A chronic skin and tissue disease caused by infection by a subspecies of the spirochete Treponema pallidum. Previously called endemic syphilis. Bejel
It is also a name, a sickness, a mark upon the body that speaks of something deeper than infection. Bejel is what they call it now, but names shift over time, pressed under the weight of history, reshaped by the hands that write them down. Once, it was called endemic syphilis, a term burdened with the language of empire—endemic, as if it belonged to a people, syphilis, as if it carried the same stain, the same whispered shame.
But Bejel is not about what one does. It is about where one is. A disease of skin and tissue, creeping into bone, spreading in places where water is scarce, where bodies are close, where survival is about more than the medicines one has, but about the circumstances one cannot escape. The cause is a subspecies of Treponema pallidum, a spiral-shaped bacterium, too small to be seen by the naked eye but carrying within it the weight of suffering.
And suffering, as history tells us, is never evenly distributed.
To have Bejel was to bear something not just in the body, but in the way one was seen. In the Caribbean, in Haiti, in the places where European medicine arrived not as a cure but as a judgment, the disease became another marker, another way to name who was afflicted and who was untouched. It was never just about biology—it was about geography, about class, about empire’s long, outstretched hand, deciding which diseases were worth curing and which were left to fester.
But the people knew better. They always have. The healers, the ougan and the manbo, the herbalists working with leaves and roots, understood that the body, like the land, remembers. They treated Bejel not with the clinical detachment of a doctor who saw only symptoms, but with the full weight of knowing that disease is not just infection—it is history, it is condition, it is what happens when the world makes certain people more vulnerable than others.
Bejel lingers. It survives in the forgotten places, in the dry lands, in the bodies of those whose names do not make it into the medical textbooks. And yet, the people survive too. They always have.
