1 - Sleeping Sickness, Depopulation Anxieties and the Emergence of Population Politics

Summary

From the mid-1890s, an epidemic of sleeping sickness in the eastern hinterland of Luanda generated increasingly dramatic accounts. Observers reported staggering mortality rates and empty villages where agriculture and commerce had once thrived. The missionary pro-colonial journal Portugal em África wrote the following in 1896: ‘The majority of the concelhos [administrative areas] are depopulating. Mortality is high. Sleeping disease has victimised the indigenous population in the concelhos of Zenza do Golungo, Muxima, Massangano and Icolo Bongo [sic]: this disease is a crying shame’.¹ Doctors in the region, like the medical officers (delegados de saúde) stationed in Dondo and the naval doctor and naturalist José Pereira do Nascimento, were equally appalled by the devastation of the disease.² And the British consuls for Angola reported that ‘the margins of the River Coanza, which a few years ago were thickly populated, may now be traversed for hours without encountering a single native hut’ and warned that ‘if European medicine cannot find a remedy, entire districts of South-West Africa [sic] will be either stripped of their present inhabitants or kept in a perpetual state of underpopulation’.³