Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

by Laura Spinney

  She preached outdoors, wearing a white robe and headdress and armed with an umnqayi, a black ceremonial stick carried by senior married women. To the Xhosa, white signified healing and transformation; to Christians, purity. Nontetha’s message appealed to both too, combining as it did both biblical and Xhosa references. The knobwood tree, for example, is known among Xhosa for containing a substance that, when rubbed on a breastfeeding woman’s nipples, induces her baby to suckle. In her dream Nontetha had seen the Bible hanging from it, the implication being that people who had turned away from God must be induced to return to him. She herself had always mixed traditional and western clothes, and though she belonged to no church, all her children had been baptised Methodists, and she had great respect for missionary education.

  Nontetha wasn’t the only prophet to emerge at that time, and though she had no links with political organisations, many of the others did. They were responding to deep insecurities in the populations they spoke to, and to a general yearning for a better world. The years 1917 to 1920 saw a series of strikes on the Rand, as miners were drawn into the trades union movement and a nascent organisation called the African National Congress (ANC). A Zulu woman named Josephina started prophesying during the pandemic, and by 1923, she was sharing a platform with the ANC on the Rand, and predicting plagues of locusts with human heads and scorpion tails.

  Afrikaners had their own insecurities. Accounting for more than half the country’s white population, they resented the domination by an English-speaking minority of industry, the army, the arts and most other areas of South African life. Memories still rankled of the Anglo-Boer war at the turn of the century, in which 26,000 Afrikaners had died, and of another failed rebellion against the British in 1914. In 1916, an Afrikaner woman named Johanna Brandt had predicted a great plague that would usher in a new and better society. Two years later, her prophecy came true. But Afrikaner losses to the flu, though tiny compared to those sustained by the black population, only sharpened their sense that the volk was endangered.

  The authorities became aware of Nontetha’s activities in 1922. Many of her messages–warnings against the dangers of witchcraft and alcohol, for example–would have appealed to them, had they been inclined to listen. But by then they were extremely wary of new religious movements, or political movements masquerading as religious ones, as they tended to see them. A few years earlier at Bulhoek, less than 200 kilometres from Khulile, thousands of followers of a Christian movement called the Israelites had gathered to await the end of the world. When it didn’t happen as their prophet had predicted, they stayed on anyway. More or less diplomatic attempts to disperse them failed, the police resorted to violence and more than 160 Israelites died in the ensuing massacre. Those in authority viewed Nontetha through the lens of Bulhoek. They saw her as subversive and anti-white–grounds enough to arrest her. Declaring her unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity, they committed her to a psychiatric hospital in Fort Beaufort, eighty kilometres from Khulile.

  She was diagnosed with dementia praecox and released soon after her hospitalisation on condition that she refrain from preaching. Local magistrates called on Xhosa elders to enforce the prohibition, but they were unable to–partly because her female disciples defied them. Nontetha preached and her followers came to hear her. She was arrested again and readmitted to Fort Beaufort, but this didn’t discourage her followers who, much to the irritation of the hospital administration, kept up a near constant presence there. So in 1924, Nontetha was moved to the notorious Weskoppies lunatic asylum in Pretoria, almost 1,000 kilometres from her home. There she witnessed at first hand the dark underbelly of the migrant labour system, because Weskoppies was a sort of holding camp for those who had gone to make their fortunes in the mines, and whose minds had been broken by them.

  Nontetha found herself in an impossible situation. Each time she insisted that she had been inspired by God, her doctors took it as confirmation of their diagnosis and a reason not to discharge her. Her followers did not forget her, however, nor would they accept that she was mad. In 1927, a group of them walked for two months to reach Pretoria, and they were allowed to see her–though their requests for her release were rejected. Later ‘pilgrimages of grace’ were turned back, however, and in 1935 Nontetha died of cancer, cut off from her community and probably in pain, never having left the hospital. She was buried in an unmarked grave, the authorities having refused to hand her remains over to her devotees.

