Page 11 - Bulletin 23- 2020

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afford to stay at home with a touch of “mere flu”. The only category of women of this age
who were at special risk was those who were pregnant.

Geographically, Spanish flu mortality was heaviest in the western, northern and eastern Cape,
the southern Orange Free State and the western and northern Transvaal. What these areas had

in common was that they were on or close to railway lines stretching from those hotspots of
second wave Spanish flu, Cape Town, Kimberley, Bloemfontein and the big Karoo railway

junction of De Aar. In most of Natal, the northern Orange Free State and the southern

Transvaal, Black October’s toll was significantly lower. This suggests that in those parts of
the country where the less virulent first wave of the disease had recently preceded the second

wave, contracting a bout of the former conferred a degree of immunity against the latter.
Paradoxically, therefore, the best protection against catching deadly second-wave Spanish flu

was a dose of milder first-wave flu.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the adjoining rural districts of Mount Frere and Mount Ayliff

in the Transkei. In the former, the mortality rate almost touched 80/1000 of the population, in
the latter just 14/1000. Tellingly, the nearest railway line to Mount Frere was that from the

Eastern Cape and its second-wave Spanish flu, while that serving Mount Ayliff was that from
Natal where the first wave of the epidemic had struck first. The same epidemic geography

probably explains why young male miners at Kimberley were decimated by the second wave

of the epidemic, which hit the city first, while mortality among their peers on the gold mines
of Johannesburg was far lighter as the second wave’s arrival there had been preceded by an

outbreak of the first wave.

Demographic Impact

Yet, the demographic impact of Black October went further than just those whom the
epidemic killed. The death of pregnant mothers meant the loss of their still-to-be-born babies

too – which raised knotty issues in African communities about repaying lobola if they would
have been first-time mothers – while in many cases, even a non-fatal bout of the disease was

enough to cause a miscarriage or a spontaneous abortion. For many decades after 1918,

therefore, the mark of the Spanish flu remained on South Africa’s demographic structure, in
the form of a reduced number of those who had been between 18 and 40 in that year and in