The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge

8. Disease and Environment in Africa: Imputed Dynamics and Unresolved Issues

198 8 Disease and Environment in Africa Imputed Dynamics and Unresolved Issues gregory h. maddox One of the great ironies of debates aboutAfrican populations turns on the pivot of disease.Although much current public and scholarly debate centers on the recent rapid expansion of African populations, scholars in a number of fields have begun to argue that African populations remained relatively low until the recent past because of the pressure of a variety of diseases.This essay reviews some of the literature on the relationship between demographic variables, disease, and environment refracted against evidence drawn primarily from easternAfrica.It argues that monocausal explanations for population growth or decline need to be replaced by more nuanced explanations that include disease environments as well as changes in the physical environment and social and political conditions. Historians must combine their own ability to discuss economic, political, and social context with a careful analysis of the biological and scientific evidence generated by scientific models to ensure the assumptions used in the creation of the models do not overly distort the resulting conclusions. It is striking that scholars can still speak of this region of the world,the one longest occupied by humanity and its ancestors,as a frontier.The idea that African societies are in some way “new” to these landscapes flows from certain assumptions about how people lived in these landscapes and particularly how many people lived there. In short, if, as John Iliffe most famously has argued, eastern Africa— and almost all of Africa—was lightly populated before the twentieth century, we 199 Disease and Environment in Africa must ask why.1 The simplest answers given usually cite some combination of disease and environment. The archaeologist Brian Fagan succinctly glosses this neo-Malthusian view: Yet Africans have often triumphed over environmental adversity. They created great kingdoms—Ghana, Mali, Zimbabwe—traded indirectly with the far corners of the earth, and fashioned great art and flamboyant cultures. But many have always lived on the edge. Regions like the southern fringes of the Sahara are so arid and unpredictable that it took remarkable ingenuity and environmental knowledge to survive there. Famine and disease stalked farmer and herder alike even when population densities were low. In the twentieth century, when colonial governments upset the delicate balance of climate and humanity on a continent that had never supported vast numbers of people or huge urban civilizations, these social disasters have come more frequently. Europe suffered through repeated subsistence crises during the Little Ice Age.Africa is enduring far more serious food shortage in the late twentieth century, caused by a combination of drought, population growth, and human activity.2 K. David Patterson and GeraldW. Hartwig, in their overview of disease in African history, have argued along similar lines:“African disease environments, frequently augmented by tropical climatic conditions, have always exacted a significant toll on human life and energy.”3 Indeed,the twin specters of disease and environmental disaster lurk throughout the literature on African history. Philip Curtin’s early work that helped spark the growth of the field of African history in the United States started with the argument that western Africa’s deadly disease environment helped explain the Atlantic slave trade and the difficulty Europeans encountered in the conquest of Africa as compared to the Americas.4 Works by William H. McNeill,Alfred W. Crosby, and Sheldon Watts repeated and elaborated these arguments.5 All these works asserted that the combination of Old World infectious diseases such as smallpox and vector -borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and trypanosome-caused human and animal diseases led to low African population densities. As a result, population—demographic change—has long concerned writers aboutAfrica.First colonial administrators and then scholars of modernAfrica have engaged in a long-standing debate over the state of African populations before the later nineteenth century and then under colonial rule. Colonial officials and then academics disagreed about both the basic demographic variables and the starting points. Until the middle of the twentieth century, colonial observers tended to worry about shrinking populations.6 They generally,in turn,assumed that population had always been low.AfterWorldWar II,concerns turned to the rapid growth in population.7 Colonial observers attributed the growth to improved health care 200 gregory h. maddox and sanitation and cited it as a danger to the sustainability of African environments .8 John Iliffe, however, has asserted that health care made...