Page 5 - Bulletin 23- 2020

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But even as these optimistic words were being written, the deadly second wave of the
pandemic was starting to penetrate the country from a different direction. Having arrived in

Cape Town aboard two troopships in mid-September, it raced inland as the now demobilised

men from these ships returned home by train. In even as remote a spot as Tsolo in the
Transkei, within days of a batch of Native Labour Corps soldiers disembarking from the

troop train from Cape Town, “sickness has become rife among both races in the village and
country”, reported the local magistrate, “and people are being brought in to [the] local doctor

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by wagon and sledge loads….”

By mid-October, almost the entire country had been overwhelmed by the same plight as

demobilised soldiers and migrant workers fleeing home from infected cities and mines spread
the disease far and wide. Nor was it any longer just laying people up in droves, but it was also

killing a frightening number of them. In Cape Town, deaths topped 400 per day, 40 times
greater than the usual daily toll, while, at the height of the epidemic in Kimberley, it was

estimated that if deaths were to continue at the current rate, the entire population of that city

would be wiped out in 16 months. In Bloemfontein, shops, offices and workshops were
closed for want of staff, public transport and services like the post office were paralysed and

ailing residents were dropping dead in the streets. “All this week the hand of the disease has
lain heavily on the town,” observed a weekly newspaper, “and so uncanny was the stillness in

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the streets and shops that we might have been in a city of the dead.”

As eerie was the silence in the countryside. “For two weeks a great solemn hush has

prevailed,” wrote a correspondent from the Cathcart district. “No one is to be seen, no one to
be heard; no life on the farms, no work in the lands. Lord influenza and his followers have

held the countryside in their grip.” Corpses lay alongside the sick in kraals; animals
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wandered in the fields unherded and cows went unmilked. The epidemic “threatens the
existence of the entire race”, concluded a resident of the Transkei fearfully.

Blame-mongering

As in most epidemics when life is under dire threat, blame-mongering soon began along the

many fault lines of South African society. Thus, some whites blamed Africans for recklessly
spreading the diseases as they fled from epidemic hotspots – there were even calls for them to