia. “Malaria Modern” tells how he came to link maize and malaria through his history of the Burie district epidemic. He then details science and research collaborations among local and U.S. entomologists, geographers, and an environmental historian. This is a telling narrative of bringing together the resources of national and international institutions, of Landsat images, mosquito wing length, and DNA data. Mosquitoes flourish on the maize pollen that accumulates in the small clay pits dug by local people amidst maize monoculture.

A final chapter is an ode to the mosquito, including a fictional quote from a mosquito. For good reasons, McCann admires the adaptability...