11 ms·

The Black Death may have transformed medieval societies in sub-Saharan Africa

87 points by Thevet 8y ago

Chikodi 8y ago
Plausible explanations, but the evidence is flimsy at best
lqet 8y ago
> Whatever calamity struck medieval sub-Saharan Africa, its impact was lasting. Akrokrowa was abandoned by about 1365, and Kirikongo was never the same. The settlement stayed small, the ceramics got much simpler, and the culture changed to more closely resemble that of the nearby Mali Empire. "It does seem to be a break," Dueppen says. I like to bring up black death in discussions when people complain that our current time is "difficult". In southern Europe in the middle of the 14th century, it is likely that around 80% of the population died over a few years. In Milan, town officials closed buildings with bricks as soon as they learned that anyone in that house was infected (with the people still inside, of course). Also, the social impact of this disease is often forgotten: I read somewhere that any interpersonal relationship between 2 or more people was effectively destroyed, because the other may already have been infected. Parents refused to take care of their own children, and people saw no reason to do long-term planning anymore (including farming). An epidemic like that basically decomposes the fabric of society, and therefore culture, very quickly, in a way only few other catastrophes are able to, and it may take centuries to recover from that. Or the society will never recover at all: > Historians have found previously unknown mentions of epidemics in Ethiopian texts from the 13th to the 15th centuries, including one that killed "such a large number of people that no one was left to bury the dead."
- iguy 8y ago
  The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast. The survivors (or more, their children) ended up significantly better-off, for a century or so, basically because there was more land per person, so you could just farm the better parts. Whether something like that happened in (say) Ethiopia too, will I guess be even harder to figure out than whether they had the plague at all.
  - lqet 8y ago
    > The survivors (or more, their children) ended up significantly better-off, for a century or so, basically because there was more land per person. Indeed, this is something I always found extremely fascinating. The plague destroyed the very rigid social and economic structures of medieval Europe. Simply put, they had to take anyone as a goldsmith's apprentice, even some poor farmer's kid, because everyone else was dead. I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, and always held the secret opinion that European culture was basically born in the fire that was the black death epidemic. > The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast. Easy answer: the plague was much, much, much more devastating in Ethiopia than in Europe, leaving no one behind to recover from anything, or to tell the harrowing story.
    - cimmanom 8y ago
      > I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, and always held the secret opinion that European culture was basically born in the fire that was the black death epidemic. I've heard that hypothesis from both popular and scholarly sources before. Pretty sure it's a broadly held theory.
      - iguy 8y ago
        I'm not sure I would go this far, there was a lot else that went on. But economically, for sure it was huge... we can actually trace several such swings in pre-industrial England, plotting population against per-capita income (or calories!) and it walks back & forth along the same curve a few times over the centuries.
      - chewz 8y ago
        > I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, The opposite - Black Death had delayed the Renaissance for circa 2-3 generations. It was already happening and then the plague came and the Renaisance have played out later in different times and with different people and ideas. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_renaissances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_renaissances
- gotocake 8y ago
  We live in a tiny bubble of time that could change at any moment. Our recent ancestors struggled with smallpox outbreaks, measles, and of course the horror that is polio. My mother knew a man who lived in an iron lung! We’re just part of one or two generations that has enjoyed both vaccines, and potent antibiotics, but were only ever a novel pathogen away from reliving the horrors of medieval plague towns. The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed millions of people, and given populations densities and air travel today, such an outbreak would kill far more. Society is no more resilient today if we’re being honest, but it’s more dependent on technology a relative few can understand or repair, and on food and water being delivered to our towns or homes. If the shit hits the fan, we’ll be in a truly unenviable position.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Yes and no. Our biology hasn't changed since the middle ages, but we're so much better with sanitation, medicine, and communication that it's much less likely that we'd suffer the sort of population-decimating plagues of the past. Not impossible, but much less likely. In the 1300s, nobody even understood what caused disease or how it spread. They had a vague understanding that sickness could be contageous, but that was about it.
