In the late 19th century, East and Central Africa were, in fact, heavily populated (by today's measures), and controlled by several large and thriving cattle-herding civilizations. These societies had elaborate and rich cultures, well-mounted armies and navies, and were engaged in robust trade over much of the sub-Saharan region.

In 1887, however, an unsuccessful Italian invasion of Eritrea brought with it rinderpest, a deadly viral infection specific to cattle. The virus had originated in central Asia, from which it had periodically swept through Europe in preceding centuries. By the 1880s, most European cattle herds had developed limited immunity to rinderpest, and serious outbreaks of it were relatively rare.

But rinderpest was unknown south of the Sahara before the Italians brought it to the continent, and no African cattle had resistance to it. Within 20 years, the virus had spread from the Horn of Africa to the tip of southern Africa, killing perhaps 90 per cent of cattle in its wake. Economic and political chaos, war, mass starvation, and disease quickly followed, resulting in the deaths of as many as two-thirds of the human population.

The once-florishing pastoralist kingdoms were destroyed by the pandemic. Most never recovered; few were able to offer more than token resistance to the European colonial forces which were to enter the region in the next decade. "Rinderpest served up the continent on a plate for Europe's 'scramble for Africa,'" Pearce writes.

He observes that conservation movements of the early 20th century which sought to "preserve" Africa's natural spaces by enclosing the depopulated savannahs within national parks (where animals might live "free" of human influence) were, in fact, based on misunderstandings of the savannah ecology, and the important role that cattle-herding had played in it for thousands of years before the pandemic. In this regard, Pearce concludes, "wild" Africa (monumentalized, for example, in the Serengeti and Masai Mara national parks) was an "invention" of European and European-influenced naturalists. They failed to comprehend -- or refused to recognize -- that a specific technological and political intervention had produced the very absence of human practice which appeared to them the evidence of a "natural" state.

The full citation for this article is:
Pearce, Fred. "Inventing Africa." New Scientist 167.2251 (2000): 30-33.

A point not often considered with regard to the development of the continent and consequences of and susceptability to colonization