Great as is the delay and difficulty placed in the
way of the development of the immense natural resources
of West Africa by the labour problem, there is another
cause of delay to this development greater and more
terrible by far—namely, the deadliness of
the climate. “Nothing hinders a man, Miss
Kingsley, half so much as dying,” a friend said
to me the other day, after nearly putting his opinion
to a practical test. Other parts of the world
have more sensational outbreaks of death from epidemics
of yellow fever and cholera, but there is no other
region in the world that can match West Africa for
the steady kill, kill, kill that its malaria works
on the white men who come under its influence.
Malaria you will hear glibly talked of; but what malaria
means and consists of you will find few men ready
to attempt to tell you, and these few by no means
of a tale. It is very strange that this terrible
form of disease has not attracted more scientific
investigators, considering the enormous mortality it
causes throughout the tropics and sub-tropics.
A few years since, when the peculiar microbes of
everything from measles to miracles were being “isolated,”
several bacteriologists isolated the malarial microbe,
only unfortunately they did not all isolate the same
one. A resume of the various claims of these
microbes is impossible here, and whether one of them
was the true cause, or whether they all have an equal
claim to this position, is not yet clear; for malaria,
as far as I have seen or read of it seems to be not
so much one distinct form of fever as a group of fevers—a
genus, not a species. Many things point to this
being the case; particularly the different forms so
called malarial poisoning takes in different localities.
This subject may be also subdivided and complicated
by going into the controversy as to whether yellow
fever is endemic on the West Coast or not. That
it has occurred there from time to time there can
be no question: at Fernando Po in 1862 and 1866,
in Senegal pretty frequently; and at least one epidemic
at Bonny was true yellow fever. But in the case
of each of these outbreaks it is said to have been
imported from South America, into Fernando Po, by ships
from Havana, and into Bonny by a ship which had on
her previous run been down the South American ports
with a cargo of mules. The litter belonging
to this mule cargo was not cleared out of her until
she got into Bonny, when it was thrown overside into
the river, and then the yellow fever broke out.
But, on the other hand, South America taxes West
Africa—the Guinea Coast—with
having first sent out yellow fever in the cargoes
of slaves. This certainly is a strange statement,
because the African native rarely has malarial fever
severely—he has it, and you are often informed
So-and-so has got yellow fever, but he does not often
die of it, merely is truly wretched and sick for a
day or so, and then recovers.
