HIV first appeared in southeastern Cameroon at a time when European colonialists were establishing outposts. Picture: File
The global Aids epidemic can be seen as an outgrowth of European colonialism in Africa, argues a new book co-authored by a Washington Post journalist and an Aids researcher at Harvard University.
The strain of the human-immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that accounts for 99 per cent of Aids deaths “appeared to have spread from a single explosion, a big bang of the Aids epidemic” that originated in Cameroon about 100 years ago, the authors write. “Powering the big bang was the burgeoning trade of colonial Africa.”
Carried by porters who had been virtually enslaved by European colonisers, the virus slowly made its way to the Belgian colonial capital called Leopoldville, the book theorises. It describes that city, now known as Kinshasa, as “Ground Zero” of an epidemic that has gone on to claim about 25 million lives.
From Kinshasa — which is today the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo — one “subtype” of the killer HIV strain travelled east toward Lake Victoria sometime in the 1960s, suggests Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the Aids Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It.
Another subtype went south to Zambia, Botswana and South Africa. And a third “hopped all the way across the ocean to Haiti, then to the United States and Europe,” write Post reporter Craig Timberg and Harvard epidemiologist Daniel Halperin.
Strong evidence shows that HIV first appeared in humans in southeastern Cameroon in either the closing decades of the 19th century or the first two decades of the 20th century, Timberg and Halperin say. They speculate that the transmission from simian to human occurred when “a hunter caught an infected chimpanzee for food, allowing the virus to pass from the chimp’s blood into the hunter’s body, probably through a cut during butchering.”
That turning point in human history came at around the same time that the European powers were establishing colonial outposts in what became known as “The Scramble for Africa.” Colonisers who were “engaged in a feverish race for wealth and glory blazed routes up muddy rivers and into dense forests that had been travelled only sporadically by humans before,” Timberg and Halperin recount. “The most disruptive of these intruders were thousands of African porters. Forced into service by European colonial powers, they cut paths through the exact area that researchers have now identified as the birthplace of the Aids epidemic.”
The porters were coerced into giving German traders access to the ivory and rubber wealth of Cameroon. A trading station known as Moloundou was established on the Ngoko River about 75 miles upstream from where its waters merged with the Sangha River. More than a thousand porters were recorded as passing through Moloundou on a busy day, the book notes.
HIV was transported along those rivers and into the Congo Basin along with other deadly diseases: sleeping sickness, smallpox and syphilis, which had been brought to Africa by the Europeans. HIV likely festered in Kinshasa for decades prior to entering into global circulation in the 1970s, the authors say.
It is likely that by 1960, between 1000 and 2000 Kinshasa residents had become infected with HIV, the book estimates. Those unknowing early Aids victims mingled with United Nations workers from Haiti who had come to Congo to work as physicians and civil servants, the authors note. It is almost certainly the case that one of those Haitians contracted HIV in Kinshasa and then became a source of the virus in Haiti.
“Without ‘The Scramble for Africa,’ it’s hard to see how HIV could have made it out of southeastern Cameroon to eventually kill tens of millions of people,” Timberg and Halperin write. “Even a delay might have caused the killer strain of HIV to die a lonely death deep in the forest.”
