The Origins of AIDS

Home > Other > The Origins of AIDS > Page 9
The Origins of AIDS Page 9

by Pepin


  The other important protagonist in the early history of the Congo Français was Prosper Augouard. Born in 1852, ordained in the congregation of the Holy Spirit, he arrived in Gabon in 1877. Missionaries of the time had to be highly motivated for their life expectancy in Africa was just three years. Augouard was more robust than average, used quinine readily for self-treatment of malaria and would spend the next forty-four years in central Africa. Having a strong personality, resourceful and energetic, he had much of a say in how the colony was run. Unlike the civil servants who tried to get promoted to richer and more comfortable colonies, Augouard had no desire to move. Unusually for a missionary of the time, he went back to Europe regularly. He understood early on that public relations, political lobbying and fundraising were essential components of his evangelical ministry. Numerous French ministers of colonies considered him the most senior adviser concerning all matters related to the Congo Français.19–22

  In 1881, barely a few months after Brazza had signed the treaty, Augouard arrived at the pool after a 560-kilometre walk from the coast, to prepare the ground for a Catholic mission, buying a piece of land around the village of Mfoa. He was the true founder of Brazzaville, for the explorer had left just a hut with a Senegalese sergeant to guard the post. Augouard built the parish of Brazzaville, while Brazza spent most of his time in Libreville, then the capital. French, Dutch and Portuguese companies established trading posts. In 1890, Augouard became the first bishop of Brazzaville, with a territory extending all the way to the Oubangui-Chari, which he crisscrossed constantly in a flotilla of small steamboats. A good architect and builder, skilled manager, excellent writer and a geographer, Augouard was always ready to go hippopotamus hunting when the mission fridges were empty. In 1892, its first physician was posted in Brazzaville. Within a few years, a brick cathedral was built, with a belltower twenty metres high, topped by a crucifix and the French flag. Schools were added, housing for the teachers, technical buildings and so on. Augouard was a nationalist, who often said to his Christians that ‘to learn how to love God required learning how to love France’. A journalist of the time wrote that there had been an error in casting: Augouard should have been governor while Brazza, the idealistic humanitarian, could have been an excellent bishop if only he had believed in God. In 1898, Brazza was fired, primarily because the colony’s finances were in a parlous situation. He certainly had been more of a visionary than a manager.19,23

  Emile Gentil was appointed commissioner in 1903, a year before Brazzaville became the capital of the entire Congo Français, renamed in 1910 Afrique Équatoriale Française (AEF). AEF was made up of four colonies: Gabon, Moyen-Congo, Oubangui-Chari and Tchad, following the model of the two other colonial federations, Afrique Occidentale Française and Indochine. The AEF territory was considered ‘pacified’. Its militia consisted mostly of West African mercenaries and conscripts, who were more willing to obey their French officers than locally recruited soldiers. Gentil divided the Congo Français into forty blocks, each allocated to a concessionary company, which was given a monopoly of all trade on a well-defined area. The natives could only sell their crops to the local company, and they could not opt out of the cash economy because they also had to pay head taxes. The largest companies operated their own private militias, and atrocities were committed by their European agents. Some of these crimes were reported in the French press in 1905, the most famous case being that of a poor man who was blown up with dynamite inserted in his rectum. Others were executed for petty crimes without any formal judgement. In Bangui, forty-five women, who had been jailed because their husband failed to bring back enough rubber, died in detention within a five-week period. These scandals preoccupied the French government, which sent a mission of inquiry headed by Brazza himself, who had by then retired in Algiers.

  He travelled through Matadi, Léopoldville, Brazzaville and all the way to the upper Chari, finding large areas of the colony depopulated, as the villagers had fled from the violence and taxes imposed by the concessionary companies. Unfortunately, Brazza became sick with dysentery, and died in Dakar on his way back to France. His report, highly critical of the abuses of the Gentil administration, was buried with him. Many of his enemies attended his national funeral in Paris, and spoke highly of him. His wife was not amused, and remained convinced until her death that Brazza had been poisoned. In AEF, the concession system did not change much for a decade. Eventually, it was criticised by the French socialists and replaced by a more normal market economy. Some companies had already gone bankrupt, as the area they had been allocated proved less wealthy than anticipated.24–25

  French officials had no scruples about using forced labour. Military raids were conducted on villages and local chiefs were requested to provide a number of young men, who would spend the next few years transporting goods on their backs and building roads or telegraph lines for a miserable salary. The telegraph came first, with several thousand kilometres of lines installed in 1909–11, allowing communications between the major trading posts. After a few decades, the Africans at last derived some benefits from the colonial system: primary school education, control of communicable diseases, a communication network which facilitated trading with some wealth eventually trickling down to the local populations. In 1927, it was possible for the first time to drive from Bangui up to the port of Douala, and there were 6,000 kilometres of laterite roads in Oubangui-Chari. The Bangui airport was opened in 1930, and the first commercial route to Europe was inaugurated in 1939. The urbanisation and social changes that were to foster the emergence of HIV-1 had appeared, and this was not limited to the territory of the AEF.24–26