  In 1948, the right-wing National Party came to power and imposed apartheid on the country (it also sought to promote Afrikaner culture and to improve Afrikaner health). The ANC was banned in 1960, and the ban remained in place until 1990. In post-apartheid South Africa, an American historian named Robert Edgar was able to pursue enquiries that had previously been blocked, to locate Nontetha Nkwenkwe’s remains. He tracked her to a pauper’s grave in Pretoria, which she shared with an unnamed man. The man had been buried in a coffin–albeit a rough box–while she had no such covering, so as his coffin had disintegrated, their bones had mingled. At her exhumation, therefore, the remains of two probable strangers had to be disentangled, before hers could be returned to Khulile and reburied in the presence of her family and followers. Several thousand people attended her funeral on 25 October 1998, on the eightieth anniversary of ‘Black October’.

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  Alternate histories

  ‘Painful readjustment, demoralization, lawlessness: such are the familiar symptoms of a society recovering from the shock of the plague.’1 When the historian Philip Ziegler wrote those words, he was describing the fallout from the Black Death, but they also apply to the Spanish flu. One in three people on earth had fallen ill. One in ten of those–perhaps as many as one in five–had died. If humanity had shown resilience, that was only evident from afar–at the population level. As soon as you came closer, as soon as you could make out individuals, it was impossible not to be struck by the price people paid for that recovery.

  Families were forced to recompose themselves. From a distance of a hundred years, everything seems to have happened as it should have, since many of us are alive today because of that enforced game of musical chairs. We trace ourselves in a straight line back to those of our ancestors who survived. But they, looking forward, might have imagined other futures, other families. Renovating his home in 1982, Anders Hallberg, a farmer living near Sundsvall, Sweden, found a packet of letters bricked up inside a wall. The house had been inhabited by his family for generations. When he opened the packet, he realised they were love letters exchanged by his grandfather, Nils, and Nils’s first wife, Clara. She was known as ‘the beautiful Clara’ in the village, and Nils had loved to play the piano for her. In one letter, dated 17 January 1918, Clara wrote: ‘My own beloved Nils… I’m longing to hug you and tell you how much I’ve missed you. My train arrives at five o’clock on Saturday. I’m sending you a thousand warm greetings and kisses. Your Clara. PS I spoke to Engla today, she sends her regards.’2 Nils and Clara were married in August 1918, but the following April Clara died of the Spanish flu. Nils remarried a few years later–Engla–and in 1924 Engla gave birth to a son, Anders’ father. But Nils never touched his piano again, and clearly, he wasn’t able to destroy the letters.

  ‘Fela would have been the prettiest,’ wrote Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz in The Maids of Wilko, a story that the Polish director Andrzej Wajda made into a film in 1979, in which Fela’s death from Spanish flu haunts her five surviving sisters. For decades after, people had a chronic sense of what might have been–of ‘alternate histories’. So many had died, and so often death had appeared to strike at random. What if it had struck differently? It was a preoccupation of the survivors, perhaps even a kind of survivor’s guilt. The elderly parents who had lost grown-up children bore it in silence, as was expected of them, and so Schiele’s painting The Family is celebrated, while we know nothing about the grief of his mother, Marie, who outlived him by seventeen years.

  In this global resh
uffle, some fell through the cracks: long-term invalids, including melancholics, who could no longer work, and who were as misunderstood as (though probably more numerous than) war veterans suffering from the ‘Flanders blues’; widows who had no hope of finding another husband; orphans nobody wanted. Because the flu had targeted those aged twenty to forty, many dependants found themselves deprived of their breadwinners. Some were caught in a very fragile, very threadbare safety net. Among them were the lucky beneficiaries of life insurance policies: the US life insurance industry paid out nearly $100 million in claims after the pandemic–the equivalent of $20 billion today. Others had been named in wills. Upon the death from flu of one German immigrant to America, for example, his widow and son received a sum of money. They invested it in property, and today the immigrant’s grandson is a property magnate purportedly worth billions. His name is Donald Trump. Most had a less rosy future to look forward to, however. One Swedish study found that for each flu death, four people moved into the poorhouse.3 A person who was accepted into a public poorhouse in Sweden at that time received food, clothing, medical care and their funeral costs, but was declared legally incompetent.

