stylistic:tone, linguistic:translation
History

According to an article in the New Scientist, the depopulated and apparently primevally wild Africa seen in wildlife documentary films was formed in the 19th century by disease, a combination of rinderpest and the tsetse fly. Rinderpest is believed to have originated in Asia, later spreading through the transport of cattle. In 1887, the rinderpest virus was accidentally imported in livestock brought by an Italian expeditionary force to Eritrea. It spread rapidly, reaching Ethiopia by 1888, the Atlantic coast by 1892 and South Africa by 1897. Rinderpest, a cattle plague from central Asia, killed over 90% of the cattle of the pastoral peoples such as the Masai of east Africa. In South Africa, with no native immunity, most of the population – some 5.5 million domestic cattle – died. Pastoralists and farmers were left with no animals – their source of income – and farmers were deprived of their working animals for ploughing and irrigation. The pandemic coincided with a period of drought, causing widespread famine. The starving human populations died of smallpox, cholera, and typhoid, as well as African Sleeping Sickness and other endemic diseases. It is estimated that two-thirds of the Masai died in 1891.

The land was left emptied of its cattle and its people, enabling the colonial powers Germany and Britain to take over Tanzania and Kenya with little effort. With greatly reduced grazing, grassland turned rapidly to bush. The closely cropped grass sward was replaced in a few years by woody grassland and thornbush, ideal habitat for tsetse flies. Wild mammal populations increased rapidly, accompanied by the tsetse fly. Highland regions of east Africa which had been free of tsetse fly were colonised by the pest, accompanied by sleeping sickness, until then unknown in the area. Millions of people died of the disease in the early 20th century.

The areas occupied by the tsetse fly were largely barred to animal husbandry. Sleeping sickness was dubbed "the best game warden in Africa" by conservationists, who assumed that the land, empty of people and full of game animals, had always been like that. Julian Huxley of the World Wildlife Fund called the plains of east Africa "a surviving sector of the rich natural world as it was before the rise of modern man". They created numerous large reserves for hunting safaris. In 1909 the newly retired president Theodore Roosevelt went on a safari that brought over 10,000 animal carcasses to America. Later, much of the land was turned over to nature reserves and national parks such as the Serengeti, Masai Mara, Kruger and Okavango Delta. The result, across eastern and southern Africa, is a modern landscape of manmade ecosystems: farmland and pastoral land largely free of bush and tsetse fly; and bush controlled by the tsetse fly.

Although the colonial powers saw the disease as a threat to their interests, and acted accordingly to bring transmission almost to a halt in the 1960s, this improved situation led to a laxity of surveillance and management by the newly independent governments covering the same areas - and a resurgence that became a crisis again in the 1990s.