INTRODUCTION

In his chapter in this book and in his splendid monographs Alfred Crosby describes how epidemic and endemic diseases, introduced by Europeans, wiped out whole aboriginal populations and decimated and demoralised others. The victims lost confidence in their own culture and in their capacity to respond. This chapter also describes a crisis of human and animal epidemic, this time in eastern and southern Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when diseases from Europe and from imperial India ravaged Africa. One African people – the so-called ‘Hottentots’ of Cape Colony – were destroyed as a culture by disease, expropriation and settler violence. But in general my story is different from Crosby's. It deals with societies which biologically were not undermined and which in the end survived the crisis of disease to commence vigorous population growth. Above all, it deals with societies which had not lost cultural self-confidence and which retained the capacity to respond intellectually. It is with these intellectual – and particularly religious – responses to epidemic that this chapter is concerned.

The chapter deals with two human diseases – smallpox and influenza; and two cattle diseases – lungsickness and rinderpest. Its argument is that study of response to these diseases allows us to understand something of the dynamics of all three of the major ideological systems of eastern and southern Africa. In the period under study such ideological systems were inevitably religious.