  Kamerun, Cameroun and Cameroons

  Around the time of the 1884–5 Berlin conference, Chancellor Bismarck, until then preoccupied mainly with Germany’s expansion within Europe, decided that Germany should have African colonies too. His emissaries managed to grab some nice pieces of land. While his British competitor was busy making deals in the Niger delta, Gustav Nachtigal, imperial consul for the west coast of Africa, signed a treaty that paved the way for the German occupation of Cameroon, which was to last only thirty years. In fact, the chiefs of the Douala tribe had signed a protocol with a private trader from Hamburg, who transferred his rights to Germany the very next day. It had been a pretty good week for Nachtigal, for just a few days earlier he had signed another treaty establishing a German protectorate in Togo.27

  Germany invested heavily in developing Kamerun’s infrastructure (ports, roads, bridges, two railways, etc.) but committed its own colonial atrocities, especially under governor von Puttkamer, Bismarck’s nephew. Germany increased the size of Kamerun by 50% in 1911 through a controversial deal with France: Germany abandoned its claims to Morocco, and in exchange the French gave the Germans substantial parts of AEF. German occupation of this new territory did not last long. At the outset of WWI, Kamerun was invaded from the Nigerian side by British troops and from the other side by French troops from AEF assisted by soldiers from the Belgian Congo. They greatly outnumbered the Germans who fled to Spanish Guinea. A deal was made between the victors, in which France did best, getting almost all of Kamerun less a small band of land alongside the Nigerian border. The British already had their hands full taking care of Tanganyika and South-West Africa, two other former German colonies. After the war, Britain and France were given a mandate by the League of Nations to administer Cameroun Français and British Cameroons. Since our story unfolded in the southern forested areas inhabited by P.t. troglodytes, we will examine only the fate of Cameroun Français.

  French rule was somewhat more benevolent in Cameroun than in neighbouring AEF. France had to provide a report each year to the League of Nations (later, the UN), and there was some moral pressure for basic human rights to be respected. The natives could write letters of complaints to the League. Unlike their AEF counterparts, Cameroonians could not be conscripted into the French colonial army and sent to do the dirty work in other African countries, or to die for
France on the battlefields of Europe or Indochina. The terms of the mandate prohibited forced labour but the Geneva-based organisation could never enforce it and many Cameroonians were requisitioned for public works. The other major difference with AEF was the prosperity of Cameroun, built around cash crops (coffee, cocoa, rubber, timber) and the easy access to the port of Douala. The development of roads, the railway, the healthcare system and the urbanisation progressed more speedily than in AEF, but by the mid-1920s only Douala was considered to have a truly urban character.

  Congo Belge/Belgisch Kongo

  To bring to an end the scandals associated with the EIC and save the country’s honour, Belgium purchased the Congo from its ailing king, Leopold II, in 1908. He died the following year, shortly after marrying his long-time mistress Caroline, a former prostitute. This led to an appreciable improvement in the respect for basic human rights. A colonial charter was promulgated, a ministry of colonies was created and the first holder of the post, Jules Renkin, gradually abolished the trade monopoly given to concession companies. Renkin even visited the Congo, which Leopold had never done. Fifty-two years of colonial rule followed which, like all others, was based on racism as its moral justification. After WWI, Belgian possessions were extended to the small kingdoms of Ruanda and Urundi, administered like Cameroon under a League of Nations mandate. While resource-poor Ruanda and Urundi were managed through a system of indirect rule via the traditional kings, in the Congo thousands of Belgian officials were posted at every level and in every district, in the public and private sectors.18

  The Belgian Congo proved a very lucrative enterprise for Belgium. Often described as a ‘geological scandal’, the territory was rich in copper, cobalt, tin, zinc, manganese, gold, industrial diamonds and uranium to name a few. It was also very fertile, and rubber tree plantations replaced the picking of wild rubber while large quantities of coffee, cocoa, cotton and palm oil were exported. Most of the Belgian Congo’s wealth was controlled by a huge and tentacular financial holding, the Société Générale de Belgique. Its most lucrative branch was the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, which operated the mines in the southern Katanga province.28

  Through the Société Générale and other groups, there was a steady flow of resources and money in one direction: from the Congo to Belgium. The motherland kept a monopoly over the processing of the Congo’s raw products, resulting in the development of a vast industrial sector in Belgium, from metallurgy to chocolate factories. A fraction of the colony’s income trickled down to the Congolese population, through the taxes and duties paid by the companies, which funded more than half of the Belgian Congo’s budget. However, the Congolese benefited from the development of the country’s infrastructures, even if its primary goal was to facilitate the operations of private enterprises. Up to 5,000 kilometres of railways were built, roads were kept in good condition and hydro-electric dams provided electricity to many cities. Air transportation started in 1920 with domestic flights, and by 1936 there was a service between Brussels and Léopoldville. The proportion of the Congo’s population that lived in an urban environment increased from 6% in 1935, 15% in 1945, to 24% by 1955.28–29

  Throughout central Africa, the impact of all these rapid changes on the traditional African societies was profound. Progressively, for better or worse, many Africans no longer felt bound by the customs that had regulated their lives for dozens of generations. Women acquired a degree of freedom, some of whose consequences were unexpected. While their ancestors had been generally content to procure food on a day-to-day basis and spend their evenings in endless palavers, colonisation and European examples brought materialism. Different clothes, a radio, lighting devices, a bicycle and later on a house made with cement blocks and a corrugated iron roof became the long-term goals of many workers now serving the Europeans. This hope for what was perceived as a better life lured many into the nascent cities of central Africa which, in the Belgian Congo, were quite appropriately called centres extra-coutumiers, centres where customs no longer held sway.

