Mid-19th Century–1920s: (Environment and Medicine — The Sleeping Sickness Epidemic Killing Up to 200,000 Around Lake Victoria and Up to 90 Percent of the Pop…

Mid-19th Century–1920s: (Environment and Medicine — The Sleeping Sickness Epidemic Killing Up to 200,000 Around Lake Victoria and Up to 90 Percent of the Population in Equatorial Africa, Rinderpest Arriving in the Horn in the Late 1880s and Sweeping South Killing Up to 90 Percent of Cattle, the Timing Calamitous as It Coincided with European Invasion, Imported Diseases Including Smallpox and Jiggers, the Herero Revolt’s Devastation Leaving Only 15,000 of 80,000 Alive, and the Ambiguity of Colonial Rule Possessing Both the Power to Destroy and the Technological Capacity to Heal): Between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1920s, swathes of eastern and central Africa experienced environmental crisis involving heightened disease, depopulation, and demographic decline. The political insecurity of the slave trade had produced new settlement patterns — people abandoned dispersed habitats and came together for protection, allowing bush to rejuvenate and the tsetse-fly frontier to advance. The consequent sleeping-sickness epidemic devastated the region — around Lake Victoria it killed some 200,000 people, and across equatorial Africa it may have killed up to ninety percent of the population. This was compounded at the end of the 1880s by rinderpest, probably introduced through infected Italian cattle in the Horn of Africa, which swept south killing up to ninety percent of cattle in particular areas and devastating pastoral communities like the Maasai. The timing was calamitous, coinciding with European incursions and undermining the capacity for resistance. Colonialism also brought new diseases — new strains of smallpox, jiggers introduced from Latin America, and epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and meningitis. Colonial warfare caused widespread destruction — up to a third of the affected population died in the Maji Maji suppression, the Italian conquest of Libya may have killed a third of the population over twenty years, and of an estimated 80,000 Herero, only 15,000 survived by 1911. The era of partition also coincided with widespread failure of rains across the savannah belt in the 1880s and 1890s, with recovery not beginning until the 1920s.