mid 19th century to the 1920s · Africanspan
Sleeping sickness and rinderpest arrive just before the Europeans do
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Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the 1920s much of eastern and central Africa lost people. The slave trade had made the countryside unsafe, so scattered homesteads were abandoned and families gathered together for protection, which let the bush grow back and carried the tsetse fly forward with it. Sleeping sickness followed. Around Lake Victoria it killed some 200,000 people, and across equatorial Africa the death rate reached ninety percent in places. At the end of the 1880s rinderpest arrived, probably with infected Italian cattle landed in the Horn, and swept south, taking up to ninety percent of the herds in some districts and ruining pastoralists such as the Maasai. The timing decided a great deal, since this was exactly when European armies were coming ashore. New strains of smallpox came with them, along with jiggers from Latin America and outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever and meningitis. Of an estimated 80,000 Herero, 15,000 were alive in 1911. The rains failed across the savannah through the 1880s and 1890s and did not recover until the 1920s.
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