The disease spread through Tigre in Ethiopia and then followed ox trails south along the Rift Valley and west across Sahel herding routes via Sudan and Chad into West Africa. It took just five years to reach the Atlantic, and within a decade it had arrived in South Africa.
By the end of the century, most of the cattle in southern Africa had died, a toll estimated at 5.5 million. This pandemic has been called the greatest natural calamity ever to befall Africa and yet many people are not aware of this history.
“To this day, hardly anyone outside academia is aware of the calamity, even though—as with the slave trade—it was the Europeans who reaped the rewards,” wrote Pearce. The massive death disrupted the ecosystem in Africa thus leading to the spread of tsetsefly & sleeping sickness
Sleeping sickness was unknown in East Africa until the ecological disruption caused by the Rinderpest epidemic. But after its arrival in the early 20th century, it caused millions of deaths. An estimated 4 million people died in Uganda alone.
Europeans faced with tsetse fly infestation when they took over Africa increased the scourge by taking over healthy lands & forcefully resettling natives to infested areas leading to major sleeping sickness epidemic that wiped out 2-third of the population of what is now Uganda.
