Africa in the Time of Cholera

Myron Echenberg is former Chair of the History Department at McGill University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is a former editor of the Canadian Journal of African Studies and previously served as President of the Canadian Association of African Studies. Professor Echenberg is the author of Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901; Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914–1945; and Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960, which won the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association for the outstanding original scholarly work published during 1991.

Introduction; Part I. The First Six Cholera Pandemics, 1817–1947: 1. 'The fiend of pestilence' circles the globe; 2. Medical responses; 3. Cholera ravages Sub-Saharan Africa: Senegambia, Ethiopia, and Zanzibar, 1821–94; 4. Cholera in North Africa and the Nile Valley: Tunisia, 1835–68, and Egypt, 1823–1947; Part II. The Seventh Cholera Pandemic Strikes Africa: 5. Medical changes; 6. Seventh pandemic in Africa, 1971–2009; 7. Risk factors: environment and geography, armed conflicts and the dispersal of refugees; 8. Risk factors: public health policy choices among stable and weak states; 9. Zimbabwe, portrait of cholera in a failed state; 10. Cholera today.