The Histories of HIVs by Schneider William H.;

Author:Schneider, William H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.1. Spatial and chronological dynamics of HIV-1 group M spread. Source: Faria et al. 2014.

To understand the role that changing conditions in Kinshasa may have played in the emergence of HIV-1, it helps to begin with a discussion of its geographic location. Kinshasa, like most cities, owes everything to its location. This is where the Congo River, Africa’s most powerful and the world’s deepest river, widens into Malebo Pool, its last navigable expanse, which covers nearly three hundred square miles, including Mbamu Island, fourteen miles long in the middle of Malebo Pool and facing both Kinshasa and its mirror city, Brazzaville. Flowing slowly around the island, the river suddenly changes course downstream and rushes toward the sea in a succession of falls and rapids. Before colonization, any travel from that point to the coast had to be managed by human porters, since pack animals in this tropical milieu were susceptible to trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness).

Because of its central location on Malebo Pool, and being the last population center along the Congo River before it ceases to be navigable, Kinshasa served very early on as a commercial hub linking the rain forest to the coast and as a linchpin in the incorporation of the fringes of the Congo basin into a wider, regional network. The presence of this chokepoint forced traders coming from the upper Congo area in their canoes to unload their goods, come ashore, and trade. It also made the Malebo Pool region an important demographic center that has been estimated to support at least fifty thousand people on the eve of European colonization (Saint-Moulin 1976). As a result, explanations of the emergence of HIV-1M based on a new colonial population center in Kinshasa are incorrect. Long before 1900 (when Belgian colonization started in earnest), Tio fishermen and Bahumbu agriculturists shared the area and set up several settlements on both sides of Malebo Pool. Ntamo, Ndolo, Lema, and Nshasa (which gave its name to the city) were among at least sixty villages and trading centers that dotted the lower banks of Malebo Pool and attracted Bobangi ivory carvers from the forested north and Bazombo and Bakongo traders who came as far as the Loango coast to trade salt, cloth, European secondhand clothes, pottery, glassware, copper, guns, and gunpowder in exchange for ivory and slaves (Guiral 1889; Stanley 1879; Vansina 1990). Many fishing villages along the Congo River became trading centers, as people of the central Congo basin sought to “benefit indirectly from international trade by using it to promote regional trade” (Harms 1981). The magnitude of trade carried out in Malebo Pool was such that it prompted the first European travelers and scholars to characterize it as “the Great Congo Commerce” (Guiral 1889; Vansina 1973). Thus, the geography and population settlements of Kinshasa and its surrounding area long were a potential “epicenter” for the emergence, adaptation, and propagation of an emerging virus such as HIV-1, thanks to its central location, the bustling activity it witnessed, and its role as a major economic hub and incubator for change.

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