The History of Cholera in Ethiopia

CHOLERA was one of the major epidemic diseases of traditional Ethiopia and resulted, in times of the worst outbreaks, in a high rate of mortality as well as considerable social disorganization, the disease giving rise to a terror second only to the much- dreaded smallpox.'Unlike the latter disease, which onrginated within the country, cholera came to Ethiopia, as to other lands, from India and the East, Ethiopian outbreaks forming part of great international epidemics.Ethiopian evidence is valuable in helping to document at least one of the pre- nineteenth-century epidemics, records of which are in all countries hard to come by.3Though royal chronicles were produced in Ethiopia since at least the fourteenth century their references to epidemics are usually too brief and obscure to allow any identification of disease.In 1634, the second year of the reign of Emperor Fasiladas, two chronicles, however, tell of the outbreak of an epidemic which is referred to by the name offangal, the word subsequently used for cholera.'The epidemic was also mentioned by a Portuguese visitor, Diego de Matteos, who reported as of 1634-5 that his companions had learnt from a Turk that the disease was raging around the mountain of Lamalmo and had entered the province of Tigre.5 It would seem probable that this outbreak was none other than an Ethiopian extension of the epidemic reported in Java around 1629.6 The society's reaction to such early epidemics, be they of cholera or smallpox, is clearly stated by the seventeenth-century German historian, Job Ludolf, who says of the Ethiopians that 'if a Pestilence chance to break out, they leave their Houses and Villages, and retire with their Heards into the Mountains, putting all their Security in flying from the Contagion'.7This practice, as we shall see, was often followed in later times for which we have far more adequate documentation.Later evidence reveals that Ethiopia encountered at least five cholera epidemics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several outbreaks coming in more than one wave.Outbreaks are thus reported between 1831 and 1836, during which time the cholera was thought to have made itself manifest on two separate occasions; in 1856 and 1866-7, when it greatly discomforted the reforming Emperor Tewodros; during the great famine of 1889-1892 when it again seems to have struck twice; and, finally, in 1906 when the disease appears to have wrought relatively little damage. 1 R. Pankhurst, 'The history and traditional treatment of smallpox in Ethiopia', Med.