The Mosquito Read online

  If we pick up the trail of our Bantu yam farmers, we can see the mosquito’s unshakable manipulation of history across millennia. We last left our Bantu friends around 3,000 years ago, when, with the advantage of their sickle cell and iron weapons, they drove the malaria-badgered Khoisan, Mande, and San peoples to the coastal fringes of southern Africa. “The much heavier consequence,” contends anthropologist and acclaimed author Jared Diamond, “was that the Dutch settlers in 1652 had to contend only with a sparse population of Khoisan herders, not with a dense population of steel-equipped Bantu farmers.” During the European colonization of southern Africa, beginning with the Dutch, who were quickly chased by the British, these African ethnic arrangements created by the mosquito thousands of years earlier would shape and fashion apartheid oppression and the modern nations of South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.

  When Dutch Afrikaners arrived at the Cape in 1652 alongside the Dutch East India Company, they met a small, fragmented Khoisan population that was easily defeated by military conquest and European disease. Europe secured a beachhead on the Cape, and Afrikaner treks through southern Africa gained traction. As the Afrikaners, and eventually the British, spread north and east from the Cape Colony, they ran into denser Bantu populations, such as the Xhosa and Zulu, who had fashioned their societies into mighty military-agricultural packages complete with steel weapons. It took the Dutch and British nine wars spanning 175 years to finally conquer the Xhosa in 1879. In bare, tactical military topographical terms, this was a Dutch/British rate of advance of less than one mile per year.

  A relatively bloodless coup backed by the majority of the Zulu population had allowed Shaka to seize the throne in 1816. He united or incorporated neighboring tribes through merciless military forays and cunning diplomacy and instigated comprehensive cultural, political, and military reforms. Armed by Shaka’s sweeping social and military-industrial revolution, the Zulu fiercely resisted British incursion until their final defeat, also in 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War.

  British malaria rates during the Anglo-Zulu War, spanning January to July 1879, uncover an alternate plotline. From a military strength of 12,615 British troops, during this seven-month period, 9,510 received medical treatment for disease, including 4,311 (45%) for malaria. While the mosquito’s deliverance of malaria was still a mystery to medicine, during the Anglo-Zulu War, the British were fortified with the recently developed germ theory of disease and, more importantly, by stockpiles of the malaria suppressant quinine. I hazard to guess that had the Dutch (and British) met the Zulu and Xhosa instead of the Khoisan peoples at the onset of colonialism on the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century (without the aid of quinine), it would have been an ugly encounter for the European trespassers. “How could whites have succeeded in establishing themselves at the Cape at all, if those first few arriving Dutch ships had faced such fierce resistance?” questions Diamond. “Thus, the problems of modern South Africa stem at least in part from a geographic accident . . . Africa’s past has stamped itself deeply on Africa’s present.” This long historical arc, including apartheid and its enduring legacy, whether by accident or design, was originally fabricated by the mosquito through malaria and the genetic response of sickle cell cultivated by Bantu agricultural expansion.

  In this instance her penetration of history’s layers pushed even deeper. These mosquito-engineered events in Africa, embracing the emergence of Sickle Cell Eve, found their way into the history logs of the Americas through the African slave trade and pierced the players of the modern NFL, including Ryan Clark. She has tormented and twisted humanity and our history across time. If I didn’t know better, I would say she is satisfying her sadistic and narcissistic impulses at our expense.

  Two and a half centuries after Dr. Sushruta exposed the deadly mosquitoes of the Indus River Valley, for instance, a young Macedonian warrior-king would feel the wrath of their bite. These mosquitoes would challenge his drive for global supremacy, quench his insatiable thirst for power, and shatter his dreams of conquest.

