4 - Cholera in North Africa and the Nile Valley

Summary

TUNISIA, 1835–1868

Tunisia's first and lightest brush with cholera took place in 1835 during the Second Pandemic. The country suffered three major cholera epidemics thereafter, in 1849 and 1850, when 56,000 died; a less severe one in 1856, when the toll in Tunis alone was roughly 6,500; and during the Fourth Pandemic in 1867 and 1868, when as many as 20,000 perished. This chapter relies extensively on Nancy Gallagher's definitive study of medicine in nineteenth-century Tunisia. Thanks to her efforts, Tunisia offers one of the few African case studies of cholera supported by primary sources. Gallagher demonstrates that cholera as a public health issue helped discredit the local Tunisian ruling elite, and played an essential role in encouraging French imperialists to annex the country in 1881.

Nominally a dependent beylik, or province within the loosely structured Ottoman Empire, what is now most of modern Tunisia developed virtual independence in the early eighteenth century when Husayn Bey (1705–1725) established a hereditary dynasty. The Husaynis reigned until 1957; their reign survived the French protectorate from 1881 to 1956, but not Tunisian independence.

The Beys, or governors of Tunis, built a strong economy based on agriculture, trade, commerce, and, informally, privateering. Tunis was one of the major ports of the so-called Barbary pirates, who reaped profits from the seizing of European cargoes, and often their nationals, who were then held for ransom, sometimes for years.