Page 13 - Bulletin 23- 2020

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remark in 1998 by an 88-year old man who had lost his mother in 1918. “I still miss her”, he
told me sadly.

On some survivors the Spanish flu left an enduring physical and psychiatric mark too. In the
1920s numerous cases of depression, impaired heart and lung function, deafness and a

susceptibility to other diseases like encephalitis lethargica, nephritis and Parkinson’s disease
were attributed to a bout of flu back in 1918.

Nor were many individuals’ religious beliefs left unscathed by the dreadful experience of
Black October. Rampant death on such an enormous, undiscriminating scale tested their faith

mightily, and some found it wanting. For example, enough African adherents of traditional
religion were attracted to Christianity for some missionaries to speak in public of “the

compensating blessings accompanying the ravages of the recent influenza epidemic as seen in
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the awakened interest among the heathen, and a desire for the Word of God”. On the other
hand, some African Christians were so disappointed by the inability of mainline Christianity

to protect their families or to comfort them in their loss that (as elsewhere in Africa) they
turned their backs on the established churches and, spurred by divine visions, founded their

own independent Zionist churches.

Some very devout Christians, both white and black, went even further. Interpreting the

epidemic as a signal that the Millennium was in the offing, they began to preach this message
and the urgent need to prepare for the Second Coming. In the environment of war, revolution,

social angst and vulnerability prevailing in 1918, they attracted not a few followers, even if
only temporarily.

This sense of personal vulnerability which Black October so intensified also underlay record
sales of life insurance in the following months, particularly as it was widely forecast that

another flu wave was imminent, a possibility that the country’s insurance companies did
everything to highlight in their post-epidemic advertising campaigns. Thus, new life cover

sold in 1919 was estimated as worth £20 million, easily a South African record in percentage
terms. Insensitively, the chairman of one big insurance firm commented in his annual report,

“It is, in our opinion, all to the good that the public should have been impressed by the lesson

of this severe experience to the extent of making provision as never before against the risks of