  CHAPTER 3

  General Anopheles: From Athens to Alexander

  The Athenian philosopher Plato declared that “ideas are the source of all things.” The ideas, observations, and writings of Plato and his pioneering academic contemporaries of “Golden Age” Greece, which included Socrates, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Herodotus, among a legendary list of others, are truly the source of all things as they cemented the eternal and immortal foundation of Western culture and modern academia. Their names are permanently emblazoned on the pages of humanity. Adhering to “the Athenian gadfly” Socrates’s use of questioning to elicit more questions and eventually answers, known today as the Socratic Method, how did this come to pass?* How did the ideas from a handful of trailblazing Greeks, predominantly Athenians, from such a small space and time within the larger historical realm, come to dominate Western, if not global, civilization and thought? Our worldview 2,500 years later is still governed by their ideas, their concepts; and their groundbreaking works are a staple on bookshelves across the globe and still taught and dissected in the classrooms and laboratories of higher education. Aristotle gave us the answer when he resolved, “The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.”

  Socrates tutored Plato, who founded the Academy in Athens, the first true institution of higher learning. Plato is considered the most pivotal figure in the development of Western philosophy and science. His most famous student, Aristotle, who studied under his mentor for twenty years, left his mark on every modern academic field from zoology and biology, including the study of insects, to physics, music, and theater, to political science and the collective and individual psychoanalysis of human beings. Aristotle coupled detailed investigation and the scientific method to biological reasoning, empiricism, and the order of the natural world. In plain terms, there is a reason why Plato, along with his master, Socrates, and his apprentice, Aristotle, among other Golden Age Greeks, is still so widely regarded, studied, and referenced today.

  The torch of progress was passed from Socrates through the hands of Plato to Aristotle and eventually found its way from Aristotle into the ambitious grip of a young prince in the northern wilds of Macedon. In time, he would embolden and disseminate Greek culture, books, and ideas across the known world, where they would be warehoused in magnificent libraries and be enriched by the minds, literature, and innovations of subsequent scholars. Plato’s observation that “books give a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything” applies directly to his own time-tested publications, such as The Republic, and also to the vast collection of writings from his generation of Greek peers, including his pupil Aristotle.

  Shortly after the death of Plato, Aristotle left Athens. He had been petitioned to tutor the thirteen-year-old son and heir of King Philip II of Macedon. Prior to summoning Aristotle to the Macedonian court, Philip had recognized his child’s innate intellect, curiosity, and courage. When the prince was ten years old, a frustrated trader had abandoned a massive feral horse to roam the streets of the capital city. The muscular, raven-black stallion marked by a menacing white star on its brow and one penetratingly piercing blue eye, refused to be mounted, and chased off any attempt to be corralled. Originally interested in purchasing the magnificent creature, Philip quickly rescinded his offer after witnessing the ferocity of the wild animal. The one-eyed king had no use for an unruly, insubordinate steed. This hostile horse quickly drew a swelling audience of curious, riveted onlookers. The young prince, surveying the unfolding, stampeding spectacle, pleaded with his father to purchase the horse. Much to his son’s disappointment, Philip could not be swayed.

  Refusing to take no for an answer, the youthful heir to the throne of Macedon shrugged off his fluttering, wind-whipped cloak and silently crept toward the now hysterical and panic-stricken horse. As he approached the startled animal, the pluc
ky prince quieted the raucous crowd. Sensing that the horse was afraid of its own shadow, he stunned the now silent spectators as he clutched the dangling reins and turned the horse toward the sun to shroud its silhouette. He had tamed the savage beast. “O my son,” a proud and beaming Philip purportedly decreed, “look thee out a kingdom equal to and worthy of thyself, for Macedon is too little for thee.” Eventually, the warhorse and loyal companion, which the prince named Bucephalus (ox-head), would carry his master across the known and unknown worlds as far as India, the eastern limit of his vast empire and one of the largest kingdoms in history.

  From the smoldering cinders of the mosquito-ravaged Greco-Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, a new power arose, and the young horse-whispering prodigy would lead it beyond the summits of supremacy, prestige, and legend, filling the power vacuum left by the waning Greek city-states. He would go on to become a god on earth and one of the greatest leaders in the history of humankind, with the titles Hegemon of the Hellenic League, Shah of Persia, Pharaoh of Egypt, Lord of Asia, and Basileus of Macedon. To history, he is known simply as Alexander the Great.