  Created by Europeans, populated by Africans

  Central African colonial cities were described as having been created by Europeans and populated by Africans. In the first half of the twentieth century, this process engendered communities whose lifestyle dramatically differed from that of traditional African societies, in a way that facilitated the dissemination of sexually transmitted pathogens, including SIVcpz/HIV-1. Before we examine some specific cities, let us glance quickly at the populations they emerged from. Figures provided by colonial censuses, especially before 1930, need to be taken with a pinch of salt: some adult males avoided being counted for fear of taxation, forced labour or conscription, while administrators exaggerated their numbers as budgets and chances of promotion were proportional to the population. Around 1930, the population of Cameroun Français was estimated to be 2.2 million, while it was 1.26 million in Oubangui-Chari, 664,000 in Moyen-Congo and only 387,000 in Gabon (Figure 4; year-to-year variations over the following decades were caused by changes in the boundaries between colonies within the AEF). The continental part of Equatorial Guinea had only 100,000 inhabitants, and the Cabinda enclave of Angola even fewer. The population of the Belgian Congo, a 2.3 million km2 subcontinent, was estimated to be 9.6 million in 1930, and 13.5 million in 1958. In all these colonies, population densities were low, generally between one and four inhabitants per km2.28–31

  Figure 4 Population of colonies of central Africa, 1922–60.

  We will focus on the evolution of the twin cities of Brazzaville and Léopoldville (better known as ‘Brazza’ and ‘Léo’), founded at the same time by French and Belgian colonisers, and where ultimately the diversification of HIV-1 took place. Around 1904, when Brazzaville replaced Libreville as the AEF capital, about 250 Europeans and 5,000 Africans lived there, those necessary for the colonial administration, an embryonic private sector, and the Catholic mission which had constituted the initial nucleus. A colonial bureaucracy was slowly developed, with a residence for the governor, buildings for the telegraph, customs, barracks, a tribunal, a prison, a local Institut Pasteur, three dispensaries and so on. Meanwhile, Léopoldville had been given a major boost with the opening in 1898 of the Matadi–Léo railway, which bypassed the cataracts on the Congo. Léopoldville drained a much larger chunk of territory than its AEF counterpart. It did not make sense to manage such a huge colony out of Boma near the mouth of the river, and in 1923 Léo became the capital of the Belgian Congo. It took a few years for this administrative decision to be implemented. This attracted a further influx of migrants, initially house servants and low-level employees of the Belgian administration. Several thousand workers were coerced to come to Léo in the mid-1920s to build the new docks along the river.32

  Brazza, the capital of an underpopulated and resource-poor colony, remained a sleepy colonial city populated by French civil servants and their house staff, missionaries, soldiers, traders and employees of a few private enterprises, while Léo thrived as the commercial hub of a wealthy colony, housing more than 600 companies by 1928. Many of these were small family-owned businesses but there were also large employers with up to 1,000 workers, such as the Lever palm oil company and the Otraco transportation utility.

  In 1921, around the time that SIVcpz emerged into HIV-1, only 7,000 people lived in Brazza, and 16,000 in Léo. Ten years later, Brazzaville, the largest city of AEF, had only 18,000 inhabitants while Léopoldville already had 40,000. As a proxy for colonial economic development, in 1931 there were 800 Europeans in Brazza versus 3,000 in Léo. The twin cities were followed by Douala (22,000), Bangui (17,000), Yaoundé and Libreville (6,500 each), and Pointe-Noire (5,000). Other agglomerations were in essence large villages rather than small towns. All told, less than 5% of the population of central Africa lived in an urban environment. But after this inauspicious start, the urbanisation process accelerated dramatically. Just twenty years later (1951), Douala had 81,500 inhabitants, Brazzaville 80,000, Bangui 65,000, Yaoundé 3
0,000, Pointe-Noire 28,500, Libreville 18,000 and Port-Gentil 11,000. Léopoldville was already in a category of its own with 222,000 inhabitants.23,26,33–35

  Too many males

  There is nothing more conducive to large-scale prostitution than bringing together, in a given location, a much larger number of young adult males than young women. Male sexual drive is highest in the twenty-five years after adolescence, and if monogamous or polygamous unions are not possible because of a lack of potential partners, sex will be purchased. This has been proven time and again, from the American military bases in Asia to colonial Nairobi and the mining areas of northern Rhodesia and South Africa. We will now examine how colonial policies created a gross gender imbalance on the banks of the Congo River, in the binational conurbation that attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from the very areas inhabited by the P.t. troglodytes chimpanzee, including at least one who was infected with SIVcpz/HIV-1.

 

‹ Prev