  Such studies are rare. Most of the information that survives about these casualties is anecdotal–and even then, their voices are faint. The plight of the orphans is especially troubling. Though there are no firm data on them, and although fewer children were born during the war than in peacetime, the fact that the flu targeted those in the prime of life–including young parents–suggests that there may have been a very large number of them. Adoption was not organised as it is now, and many would have been absorbed by the extended family or made wards of state. Ante Franicevic was born in a small village on the Neretva River in Croatia, one of four young siblings who lost both their parents and their paternal grandmother to flu within a matter of days. They were brought up by a series of uncaring relatives, until Ante, coming of age, decided with a friend to leave Croatia and make a new life for himself in Africa. They arrived in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) soon after the Anglo American mining company had moved in to develop mines along the Copperbelt. The area where they found themselves was practically uninhabited, and to begin with they camped in snake-infested jungle, but their fortunes rose with the company’s–particularly as demand for copper grew in the run-up to the Second World War. Ante worked for Anglo American for twenty-five years, married, raised a family and retired, comfortably off, to South Africa.

  When there was no one to take them in, the orphans’ prospects were bleak indeed. In the 1970s, an elderly German woman, Pauline Hammer, wrote to tell Richard Collier that she had lost both her parents to flu in 1919. Her eighteen-year-old sister had tried to keep the family together–eight-year-old Pauline, two other siblings and a foster brother–‘but after nine months or so we had to break it up’. She didn’t explain what happened to them, only that losing her parents had cast a shadow over her life. Were the consciences of some governments pricked? It is possible, though difficult to prove, that the existence of flu orphans contributed to France’s legalisation of the adoption of minors in 1923, and to Britain’s legalisation of adoption three years later, after a century of fruitless campaigning. Those laws benefited millions of children, but they came too late to help many of the orphans of the Spanish flu.

  AIDS has created millions of orphans, Ebola thousands. Welfare organisations report that these orphans are more likely to drop out of school, to be malnourished, to live on the streets, to be exploited by adults, and to be drawn into prostitution and crime. That is the situation today, and in 1918 it was certainly no better. An estimated 500,000 children were orphaned in South Africa alone, during Black October. The South African government, along with the police, the post office, the railways and certain religious institutions, launched an ambitious programme of orphanage building, but it catered mainly to the white minority. Very little was done for the hundreds of thousands of black or coloured orphans who, if they weren’t taken in, often ended up as indentured labourers–domestic servants or farmhands–or vagrants.

  In 1919, indicting one coloured ‘flu remnant’ for theft, a Cape Town prosecutor painted a vivid portrait of the accused: ‘He has no home, and does not know what has become of his parents. He does not know his age or his proper name, and has no surname, so far as he knows. He and others sleep under the pier, in the old boxes, and in railway compartments, first-class preferred, when the opportunity offers. He looks half starved and eats garbage, or whatever he can get hold of, and says he has never been to school.’ He was ‘one of dozens of boys his age who roam the city and sleep anywhere’. The presiding magistrate found the boy guilty and sent him to a reformatory for four years.

