Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 1.djvu/47

 on to the upper reaches of that river, from which it rapidly spread to all parts of the Conoco basin, making a special nidus in the Ituri Forest on the north-east and on the Upper Aruwimi (I quote from information given me in 1900 by Swahili traders and intelligent natives coming from those regions). Emin Pasha's Sudanese, when they settled down in the Lendu country to the west of Lake Albert, seem to have become infected with the disease. A portion of these troops were moved somewhat rapidly into Busoga, the district of the Uganda Protectorate which is on the opposite bank of the Victoria Nile to the Kingdom of Uganda. After the Sudanese troops of Lugard's recruiting had thoroughly settled down in Busoga, sleeping sickness began very slowly to develop. Possibly its spread was checked by the convulsions and displacement of population occurring during the Uganda Mutiny. I first heard of cases of sleeping sickness which reminded me of those I had met with many years before on the Congo in the early spring of 1901, when I was visiting the coast of Busoga and the island of Buvuma. Since that the history of this disease in the Uganda Protectorate is too well known to require recapitulation.

But what deserves special attention at this moment is the appalling ravages of sleeping sickness in the western part of the Congo basin, as reported by travellers like Torday and the numerous missionaries. It seems to be killing out a number of the Bayaka on the Kwango River. In some of these districts it would almost seem as though sleeping sickness had returned ; would seem indeed as though somewhere in the Congo basin this disease had acquired a sudden and very serious virulence. I cannot recall any traditions or recorded history of the West Coast of Africa, from the Senegal to the Congo, in which anything like a serious epidemic of sleeping sickness is mentioned. Through the centuries which have elapsed since