Digby reflects on the 1919 Influenza Pandemic in Bulawayo
The 1919 Influenza Pandemic in Bulawayo
I’ve recounted how in the late 1940s we used to go and see Mrs Cotterell, the mother of my mother’s oldest friend, at her farm near Bulawayo. Now for the story of Mrs Cotterell’s vivacious granddaughter, Violet, a brilliant student a couple of years older than me. She woke up with a bad headache but forced herself to go to school for her Matriculation examinations; she died the same day of polio. Death was closer then, and several of my luckier peers survived polio, but sported leg-irons. Measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough, German measles (rubella): we even tried to contract them while still young and healthy, to get them out of the way. Some of us died. Accordingly, we’re especially contemptuous of vaccine-deniers.
But by then at least malaria was largely confined to the lowveld. My mother had six siblings and in the 1930s she’d lost her dear elder brother and her closest sister to blackwater fever: Eric got a good job up north in Ndola; malaria was endemic there and a third bout proved fatal; Eileen went camping while heavily pregnant and she hadn’t the stamina to survive childbirth, though her son lived. It was a hard life, even for relatively well-off Europeans.
Go back a couple of decades and thousands perished in the Influenza Pandemic, crueller than Covid.
Aged five, my mother, under the dining table and hidden by the tablecloth, listened quietly to puzzling adult conversation about the war. Actually, she remembered the First World War less clearly than I the Second, though she did recall the widespread rejoicing afterwards and heard that the entire population had flocked onto the streets to dance and cheer to an alfresco band. Weeks later, however, terrifying stories of the “Black ’Flu” reached them. She told me that her mother and the children survived the epidemic by isolating themselves, as did most of their farmworkers. The first step: Winifred Bedford forbade the Africans and their wives and children to venture beyond the boundaries or, if they did, they weren’t allowed to return. Then, as my grandfather himself had perforce to work in Bulawayo (at Rhodesia Railways), he decided he must lodge in town for the duration. And, belt and braces, wasn’t everyone on the farm protected from infection by the strings of onions that hung about their necks? (The workers thought it hilarious.) Winnie had great faith in the humble onion; they ate onions in vast quantities, raw. An unimpeachable medieval remedy! Additionally, with a nod to more modern medicine, they gargled with “potash of permanganate”. It all helped morale.
Each day an official from the Town Health Department came to the gate and shouted “Is all well?” – a bit like the old plague cry of “Bring out your dead!” Deliveries to the farmhouse door were stopped, though some supplies were left at the end of the drive. But eventually Winnie had to go into Bulawayo for provisions, and she had to take the children with her in the trap, and my mother was haunted by vivid memories of passing by dozens of sick and weary Africans, perhaps on their way to seek help in town, or fleeing to their villages. Many of them didn’t survive the journey; in one dry riverbed there were three bodies. All Winnie could do was to push on as fast as she dared and report the fatalities to the authorities.
Meanwhile, after work my grandfather Alec had been helping out at the makeshift hospital in the Drill Hall, which was packed with patients lying upon on the floor in any space they could find. The official count: 514 Europeans died; Africans, more susceptible than Europeans, succumbed by the uncounted thousand. Michael Gelfand, who specialised in the history of medicine, says the contagion spread up to Rhodesia from the Cape in about October 1918, when Bulawayo was already beset by an outbreak of scarlet fever; he said Africans were warned through the chiefs of the impending epidemic and they lost about two or three per cent of their number, mortality being especially bad in urban areas. Fortunately, relatively quickly, by mid-November, the epidemic was waning.
The Drill Hall, by the way, was a handsome red brick building, in the best Victorian tradition, standing in spacious and tree-planted grounds at the corner of Lobengula Street and Tenth Avenue, near the Convent School and the station, and it was not only the base for the Volunteers but also a venue for dances and concerts. There were reading rooms, lecture rooms, messes, a gymnasium, a billiard room, a skittle alley, an armoury and a small-bore rifle range, as well as a drill area, a cricket pitch, football fields.
Digby is the author of the biography of Sir John Christopher Willoughby.
