1920s–1930s: (The Ambiguous Legacy of Colonial Environmental and Medical Intervention — Sleeping Sickness Evacuations Creating the Game Parks of the Modern T…

1920s–1930s: (The Ambiguous Legacy of Colonial Environmental and Medical Intervention — Sleeping Sickness Evacuations Creating the Game Parks of the Modern Tourist Industry, Commercial Agriculture Reclaiming Bush, Transport Networks Theoretically Enabling Famine Relief, Africans Surviving Despite and Because of the Pax Colonia, and Population Recovery from the 1920s Onward): As sleeping sickness spread, colonial authorities in territories like Nyasaland and Tanganyika moved entire populations out of affected areas en masse — the large open zones thus created would eventually become the game parks so central to the modern-day tourist industry, a transformation that underlined the ambiguity of colonial rule in microcosm. The encroachment of colonial rule and global capitalism had undoubtedly worsened environmental crises and introduced new diseases, yet colonial regimes were later able to partially reverse the process through commercial agriculture that reclaimed bush, controlled game, and pushed the tsetse fly into retreat. European rule also introduced medicine capable of treating diseases of long standing, as well as tackling those Europeans themselves had carried into Africa. Colonial transport networks could, at least in theory, deliver aid to famine-stricken communities more rapidly than at any time in the past. While across much of the continent Africans found their capacity for self-management impaired by the very nature of the colonial system, that same system also provided new commercial and eventually political opportunities. From the 1920s and 1930s onward, reproductive fertility increased, rainfall stabilized, and the continent’s population began its upward curve. Africans recovered — as Fanon might have observed — not through the benevolence of colonialism but through their own inextinguishable capacity for survival, enduring both despite and because of the so-called pax colonia.