The first signal of an imminent malaria attack is a feeling of anxiety, which comes on suddenly and for no clear reason. Something has happened to you, something bad. If you believe in spirits, you know what it is: someone has pronounced a curse, and an evil spirit has entered you, disabling you and rooting you to the ground. Hence the dullness, the weakness, the heaviness that comes over you. Everything is irritating. First and foremost, the light; you hate the light. And others are irritating — their loud voices, their revolting smell, their rough touch.
But you don’t have a lot of time for these repugnances and loathings. For the attack arrives quickly, sometimes quite abruptly, with few preliminaries. It is a sudden, violent onset of cold. A polar, arctic cold. Someone has taken you, naked, toasted in the hellish heat of the Sahel and the Sahara, and thrown you straight into the icy highlands of Greenland or Spitsbergen, amid the snows, winds, and blizzards. What a shock! You feel the cold in a split second, a terrifying, piercing, ghastly cold. You begin to tremble, to quake, to thrash about. You immediately recognize, however, that this is not a trembling you are familiar with from earlier experiences — say, when you caught cold one winter in a frost; these tremors and convulsions tossing you around are of a kind that at any moment now will tear you to shreds. Trying to save yourself, you begin to beg for help.
What can bring relief? The only thing that really helps is if someone covers you. But not simply throws a blanket or quilt over you. This thing you are being covered with must crush you with its weight, squeeze you, flatten you. You dream of being pulverized. You desperately long for a steamroller to pass over you.
I once had a powerful malaria attack in a poor village, where there weren’t any heavy coverings. The villagers placed the lid from some kind of wooden chest on top of me and then patiently sat on it, waiting for the worst tremors to pass. The most wretched are those who have a malaria attack and there is nothing to wrap them in. You can see them by the roadsides, in the bush, or in the clay huts, lying semicomatose on the ground, drenched in sweat, confused, their bodies rent by rhythmic waves of malarial convulsions. But even snuggled under a dozen blankets, jackets, and coats, your teeth chatter and you moan with pain, because you sense that this cold does not come from without — it’s forty degrees Celsius out there! — but that it’s within, inside you, that these Greenlands and Spitsbergens are in you, that all those floes, sheets, and mountains of ice are advancing through your veins, muscles, and bones. Perhaps this thought would fill you with fear — were you able to summon the strength to feel anything at all. But the thought occurs just as the peak of the attack, after several hours, is gradually subsiding, and you start a helpless descent into a state of extreme exhaustion and weakness.
The malaria attack is not merely painful, but like every pain also a mystical experience. We enter a realm about which a moment ago we knew nothing, though it now turns out that it had existed alongside us all the while, finally capturing and incorporating us: we discover within ourselves icy crevasses, chasms, and abysses, whose presence fills us with suffering and fear. But this moment of discovery, too, passes, the spirits desert us, depart, and disappear, and that which remains, under the mountain of the most bizarre coverings, is truly pitiful.
A man right after a strong attack of malaria is a human rag. He lies in a puddle of sweat, he is still feverish, and he can move neither hand nor foot. Everything hurts; he is dizzy and nauseous. He is exhausted, weak, limp. Carried by someone else, he gives the impression of having no bones or muscles. And many days must pass before he can get up on his feet again.
Each year in Africa malaria afflicts tens of millions of people, and in those areas where it is most prevalent — in wet, low-lying, marshy regions — it kills one child out of three. There are many types of malaria; some, the gentle ones, you should be able to recover from as you would from the flu. But here, even those can lay waste whoever succumbs to them. First, because in this murderous climate one endures with difficulty even the slightest indisposition; second, because Africans are often malnourished, attenuated, hungry. Time and again you encounter here drowsy, apathetic, benumbed people. They sit or lie for hours on end on the streets, by the roadsides, doing nothing. You speak to them and they do not hear you; you look at them and have the impression that they do not see you. It is unclear if they are ignoring you, if these are just idle lazybones and do-nothings, or if they are being ravaged by a malaria that is slowly and inexorably killing them. You do not know how to behave toward them, or what to think.
I lay for two weeks in the Mulago Hospital. The attacks recurred, but each one less intense and exhausting than the preceding. I got countless injections. Dr. Patel came every day, examined me, told me that when I was better he would introduce me to his family. He has a wealthy family, owners of large stores in Kampala and in the provinces. They were able to educate him in England, and he received his medical degree in London. How did his ancestors come to find themselves in Uganda? At the end of the nineteenth century, his grandfather and thousands of other young Indians were brought by the English to eastern Africa to build the railway line from Mombasa to Kampala. It was a new phase of colonial expansion: the conquest and subjugation of the continent’s interior. If you look closely at old maps of Africa, you will notice a peculiarity: inscribed along the coastlines are dozens, hundreds of names of ports, cities, and settlements, whereas the rest, a vast 99 percent of Africa’s surface, is a blank, essentially virgin area, only sparsely marked here and there.
The Europeans clung to the coasts, to their ports, eating houses, and ships, reluctantly and only sporadically making incursions into the interior. They were hampered by the lack of roads, fearful of hostile tribes and tropical diseases — malaria, sleeping sickness, yellow fever, leprosy. And although they inhabited the coasts for more than four centuries, they did so in a spirit of impermanence, with a narrow-minded goal of quick profits and easy spoils. Their ports were really only leeches on the body of Africa, points of export for slaves, gold, and ivory. Their goaclass="underline" to carry away everything, and at the lowest possible price. Consequently, many of these European beachheads resembled the poorest sections of old Liverpool or Lisbon. In the course of four hundred years in Luanda, the Portuguese did not dig a single well for potable water, or illuminate the streets with lanterns.
The construction of the railway line to Kampala was the symbol of a new, more paternalistic approach to Africa on the part of the colonial powers, especially London and Paris. With the division of Africa among the European states already securely accomplished, they could turn their attentions to investing in those parts of their colonies whose rich and fertile soils held the promise of huge profits from coffee, tea, cotton, and pineapple plantations, or, in other places, from diamond, gold, or copper mines. But there were no means of transport. The old way — porters carrying everything on their heads — no longer sufficed. Roads, railway lines, and bridges had to be built. Yes, but who would do this? They could not bring in white workers: the white man was master here, he could not do physical labor. Initially, the local African worker was also out of the question: he simply did not exist. It was impossible to induce the local population to work for wages, because they didn’t yet understand the concept of money (for centuries, trade here was based on barter, and one paid for slaves, for example, with firearms, lumps of salt, calico fabrics).