摘要：Martha Bokako was mourning her family’s deep loss, and recovering from a serious bout of ’flu in Pniel (Western Cape) in late 1918, and yet she recalled anticipating the life ahead of her – including her hope that her postponed wedding plans would resume when her fiancée, an ordained minister, had recovered from the most thoroughgoing and severe epidemic the region had ever faced. In the 3 months Martha Bokako refers to here, South Africa lost about 4% of the total estimated population; millions of loved ones were left in mourning and many children were left orphaned and unmoored. Her full account, with that of 127 of her fellow South Africans, has been collected by Professor Howard Phillips of the Department of History at the University of Cape Town in In a Time of Plague: Memories of the ‘Spanish ’Flu Epidemic of 1918 in South Africa. This unique, harrowing and deeply engaging collection, has been edited and brought to life with a lucid and crisp introduction, carefully annotated throughout, to bring the specific geographical, medical and social details of the hundreds of witnesses to this epidemic into our world a century later. The letters and accounts in this collection locate South Africa in a tri-continental frontier – a region deeply imbricated in global movements of people, goods, animals, ideas, ideologies, forms of exchange and extraction. With people and microbes came also their microscopic parasitic cousins – viruses. The Union of South Africa, established in 1910, was one of the newest political formations in the world and the meeting place for people of the sub-continent, from Europe, and, with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, with new arrivals and cargoes from Atlantic African ports, from east Africa and the Mediterranean, and from ports and towns along the Indian Ocean. This book traces the routes of the epidemic through the words and memories of witnesses and survivors in accounts gathered in the 1970s and 1980s and is contextualised with painstaking archival research.
