Thread by @HistoryKE

#HistoryKeThread: Kenya’s Flu Pandemic of 1918

As the end of World War 1 approached, about a quarter of the world’s population, estimated at about 500 million, caught a debilitating bout of a flu-like disease.

This was the Spanish flu of 1918.

Between 20million and 100million people succumbed to it in the years from 1918 to 1919.

In Africa, East Africa was one of the continent’s deadliest hotspots of the pandemic.

But let’s first familiarize ourselves with the situation that existed in Kenya - or British East Africa, as the territory was then known.

In the years prior to the pandemic, the British saddled African households with a hut tax intended to fund development and war operations. The hut tax was systematically increased as 1918 drew near.

In order to be able to pay for this hut tax, local populations, particularly those found along the railway, shunned subsistence farming, drawn instead by the allure of salaried jobs such as those of farm workers, cooks, gardeners, porters and railway clerks.

As a result, food production decreased significantly. Pastoral tribes waged war against each other over pasture. There were numerous reports of malnutrition within the african population.

Health and sanitation indicators painted a bleak picture.

Worse, famine hit the land in the run up to 1918. Luos had a name for the famine of 1918-1919, caused by the failure of short rains for two years; the Kanga famine, they called it.

1918 also marked the end of #WW1. Shiploads of African troops who served in the carrier corps of the British army returned home, arriving in Mombasa from Asia and other war zones.

There were also at the same time reinforcements made up of Indian troops that the British war office sent on the trail of German military leader Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, who was still waging guerrilla attacks against British positions in Tanganyika.

The Spanish flu was first detected when a ship carrying Indian troops from Bombay arrived in Mombasa on 23rd September 1918. Dozens of the Indian troops were sick with flu.

And as they were transported by train, the pandemic spread along the railway line to all major towns and as far afield as Entebbe in British Uganda, and Mwanza in Tanganyika.

Exacerbating the spread of the disease were labourers who traveled around the famine-struck country in search of food.

Apart from Mombasa, other points of entry of the pandemic on the continent included Freetown, Sierra Leone, Cape Town, French Somaliland (Djibouti), among others.

Around the continent, casualties mounted.

This flu was, unlike ordinary influenza, more virulent, and often killed its victims within no more than four days. Symptoms included sore throat, violent coughs, fevers, chest congestions and intense body aches.

Within nine weeks of its arrival in Kenya, the flu had spread to practically every inhabited part of the country.

In March 1919, which was at the end of the third and final wave of the pandemic, John Ainsworth, the Chief Native Commissioner in Kenya, reported that about 155,000 Africans - at the time estimated to constitute 5.5% of the African population - had succumbed to the deadly flu.

Some colonial officials, pointing out that some regions had not filed in their data, concluded that the actual number of fatalities was far higher than that reported by Ainsworth.

By the end of the first quarter of 1919, the deadly cocktail in British East Africa of Spanish influenza, malnutrition and famine had registered far more fatalities than the war.

Desperate to revive the colony’s battered economy and spur plantation farming, the colonial government stepped up investments in medical facilities. This was necessary in order to secure the lives of a much needed labour force.

Church missions received additional incentives and support from the colonial government. Many health centres were established or expanded. Kijabe Mission Hospitals and a hospital in Taita Taveta, which I believe to be the Moi District Hospital in Voi, come to mind.

Today, a different flu-like disease, Covid19, threatens our existence. Like Spanish flu, it was imported into Kenya.

In 1918, the pandemic reached our shores at a time when famine, and taxation, had swept the country. Today, a locust invasion has swept the country to make way for the more calamitous #Covid19.

Researchers traced the source of the 1918 Spanish flu to a military base in Étaples-sur-Mer, north of France.

One unproven theory has it that Covid19 originated from a Chinese biological weapons program, based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Covid19 and Spanish flu may be related in many ways. But both, like history, will come and go.

But dear Kenyans, take government and medical experts’ advisories seriously.

This is a killer pandemic. Imagine the dependency ratio it will leave in its wake. We need to continue breathing.