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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (156807)	1/22/2005 4:51:36 PM
From: marcos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Good stuff neolib, thank you ... that the zulu were a clan of the bantu i'd forgotten ... much of my impression of early days comes from reading Michener's book ['Covenant'?], but thirty years ago probably ... one thing that sticks in the mind, is the assertion that when van Riebeeck and company started up their colony there were no natives around at all, and little to no evidence that they ever had been, no sign of houses or cultivation or clearings etc, according to the dutch, who wrote a lot down at the time, and would have had no reason to lie about it, as wiping out natives was then considered routine That would have applied to a fairly small area though, no doubt, and wouldn't have lasted long at a rate of 6000 acres per son per generation, wooo So that is how Orange Free State was so clear for the boers of the Great Trek ... terra nulla sort of but too nova-ly so for the title ... there were actually some useful facets to afrikaaner culture, the vitality, the sense of independence and self-responsibility, the drive to enterprise of it all ... but very nearly killed off, and rightly so, by that self-destructive pig-headed narrow-minded exclusivism

To: neolib who wrote (156807)	1/23/2005 3:22:18 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi neolib; Re: "Both [Bushmen and Hottentots] suffered greatly from European diseases ..." I've got doubts that this is true. There is no doubt that the natives of the New World were devastated by diseases brought in by Europeans, but that was because they were such an isolated population that they'd never been exposed. When I google for what these diseases that destroyed the Bushmen were, the most frequent mention I get is smallpox: Diseases such as smallpox, which was introduced by the Europeans in 1713, decimated the Khoisan, contributing to the decline of their cultures. info.gov.za But smallpox, is an ancient disease with an African origin, and the Bushmen were surely exposed before Europeans got around to sailing down there. For example, the above South African government link goes on to say: At the same time, a process of cultural change was set in motion, not least by commercial and missionary activity. In contrast to the Khoisan, the black farmers were by and large immune to European diseases. info.gov.za I think that the obvious conclusion is that the "black farmers" had been more regularly exposed to small pox than the Khoisan, but that is exactly what one would expect. And they've got some nerve calling these diseases "European". People acquire immunity to small pox, and consequently very small groups cannot sustain an infection. Thus the disease is common only in high population density regions. When the disease spreads into low population density areas it is an effective killer, but to blame it on the Europeans is a bit much. The fact that the "black farmers" were immune to it is proof that it was already endemic in high population areas in Africa. What I'm trying to point out here is that there is a universal human tendency to blame visitors whenever a disease breaks out. Sometimes there is a germ of truth to these things. Each city in Europe probably has a tradition of blaming some other city for the introduction of the black plague, and since the disease is associated with human travel, this is undoubtedly true, but the spread will happen no matter who gets blamed. If the Europeans had never travelled to the New World, eventually the New World would have been exposed to those diseases by someone else, perhaps even as a result of their own visits to Europe or Asia. To blame the Europeans on the spread of world-wide diseases that were going to be spread by whoever got there first is as unfair as blaming the gay community for spreading HIV. But to blame the Europeans for introducing smallpox to Africa, in the face of the admitted fact that the Africans were already resistant to it, and the fact that the history of smallpox is much older in Africa than in Europe, seems to me to be quite silly. History The earliest evidence of smallpox comes from pockmarks on an Egyptian mummy dated to 1600 BC.[1] The first recorded smallpox epidemic occurred in 1350 BC during the Egyptian-Hittite war.[2] The disease reached Europe between the 5th and 7th centuries and was first recorded in the New World in 1507. Each time variola encountered a new population with no previous immunity huge numbers of human lives were lost. Smallpox was first used as a biological weapon in the 1760s by British soldiers in North America during the French and Indian Wars.[3] Blankets that had been used by smallpox patients were distributed among the Iroquois and the resulting epidemics killed more than 50% of affected tribes. Before the development of the cowpox vaccine, the technique of variolation was practiced in parts of Asia and Africa. In China, dried smallpox crusts were inserted into the nostrils. In other regions, fluid from a smallpox pustule was rubbed into a small scratch on the arm.[4] Both of these methods produced a much milder form of the disease and conferred lifelong immunity. utmj.org The known facts are that smallpox is a disease with an ancient history in Africa. Europe was not exposed to it until several thousand years after Africa. Europeans knew so little about the disease that they didn't practice the natural methods of inoculation known in other parts of the world. To blame Europeans for introducing to Africa is more than unfair. The disease was in Africa a thousand years before Europe had a population density high enough to support it. The modern history of the disease is that it was obliterated in the nations controlled by Europeans years before it was eliminated in Africa, and that effort depended to some extent on the efforts of European scientists and doctors, and very largely on European technology. -- Carl