The Health of Africans: Portuguese, Belgian, Italian, Spanish, and German Rule

Abstract

This chapter starts with a brief discussion of the demographic impact of the various colonial policies in Africa, which are said to have caused or were associated with the recurrence of famine and hunger and infertility, as well as the resulting depopulation in almost every colony, and the rapid spread of disease. Studies of the colonial period show that concern about higher infertility among colonized Africans was more pronounced among the concessionaire companies’ work areas, particularly in French Equatorial Africa, Chad, Oubangui-Shari (Central African Republic), Congo, and Gabon, and in such East African territories as Uganda (Retel-Laurentin 1974; Romaniuk 1967). The concern for infertility forced the French colonial regime, which suspected that the condition was a result of the ravages of sleeping sickness, to initiate major campaigns against epidemics during the 1920s. In fact, Denis Cordell, writing on infertility in Equatorial Africa, noted that: “At the end of the nineteenth century, Oubangui-Shari was characterized by high and increasing mortality, by what was probably the manifestation of low fertility and some sterility, and by new patterns of more intensified migration. Morbidity and the health environment in general, probably suffered rapid deterioration, particularly with the introduction of new diseases and the epidemic outbreak of old ones. ” All this was certainly exacerbated by new epidemics, slavery, and colonialism, causing the higher devastation during the first 10 years of 1900. Cordell et al. put it in no unclear terms: