How the mosquito has played the greatest role in human history of any creature
Pépin, an Afro-French trafficker, must have heard her captives rattling their shackles as she shared canapés with her guests. If she looked down from her balcony, she must have seen them being pushed through a narrow opening—the “door of no return”—and loaded onto ships bound for the Americas.
Stand again on Gorée Island and look in a different direction. Look past the children cooling in the surf, and the masked shopkeepers waiting for the covid-deterred tourists to come back. Stare towards the African mainland. Today the view is of skyscrapers and container ships—Dakar, Senegal’s capital, is a thriving port. Back in 1805, when Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, looked across this same narrow strait, he would have seen a small settlement and a vast expanse of forest.
In the highly malarial parts of Africa, imperialists ruled indirectly, through local potentates, who were persuaded with threats and bribes to throw in their lot with the French or British empires. In non-malarial zones Europeans settled en masse, creating institutions, many of which last to this day, along with racial injustices that caused centuries of grievances. Malaria helps explain why modern South Africa, with 4.
In Britain, malaria may have ended a Protestant dictatorship. Oliver Cromwell, the man who had King Charles I beheaded, ruled as Lord Protector from 1653-1658. His puritanical decrees sucked the joy out of life as surely as mosquitoes suck blood. He closed theatres and banned make-up and Christmas decorations. He hated Catholics, which may be why he angrily refused an offer of “Jesuits’ powder” to cure his malaria. The fever killed him, and merriment was re-legalised.
Wartime demand spurred a race to invent a good substitute. German scientists got there first, with chloroquine. After the war, chloroquine was so widely used that parasites grew resistant to it. The race between science and evolution continues today.mosquito itself, by spraying its habitat with, an insecticide so effective that America’s Centres for Disease Control called it “the atomic bomb of the insect world”. Prolific spraying caused mosquito populations to crash.