Page 4 - Bulletin 23- 2020
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SPANISH FLU, 1918–1919, in SOUTH AFRICA
“It threatens the existence of the entire race”
Howard Phillips
Three hundred thousand (or 6 per cent of the population) dead in six weeks; tens of thousands
of wives and husbands turned into widows or widowers virtually overnight; hundreds of
thousands of orphans created at a stroke. These stark statistics sum up the grim impact of the
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devastating epidemic of so-called Spanish flu, which raged through South Africa in October
– November 1918 and again, less virulently, in August 1919. Short, sharp and savage, ‘Black
October’ (as contemporaries called it) became a synonym for the country’s worst epidemic
ever, for it outdid in intensity, range and lethality every other epidemic in the subcontinent
before or since.
This vicious epidemic was part of a global pandemic of highly infectious influenza which
swept around the planet in 1918–19 in three waves. The first and last of these were wide-
spread but not unduly serious, confining most of those it struck to bed, but no more. The
second wave was quite the opposite in character, for it rapidly assumed a deadly form,
claiming one victim after another.
First noticed in military training camps in the United States early in 1918, the pandemic was
spread from there by land and sea, primarily by the mass movement of troops and sailors to
and from the main theatres of World War One. In this way the tail-end of the mild first wave
reached Durban early in September 1918, carried there by soldiers returning from campaigns
in the Middle East and German East Africa. From Durban it spread into the interior of Natal
and then to the Witwatersrand where it prostrated thousands of miners but caused relatively
few deaths. It would only “produce temporary inconvenience without serious loss”, forecast
the local Reuters correspondent confidently, and “in view of the fact that such a very large
number of people have been affected, the fact that there has been only one death must be
considered to be reassuring”.
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