  Thus troublesome elements were brushed aside, in societies’ march to recovery. New babies were born–a record number of them, in the 1920s–and populations replenished themselves. Some countries, at least, saw an economic rebound too. In America, industrial output and business activity took a serious hit in 1918 (with the exception of businesses specialising in healthcare products), due to the flu, but when economists Elizabeth Brainerd and Mark Siegler looked at state-by-state flu mortality rates and compared them to estimates of personal income for the following decade, they found a striking correlation: the higher the death rate, the higher the growth in per capita income throughout the 1920s. This was not new wealth, but it was an indication of the capacity of a society to bounce back after a violent shock.4

  Not all communities recovered. The island nation of Vanuatu is today home to over 130 local languages that are spoken in addition to English, French and the national language Bislama, making it the most linguistically dense country in the world (each local language has between 1,000 and 2,000 speakers, on average). Parts of the Vanuatu archipelago experienced 90 per cent mortality during the Spanish flu, and that epidemic–along with others of smallpox and leprosy that swept over the islands in the early 1900s–pushed around twenty local languages to extinction. The population is still recovering from that catastrophic collapse, but those twenty languages–and the cultures associated with them–are gone forever.5

  Some have blamed the social ills that afflict many small-scale societies today on epidemics including the Spanish flu (though contact with outsiders changed their lives in many more ways besides the introduction of new diseases). When Johan Hultin returned to Brevig Mission in 1997, to reopen the mass grave where the village’s flu victims had been buried, he found it a sad, hopeless place–quite unlike the one he had visited in 1951. Back then, local people had still practised whaling and hunting and were self-sufficient; now they were dependent on welfare handouts.6 Of course, whaling and hunting are hazardous pursuits, and Hultin’s impression may have been wrong–the canny villagers may have chosen to take whatever money the government was offering in order to devote their time and energies to less dangerous but nevertheless fulfilling activities. The findings of a report by the Alaska Natives Commission suggest otherwise, however. Published three years earlier, it described Alaskans as a ‘culturally and spiritually crippled people’ who had become dependent on others to feed, educate and guide them.7

  The commission placed some of the blame on epidemics that had caused the deaths of shamans and elders–the repositories of knowledge and tradition in native Alaskan cultures–while at the same time creating many orphans. In the early twentieth century, it was common practice to remove such orphans from their communities and place them in centralised institutions. The idea was that this would encourage them to assimilate into a larger, more diverse community and broaden their horizons. Instead, the report claimed, they experienced ‘long-term cultural loss’. These problems, aggravated by competition with outsiders for natural resources and for work in local industries, had culminated in a situation where ‘the social and psychological condition of Native people has varied inversely with the growth of government programmes intended to help them’. The more money the government pumped in, in other words, the more rates of alcoholism
, crime and suicide soared in Alaska.

  One of those who contributed to the 1994 report was Yupik elder Harold Napoleon. Two years after it appeared, while serving time at the Fairbanks Correctional Center for the drunken killing of his infant son, he wrote an essay entitled Yuuyaraq. Literally ‘the way of being a human being’, Yuuyaraq is the name of the world the Yupik traditionally inhabited–a world busy with animal and human spirits. Napoleon’s essay was a lament for that lost world and an attempt to understand what had happened to his people. His thesis, based on his own experiences and those of his fellow inmates, was that the epidemics that had battered them for nearly two centuries had destroyed their culture and left them traumatised–so traumatised that they could not even talk about it. ‘To this day nallunguaq remains a way of dealing with problems or unpleasant occurrences in Yupik life,’ he wrote. ‘Young people are advised by elders to nallunguarluku, “to pretend it didn’t happen”. They had a lot to pretend not to know. After all, it was not only that their loved ones had died, they also had seen their world collapse.’8

  18

  Anti-science, science

  In 1901, Gustav Klimt shocked Viennese society when he unveiled Medicine, one of a series of works he had been commissioned to paint to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. The theme of the series was the triumph of light over darkness, but Klimt’s painting placed a skeletal Death in the middle of a cascade of naked bodies–the river of life. His meaning was clear: when it came to the healing arts, darkness continued to triumph over light. The Ministry of Education refused to fix Medicine to the ceiling, and Klimt resigned the commission, saying that he wanted to keep the work for himself. Fearing that he intended to exhibit it abroad, the ministry claimed it was state property and sent agents to seize it. Klimt threatened them with a shotgun and they came away empty-handed.1