Istwa Nou

Between the tenth and sixth millennia BCE the new farming and herding economies changed the human relationship with disease permanently. Populations grew, and even at very low densities more people meant more transmission. People also stopped moving. Hamlets and multifamily villages appeared, and with them the rubbish tips just outside, which brought in scavengers such as rats. Food production opened further routes. Animals were penned at night inside or beside the family compound, which put herds and households in daily contact and gave pathogens somewhere to cross. Clearing land had its own effect. In early West African agriculture the cleared ground held standing water through the rainy season, and Anopheles mosquitoes bred in it. Malaria was already a major African disease thousands of years ago. Every gain in food security bought a new pathway for infection: the granary that fed a village also fed its rats, and the field that grew fonio also grew mosquitoes.

The standard account of one God has a fixed shape. The idea appears among the ancient Israelites, the prophets refine it, Christianity and Islam universalise it, and missionaries and empires carry it to everyone else. That places the Levant at the centre and the last three thousand years in the frame. Ehret puts a different set of dates on the table. Between 9700 and 5000 BCE, across the long transition from foraging to farming, monotheistic religion already predominated among the speakers of the Niger-Congo languages and among the speakers of the Nilo-Saharan languages. Between them those two families cover most of the people on the continent. Their belief in a single creator is thousands of years older than anything comparable further east. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because of what happened later to African religion in the Americas. The men who called Vodou a primitive survival were measuring it against a monotheism that Africa had arrived at first.