  Regardless of the futile academic squabbling over motivation and personality, there can be no questioning the pure, raw genius that was Alexander. It is also worth remembering just how young he was, and the relatively small size of his army, when he challenged Persian emperor Darius III for imperial command and carved out one of the largest domains in history.

  There are few instances in our past when the spheres of civilization line up so perfectly to foster an environment in which one individual can single-handedly leave such a deep and indelible mark on humankind. This environment was fashioned by the events of the Greco-Persian and Peloponnesian Wars preceding Alexander’s meteoric rise to conquering celebrity. These conflicts, pitted with mosquito-borne disease, left the weary war-torn world in financial decay and political disarray. What was left of the door to world domination was propped ajar by rubble and ruins, affording the entrance of Alexander onto the world stage. “An unexamined life,” professed Plato, “is not worth living.” To examine the life and legacy of Alexander, we must first take a step back into the mosquito-stalked affairs that created the atmosphere for his enduring imprint on the modern world. While Macedon was still a rugged mountainous tribal backwater, the continuing events of Western civilization were collected around Mesopotamia and Egypt.

  Until 1200 BCE, a political and economic equilibrium and balance of power existed across the greater Middle East. Economic concentration and specialization of the various Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hittite micro-empires fostered trade, peace, and general prosperity. This was short-lived. Within fifty years, each of these empires, as well as Egypt, was brought to its knees by invasions from displaced mercenary plunderers, sundry Mediterranean islanders immortalized by their mythological Trojan Horse. These “Sea People,” as they are collectively known, severed trade routes and ravaged crops and towns amid dire drought, famine, and a series of earthquakes and tsunamis, thrusting the region into the “Ancient Dark Ages.” This complete cultural, political, and economic collapse was aided by the mosquito’s circulation of a resolute malaria epidemic. On a Cypriot clay tablet, the cause was clearly etched: “the Hand of Nergal [the Babylonian mosquito devil] is now in my country; he has slain all the men of my country.” Thanks in part to the mosquito, what remained of these inaugural human agricultural civilizations was charred relics and crumbling ruins, collapsing into a vacant power vacuum.

  Out of these ashes arose two rival powers—Greece and Persia. These vying ancient superpowers laid the foundations for modern literature and the arts, engineering, politics and democratic governance, the art of war, philosophy, medicine, and all facets of Western civilization. In the wake of the wreckage left by the marauding Sea Peoples, while the majority of the Middle East drowned in the darkness of a cultural and developmental abyss, a new power quietly arose from the shadows in the East. Cyrus the Great’s Persian Empire, the largest yet seen, embraced all the former imperial states of the Middle East, and extended into central Asia, the southern Caucasus, and the Ionian-Greek settler states of western Turkey.

  Cyrus had founded the Persian Empire in 550 BCE through skilled diplomacy, benevolent intimidation, periodic military forays, and, above all else, a human rights policy the United Nations would applaud.* Across his burgeoning and flourishing empire, Cyrus promoted cultural, technological, and religious reciprocation and exchange, and nurtured artistic, engineering, and scientific innovation. The expansion of Persian power under Cyrus and his heirs, Darius I and Xerxes, who stretched his empire to include Egypt, the Sudan, and eastern Libya, led to a legendary showdown with another young power: Greece. In 440 BCE, Greek writer Herodotus, considered the “father of history,” wrote that Cyrus brought together “every nation without exception.” The exception, however, was Greece itself.

  At this point, the singular “Greece” we commonly imagine did not exist. It was an assemblage of competing and warring city-states, with the coalitions of Sparta and Athens the two top contenders for military and economic supremacy. In fact, the original Olympic Games, initiated in Greece in 776 BCE, were a peace offering made by mimicking war in the form of battlefield athletics and soldierly skills, such as wrestling, boxing, javelin, discus, running, equestrian, and pankration, meaning “all of power and might” (an early form of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, the only rules being no biting or eye gouging). Although the Olympics Games were intended to promote peace, the mutually hostile and sparring Greek city-states were drawn into a life-or-death struggle against the Persians, instigated by their Greek Ionian brethren who revolted against Persian rule.

