1890s–1920s: (Demographic Catastrophe and Partial Recovery — Population Decline Across Sub-Saharan Africa from the 1890s to the 1920s, the Belgian Congo Losi…

1890s–1920s: (Demographic Catastrophe and Partial Recovery — Population Decline Across Sub-Saharan Africa from the 1890s to the 1920s, the Belgian Congo Losing 30 to 50 Percent of Its Population Through War, Disease, and Famine, French Equatorial Africa Particularly Struck by Declining Female Fertility, and the Compounding Devastation of the First World War, Scorched-Earth Tactics, and Spanish Influenza): Across swathes of sub-Saharan Africa, population levels almost certainly dropped between the 1890s and the 1920s before stabilizing and beginning to recover. Reliable demographic data for the early colonial period is scarce — still less for the second half of the nineteenth century — but widely accepted estimates suggest the population of the Belgian Congo fell by between thirty and fifty percent between 1880 and 1920, through the combined devastation of war, sleeping sickness and other diseases, and famine. A similar decline probably afflicted French Equatorial Africa, which was particularly ravaged by declining female fertility during the first half of the twentieth century. Other regions experiencing net population loss included the northern and western Great Lakes, western Ethiopia and southern Sudan, and northern Angola. These catastrophes were compounded across eastern and central Africa by the ravages of the First World War — scorched-earth tactics, famine, and the Spanish influenza pandemic struck communities already reeling from the crises of the preceding decades. The continent’s demographic nadir represented the full cost of what Aimé Césaire might have called the colonial thing — the reduction of peoples to raw material in the service of European accumulation.