Description

Although it's been widely documented in scientific writing, few works of literary fiction deal with the sleeping sickness epidemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Africans at the turn of the century. One notable exception is Charles Beadle's A Whiteman's Burden, published in 1912, when trypanosomiasis was still claiming so many lives in Uganda and the Congo: sites of his numerous expeditions. Beadle traveled through the most infected areas in the early 1900s - at the very peak of the catastrophe - when Uganda lost a quarter of a million inhabitants and the number of infected Congolese had reached several hundred thousand. Thus, his presence in Africa between 1898 and 1910 lends us a rare personal insight into this larger collective crisis. With its abundant depictions of absurdity, alienation, and isolation as the characters confront the dreadful vicissitudes of life and the indifference of the glittering cosmos swirling above the vast African firmament, we're left to wonder: Is A Whiteman's Burden one of Europe's first existential novels?