  Supported by the democratic city-state of Athens, in 499 BCE, the Ionian Greeks mutinied against the regime of Persia’s emperor Darius I, who ruled over 50 million people, almost half the global population. Darius quickly subdued the rebellion but vowed to punish Athens for its insolence. In addition to the punitive benefits of retaliation, the conquest of Greece would consolidate Persian power in the region and guarantee complete control of Mediterranean commerce. Seven years later, Darius’s full-scale invasion of Greece, the last sovereign vestige in the known Western world, ignited the Greco-Persian Wars.

  The Persian army crossed the Dardanelles Straits from Asia into Europe, and marched on Thrace and Macedonia, exacting the fidelity of local populations en route. Continuing south toward Athens, the avenging campaign of Darius quickly descended into disaster. Nearing the approaches to the city, the Persian naval fleet was destroyed by a violent storm, while Persian land forces retreated after being shredded by what historians hypothesize to be a lethal combination of dysentery, typhoid, and malaria.

  Two years later, in 490 BCE, Darius unleashed a second campaign, circumventing the arduous northern overland route by launching an amphibious landing, 26,000-strong, at Marathon, roughly twenty-six miles north of Athens. Outnumbered two-to-one, the amateur but heavily armed and bronze-armored Athenians confined the Persians to low-lying marshy encampments. Within a week, the same toxic mixture of disease mentioned above thinned the Persian force. Given the position of the Persian fleet, the disembarkation grounds of the Persian troops, and the placement of the Athenian defenders, it would have been impossible for them to bivouac away from or to skirt the swamps. The terrain and Athenian posture dictated the battle. Following a decisive Athenian victory, the disease-riddled Persians withdrew and set sail to attack Athens itself. Herodotus records that 6,400 Persian corpses were strewn on the battlefield, with an unknown number perishing in the surrounding swamps. Messengers were quickly dispatched from Marathon to run the twenty-six miles to Athens to warn the city of the impending Persian attack.

  The legend of the Athenian courier Pheidippides racing to Athens, commemorated by the modern marathon athletic event, did not happen. This myth is a muddled and confused version of two truths. In a day and a half, Pheidippides did in fact cover the distance of over 1
40 miles from Marathon to Sparta to seek help prior to the battle. Although the rapport between Sparta and Athens was anything but cordial, the Spartans, as Herodotus mentions, were “moved by the appeal, and willing to send help to Athens.” If Athens crumbled and surrendered to Persian power, Sparta would no doubt suffer the same fate. Better the devil you know, right? The 2,000 Spartans, however, arrived a day late as battlefield tourists just in time to survey the corpses of roughly 6,500 Persian and 1,500 Athenian dead. Immediately after their victory at Marathon, the Athenian army marched to Athens to successfully prevent a Persian landing. Sensing that the opportunity had been lost, and with the surviving soldiers demoralized by malarial infection and defeat, the Persians headed home. They would be back, though, under a new emperor, Darius’s heir and son, Xerxes.

  Determined to avenge his father, in 480 BCE, Xerxes personally commanded an unprecedented and alarming combined naval and land force nearing 400,000 men. To meet the daunting Persian invasion, the rival Greek states, led by Athens and Sparta, temporarily put aside their differences once again to marshal an allied defense of roughly 125,000 men. After marching into Europe across ingeniously engineered pontoon bridges spanning the Hellespont (Dardanelles), the Persians were blocked at the bottleneck pass of Thermopylae by a vastly outnumbered Greek force. The 1,500 Greeks left behind, including 300 Spartans led by King Leonidas, briefly checked the Persian advance by fighting to the death. While the military significance of the Battle of Thermopylae has been inflated and sensationalized, the delaying action of Leonidas and his band of brothers at this defile did allow the main Greek column to withdraw to Athens. With this last stand, the legend of the 300 was born, and subsequently exaggerated to the point where it has become unrecognizable, epitomized by the historically challenged 300 movie franchise.