The Colonial Enterprise
The global social crisis and in particular the health
crisis that afflicts the South today can be traced to the European
colonisation of South America, Africa and Asia. Beginning with the first
wave of European expansion when Columbus landed in the New World, the
historical record of this encounter was replete with instances of
wholesale plunder, genocide and oppression.
Fifty years after Columbus’ arrival, the indigenous
populations were decimated by death, enslavement, malnutrition and
diseases the white man brought like the common cold, measles,
chickenpox, typhus and syphilis as they had no resistance to combat
these diseases. In fact, smallpox epidemics were instrumental to the
success of the Spanish Conquest. The final solution arrived with the
deliberate extermination of populations and the sense of powerlessness,
loss of security and identity which followed, took its toll in the
psychological and cultural breakdown of the original inhabitants of the
New World resulting in mass suicide occurrences.
Hand in hand with colonial conquest, the slave trade,
which spanned some four centuries, fuelled the prosperity of the New
World, Western Europe and the institutions that participated in it.
Sixty million Africans were kidnapped and shipped to the Americas and
the Caribbean to work in the mines, coffee, cocoa and sugar plantations.
Millions died at sea from over-crowding, hunger, diseases and the
inhuman conditions meted out to them. Others were killed during
insurrections against their captors; yet others threw themselves
overboard. Over two hundred million slaves died in the middle passage
across the Atlantic. The slave trade also brought along with it yellow
fever, leprosy, yaws and hookworm from West Africa to the Americas.
The slave trade had a deadly impact on African
society. Societies disintegrated and the loss of Africa’s population
bled the continent to death and led to its underdevelopment, which
persists to this day. With the second wave of European colonisation
sometime in the 1800s, Africa was left with a legacy of massive poverty,
economic stagnation, crippling indebtedness, wars and conflicts.
The slave trade was the cornerstone on which
colonisation developed and grew. Britain, which took the lead, became
the most powerful colonial power by the 19th century. European
colonial expansion was accompanied by wars and military campaigns, which
adversely affected the local populations. Uprisings against colonial
rule were brutally crushed; villages and farmlands were destroyed
resulting in death, disease and famine. This was the experience in East
Africa in the late 19th and early 20th century where it became the focus
for imperialist rivalry between the English and the Germans (Doyal
1979:102-103).Apart from the importation of new deadly diseases and
the deleterious effects of warfare, colonial penetration and unequal
treaties led to the social and economic disintegration of native
societies as well as their integration with the global market economy.
This had a major lasting impact on health conditions in the Third World.
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