    - gotocake 8y ago
      A pandemic flu really wouldnt be something we could cope with. The combination of a long contagious latent period and high R0 would be devastating, and we need to bat perfectly every time to stop it. Sure, we can stop things like MERS and SARS and H1N1, but it just takes one slipping through and our knowledge won’t matter. Besides, we literally can stop things like measles, but people are too stupid and superstitious! It’s easy to look back on people who believed in the miasma theory of contagion, and laugh, but we haven’t come so far. We know our abuse of antibiotics is going to come home to roost, and we do very little to stop it. We know that cutting further into unspoiled habitats raises the risk of discovering something our immune systems have never encountered, but we do it. A black swan event like 1918 would play out just the same today as any other time.
- thelasthuman 8y ago
  "I like to bring up black death in discussions when people complain that our current time is "difficult"." IMO, we can do so much more with the technological advances we've made. We have used technology to tame nature, but are unable to tame the beast within ourselves. Having to compare our information age society with feudal societies wracked with the plague to prove how much better things are proves my point. Things should be way better, but they aren't outside of the small bubbles that are slowly popping/deflating in the first world.
- duxup 8y ago
  Today I would wonder what that would be after the fact. Whole towns and cities largely abandoned? Small county roads and highways left to rot? Massive tracts of housing empty. Would communities consolidate toward city centers, and sort of "turn off" whole suburbs? You really can't keep all the sewer and plumbing for all those places online if nobody is there. What would we do with all the extra material goods lying around in these houses? Then there are all the factories and chemicals and pollutants at those place that would need to be cleaned up and stored as they're not being actively maintained.
- ml_thoughts 8y ago
  The Decameron has a contemporaneous account of the plague in Florence that has always stuck with me in its first section, "The Plague of Florence" (you can see here, http://faculty.sgc.edu/rkelley/The%20Decameron.pdf http://faculty.sgc.edu/rkelley/The%20Decameron.pdf ). The whole section is worth reading but a fragment following descriptions of people that exhibited extreme temperance out of fear, or extreme partying out of nihilism is, "Of the adherents of these divers opinions not all died, neither did all escape; but rather there were, of each sort and in every place, many that sickened, and by those who retained their health were treated after the example which they themselves, while whole, had set, being everywhere left to languish in almost total neglect. Tedious were it to recount, how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbours was scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinsfolk held aloof, and never met, or but rarely; enough that this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women, that in the horror thereof brother was forsaken by brother, nephew by uncle, brother by sister, and oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate, as if they had been strangers. Wherefore the sick of both sexes, whose number could not be estimated, were left without resource but in the charity of friends (and few such there were), or the interest of servants, who were hardly to be had at high rates and on unseemly terms, and being, moreover, one and all men and women of gross understanding, and for the most part unused to such offices, concerned themselves no farther than to supply the immediate and expressed wants of the sick, and to watch them die; in which service they themselves not seldom perished with their gains." This passage always struck me as a particularly living and breathing account of what it might have been like to live through that time in human history.
- velobro 8y ago
  We don't live in that time period anymore. Our current Era is tough in its own ways, without people like you invalidating someone else's troubles. Done be a one-upper.
wsgeorge 8y ago
> in sub-Saharan Africa while excavating the site of Akrokrowa in Ghana. Article never says if this is modern Ghana or the Ghana Empire. Elsewhere it uses "Nigeria", and then goes back to talking about Akrokrowa being near the Mali Empire. I wish it will be a bit more specific. There seems to be a dearth of historical/archeological information about the site that is modern day Ghana (save legendary accounts from various tribes) before the Portuguese arrived at Elmina.

