Marine engineer Louis Ancelin de Gémozac was a decent artist and an efficient spy.¹ Crisscrossing the Atlantic from West Africa to La Martinique, and then back to the port at Rochefort (in south-western France) aboard the French man-of-war Le Tourbillon in early 1671, he spent a great deal of time in his quarters, drawing and writing. A few weeks earlier, he had taken advantage of his visits to the Dutch fortified trade posts on the African Gold Coast to sketch their layouts; he was now putting the finishing touches on an impressive series of confidential plans intended for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s all-powerful Secretary of State of the Navy.² De Gémozac probably kept a private journal of his voyage in which he documented his experiences, and which he later used to produce a short travel account published anonymously in 1674 (Chouin 2011). Like many other early modern European travellers to West Africa, he recorded gruesome details of the health hazards to which sailors were exposed in this part of the world. For instance, he mentioned a mysterious illness that affected some crewmen after the ship had left São Tomé, an island he described as being “the most unhealthy in the world” (Chouin 2011, 142). Some died within three weeks, he wrote, while it took others four months to recover from what he described as extreme fatigue. Because the men affected by this illness also bled profusely from the penis, he blamed the condition on an excessive “dissipation of spirit” that occurred during intercourse with the native island women, whom he considered randy and dangerous.

De Gémozac’s report fits into an entrenched western perception of Africa as a diseased continent and Africans as vectors of deadly diseases. In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Great Britain, this notion was epitomized by the widespread use of the phrase “the White Man’s Grave,” an expression made popular by traveller F. Harrison Rankin’s 1836 book The White Man’s Grave: A Visit to Sierra Leone, in 1834 (Curtin 1961; 1992; Skotnes-Brown 2019). This metaphor for tropical West Africa, however, contradicted synchronous colonial propaganda that sought to present Africa as a new “White Man’s Opportunity.” In the twenty-first century, after many decades of advances in tropical western medicine, the old scares have evolved but remain firmly embedded in global health discourses about Africa. Even though the idea of the “White Man’s Grave” has disappeared, Africa remains perceived as a reservoir of global bio-threats to western nations. The HIV/AIDS pandemic and the more recent 2013–16 West African Ebola virus epidemic provide ample evidence that the “backward” and “diseased continent” narrative endures, alongside the stigmatization and structural violence that accompanies it (Joffe 2011, 449–51; Jones 2011; Leach 2010; Wilkinson and Leach 2015). In the same vein, Western media that loudly predicted mayhem in Africa in the wake of the Covid-19 has been much less vocal since the continent eventually proved to be less severely impacted by the virus than many parts of the Western world.

We need to critically examine this long-term narrative about the deadly entwining of Africa and diseased environments. Detailed histories of various diseases and epidemiological patterns have taken into account both environmental and global factors, but most focus on relatively recent case studies (Echenberg 2011; Pépin 2021; Webel 2019). In contrast, there is limited published research on Africa’s disease landscapes before the nineteenth century, including those parts of the continent engaged in pre-modern Atlantic trade (Cagle 2018). In the face of a ghostly historiography and scattered sources, the task of writing a chapter on the history of diseased environments in pre-modern Africa is more than a challenge; it is an act of intellectual tightrope walking on a dotted line. I, therefore, address the topic by providing impressionistic, fragmented, and, sometimes, provocative answers to three primary questions.

First, was pre-modern tropical Africa as dangerous a diseased environment as is often suggested in the western scholarly literature? One way to respond to this question is to revisit European travelogues about the early modern Atlantic world. We need to probe them as historical sources and reflect critically on their contribution to the deeply rooted and enduring perception of tropical Africa as a metaphor of the world’s darkest unwholesomeness. From this emerges a second question: how did Africans themselves conceptualize their environment and its diseases before the nineteenth century? In other words, is the modern concept of diseased landscape useful in a pre-modern Africa-centred perspective? Finally, how might we historicise the intersections between human activity, diseases, and environments in Africa? To engage with these critical questions, I will investigate how pre-modern connections between the Old and New Worlds contributed both to the emergence of specific African diseased landscapes and their projection beyond the continent’s shores.