Natural Disasters? Droughts and Epidemics in Pre-colonial Sudanic Africa

Droughts and epidemics are recurrent phenomena in the history of Sudanic Africa. Only in the aftermath of the famines of 1973–74 and 1984–85 in the Sahel zone did historians begin to question their easy classification as ‘natural disasters’ and to look more closely at the interplay of climatic and societal stress factors in the causation process. Research into the history of disasters in pre-colonial Sudanic Africa has to face the problem of a distinctive lack of available source material. This article will address the problems surrounding the identification of droughts and epidemics, before getting to the question of how they turned into disasters, mostly in the form of famines. It argues that before the colonial period the regional food systems seem to have been better adapted to deal with climatic stress than with the specific forms of violence that were an intrinsic part of the fabric of Sudanic Africa since the political reorganisation of the sixteenth century. Thus, both vulnerability and resilience, but also the ways to explain disasters have to be understood in the context of the political, economic and social history of these African societies.