Sleeping Sickness

In 1912, a British physician documents a catastrophe that half a million Africans died from, and traces its spread directly to the machinery of empire. Dr. Fleming Mant Sandwith was an eyewitness to the sleeping sickness epidemic that tore through East Africa, and his account reads as both medical treatise and quietly devastating critique of colonial "progress." The disease had been contained for years until European expeditions needing porters and carriers swept across the continent. Stanley's famous treks in search of Dr. Livingstone and Emin Pasha carried the parasite in infected Africans who were simply discarded by traders when they developed telltale swollen glands. What follows is a clinical portrait of suffering: the tremor, the splitting headache, the agonizing sensitivity of skin to touch, and finally the namesake sleep from which no one wakes. Sandwith spares no detail in documenting what empire cost. This short monograph endures because it is one of the few documents written from inside the epidemic, and because its quiet clinical language conceals a radical question: what kind of civilization leaves such a trail?