87 points by Thevet 8y ago

Plausible explanations, but the evidence is flimsy at best

lqet 8y ago

> Whatever calamity struck medieval sub-Saharan Africa, its impact was lasting. Akrokrowa was abandoned by about 1365, and Kirikongo was never the same. The settlement stayed small, the ceramics got much simpler, and the culture changed to more closely resemble that of the nearby Mali Empire. "It does seem to be a break," Dueppen says. I like to bring up black death in discussions when people complain that our current time is "difficult". In southern Europe in the middle of the 14th century, it is likely that around 80% of the population died over a few years. In Milan, town officials closed buildings with bricks as soon as they learned that anyone in that house was infected (with the people still inside, of course). Also, the social impact of this disease is often forgotten: I read somewhere that any interpersonal relationship between 2 or more people was effectively destroyed, because the other may already have been infected. Parents refused to take care of their own children, and people saw no reason to do long-term planning anymore (including farming). An epidemic like that basically decomposes the fabric of society, and therefore culture, very quickly, in a way only few other catastrophes are able to, and it may take centuries to recover from that. Or the society will never recover at all: > Historians have found previously unknown mentions of epidemics in Ethiopian texts from the 13th to the 15th centuries, including one that killed "such a large number of people that no one was left to bury the dead."

iguy 8y ago
The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast. The survivors (or more, their children) ended up significantly better-off, for a century or so, basically because there was more land per person, so you could just farm the better parts. Whether something like that happened in (say) Ethiopia too, will I guess be even harder to figure out than whether they had the plague at all.
- lqet 8y ago
  > The survivors (or more, their children) ended up significantly better-off, for a century or so, basically because there was more land per person. Indeed, this is something I always found extremely fascinating. The plague destroyed the very rigid social and economic structures of medieval Europe. Simply put, they had to take anyone as a goldsmith's apprentice, even some poor farmer's kid, because everyone else was dead. I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, and always held the secret opinion that European culture was basically born in the fire that was the black death epidemic. > The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast. Easy answer: the plague was much, much, much more devastating in Ethiopia than in Europe, leaving no one behind to recover from anything, or to tell the harrowing story.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    > I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, and always held the secret opinion that European culture was basically born in the fire that was the black death epidemic. I've heard that hypothesis from both popular and scholarly sources before. Pretty sure it's a broadly held theory.
    - iguy 8y ago
      I'm not sure I would go this far, there was a lot else that went on. But economically, for sure it was huge... we can actually trace several such swings in pre-industrial England, plotting population against per-capita income (or calories!) and it walks back & forth along the same curve a few times over the centuries.
    - chewz 8y ago
      > I am quite sure it is no coincidence that the Renaissance appeared 1-2 generations after the black death, The opposite - Black Death had delayed the Renaissance for circa 2-3 generations. It was already happening and then the plague came and the Renaisance have played out later in different times and with different people and ideas. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_renaissances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_renaissances
gotocake 8y ago
We live in a tiny bubble of time that could change at any moment. Our recent ancestors struggled with smallpox outbreaks, measles, and of course the horror that is polio. My mother knew a man who lived in an iron lung! We’re just part of one or two generations that has enjoyed both vaccines, and potent antibiotics, but were only ever a novel pathogen away from reliving the horrors of medieval plague towns. The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed millions of people, and given populations densities and air travel today, such an outbreak would kill far more. Society is no more resilient today if we’re being honest, but it’s more dependent on technology a relative few can understand or repair, and on food and water being delivered to our towns or homes. If the shit hits the fan, we’ll be in a truly unenviable position.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Yes and no. Our biology hasn't changed since the middle ages, but we're so much better with sanitation, medicine, and communication that it's much less likely that we'd suffer the sort of population-decimating plagues of the past. Not impossible, but much less likely. In the 1300s, nobody even understood what caused disease or how it spread. They had a vague understanding that sickness could be contageous, but that was about it.
  - gotocake 8y ago
    A pandemic flu really wouldnt be something we could cope with. The combination of a long contagious latent period and high R0 would be devastating, and we need to bat perfectly every time to stop it. Sure, we can stop things like MERS and SARS and H1N1, but it just takes one slipping through and our knowledge won’t matter. Besides, we literally can stop things like measles, but people are too stupid and superstitious! It’s easy to look back on people who believed in the miasma theory of contagion, and laugh, but we haven’t come so far. We know our abuse of antibiotics is going to come home to roost, and we do very little to stop it. We know that cutting further into unspoiled habitats raises the risk of discovering something our immune systems have never encountered, but we do it. A black swan event like 1918 would play out just the same today as any other time.
thelasthuman 8y ago
"I like to bring up black death in discussions when people complain that our current time is "difficult"." IMO, we can do so much more with the technological advances we've made. We have used technology to tame nature, but are unable to tame the beast within ourselves. Having to compare our information age society with feudal societies wracked with the plague to prove how much better things are proves my point. Things should be way better, but they aren't outside of the small bubbles that are slowly popping/deflating in the first world.
duxup 8y ago
Today I would wonder what that would be after the fact. Whole towns and cities largely abandoned? Small county roads and highways left to rot? Massive tracts of housing empty. Would communities consolidate toward city centers, and sort of "turn off" whole suburbs? You really can't keep all the sewer and plumbing for all those places online if nobody is there. What would we do with all the extra material goods lying around in these houses? Then there are all the factories and chemicals and pollutants at those place that would need to be cleaned up and stored as they're not being actively maintained.
ml_thoughts 8y ago
The Decameron has a contemporaneous account of the plague in Florence that has always stuck with me in its first section, "The Plague of Florence" (you can see here, http://faculty.sgc.edu/rkelley/The%20Decameron.pdf http://faculty.sgc.edu/rkelley/The%20Decameron.pdf ). The whole section is worth reading but a fragment following descriptions of people that exhibited extreme temperance out of fear, or extreme partying out of nihilism is, "Of the adherents of these divers opinions not all died, neither did all escape; but rather there were, of each sort and in every place, many that sickened, and by those who retained their health were treated after the example which they themselves, while whole, had set, being everywhere left to languish in almost total neglect. Tedious were it to recount, how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbours was scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinsfolk held aloof, and never met, or but rarely; enough that this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women, that in the horror thereof brother was forsaken by brother, nephew by uncle, brother by sister, and oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate, as if they had been strangers. Wherefore the sick of both sexes, whose number could not be estimated, were left without resource but in the charity of friends (and few such there were), or the interest of servants, who were hardly to be had at high rates and on unseemly terms, and being, moreover, one and all men and women of gross understanding, and for the most part unused to such offices, concerned themselves no farther than to supply the immediate and expressed wants of the sick, and to watch them die; in which service they themselves not seldom perished with their gains." This passage always struck me as a particularly living and breathing account of what it might have been like to live through that time in human history.
velobro 8y ago
We don't live in that time period anymore. Our current Era is tough in its own ways, without people like you invalidating someone else's troubles. Done be a one-upper.

wsgeorge 8y ago

> in sub-Saharan Africa while excavating the site of Akrokrowa in Ghana. Article never says if this is modern Ghana or the Ghana Empire. Elsewhere it uses "Nigeria", and then goes back to talking about Akrokrowa being near the Mali Empire. I wish it will be a bit more specific. There seems to be a dearth of historical/archeological information about the site that is modern day Ghana (save legendary accounts from various tribes) before the Portuguese arrived at Elmina.