Smallpox had been endemic in parts of coastal Africa for centuries, but the great population movements of the imperial age spread the illness throughout the interior, leaving village after village full of dead bodies.
A Kuba king – the successor to the one who had welcomed William Sheppard to the kingdom – died from the disease. Smallpox inspired a particular terror. The Africans called it “the sickness from above” or “the sickness of heaven,” because the terrifying disease seemed to come from no familiar source.
One traveler to the Congo came on a deserted town where a fifteen-foot boa constrictor was dining on smallpox victims’ flesh, and on another where the vultures were so gorged that they were too heavy to fly.
Source:
Hochschild, Adam. "A Reckoning." King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 230-31. Print.
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