'Veni, VD, Vici'?: Reassessing the Ila syphilis epidemic

The HIV/AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa has stimulated renewed interest in the social, cultural, and epidemiological history of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) under colonialism. Several authors have already challenged the evidence behind colonial era narratives on syphilis and sexuality by noting that European observers often vastly overestimated the incidence of this STD among Africans by misdiagnosing common manifestations of yaws as syphilis. Yet few researchers have explored the epistemological basis of pronouncements on the link between syphilis and widespread infertility in rural African society. This essay does so by re-examining the historical origins of a well-known syphilis epidemic among the Ila-speaking peoples of Northern Rhodesia's Namwala District. It argues that the epidemic was largely a colonial construction based on a misinterpretation of the role of sex in Ila exchange relations and an underassessment of other factors that may have contributed to the perception that population growth was stagnant. On the one hand, district officers and medics may have overlooked the demographic impact of other infectious diseases, malnutrition disorders, and consciously deployed birth-control measures. On the other hand profound changes in the social organisation of production and reproduction in Namwala may have seriously distorted census statistics. Evidence indicates that long-term labour migration developed as early as the 1910s, and intra-rural resettlement in response to the end of regional warfare and the rise of commercial agriculture may have undermined the definitions of 'village' and 'household' that colonial census-takers used in calculating Ila population.