About 140 years ago, from 1882 to 1885, a smallpox epidemic roiled southern Africa. It was another time, I know, but comparing it to Covid-19 is enormously instructive.
Having contained the disease a year earlier, the diamond boom town of Kimberley succumbed to smallpox in November 1883. It started when a group of nine prospective labourers coming from the north arrived ill and feverish at a farm a few miles from town. Kimberley’s civil commissioner appointed a team of six doctors to go immediately to examine them.
Three of those doctors reported that the men clearly had smallpox and advocated emergency public health measures. The other three, among them Leander Starr Jameson, declared that the men were suffering from a rare, noninfectious skin disease and that there was no cause for alarm.
Jameson and his two colleagues were lying through their teeth. Heavily invested in diamond stocks, they were in close contact with the town’s magnates, among them Cecil John Rhodes. The industry feared that if the presence of smallpox was officially announced the entire black labour force of Kimberley would flee, destroying its economy. In their calculus, denial was preferable to public health.
Diamonds had been discovered in Kimberley just 13 years earlier. But so spectacular was the industry’s rise that it already accounted for 75% of the entire region’s export earnings. Southern Africa had been elevated from a backwater to a region that generated significant wealth. Civil servants, military men and politicians from Cape Town to Durban were by now heavily invested in diamonds. Nobody who had accumulated wealth or exercised power wanted to see the industry wounded.
As smallpox began to ravage Kimberley the politics of denial deepened. The directors of the town’s sanitary board, among whom diamond interests were also heavily represented, refused to allow its own inspectors to enter the town’s labour compounds. Rumours that workers were dying en masse were quickly suppressed.
Kimberley’s hospital was another site of deep denial. As mortality among patients climbed doctors signed death certificates citing pneumonia and influenza as the cause of death. Hospital staff themselves were perfectly safe, as every nurse and doctor on the premises was vaccinated. It was among patients that the disease spread uncontrolled.
A month after the first reports of infection the Cape government finally published a delayed report confirming that Kimberley was plagued by smallpox. The Cape parliament passed a law facilitating emergency public health measures. But by now the epidemic was hard to control. By the time it was finally suppressed in early 1885, more than 700 people had died.
Comparing then with now is instructive. If the Gupta brothers wished to learn how to do state capture they could have done no better than to sit at the feet of Cecil John Rhodes. In terms of greed and naked cynicism they match one another step for step. More instructive, though, is to compare the Ramaphosa government’s response to Covid-19 to Kimberley’s approach to smallpox.
The two epidemics are bookends. The first took hold in the infancy of SA’s industrialisation, the second in the long afterglow of the mining industry’s peak. Government then was in thrall to mining capital. It was the source of coming plenty, and nothing was to stand in its way. Bureaucrats and politicians were personally so invested in this glittering future that their duties of governance were rendered a joke.
Today, the government is anything but in thrall to capital. It used the Covid-19 pandemic as a stick to savage the alcohol and tobacco industries, and to micromanage the sale of produce ranging from chicken to apparel. A government with a taste to punish industry used a pandemic to assert its grip.
The comparison is so rich in meaning. The response to smallpox foretold a long history of white abundance and black suffering. The response to Covid-19 tells of the bitterness and resentment that history wrought. The arc of the whole story, 140 years long, is sad indeed.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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