SLEEPING SICKNESS 
79 
N’Gounje district, the N’Gounje being a tributary of 
the Ogowe about ninety miles from here, but there 
are isolated centres round Lambarene and on the lakes 
behind N’Gomo. 
What is the sleeping sickness ? How is it spread ? 
It seems to have existed in Equatorial Africa from time 
immemorial, but it was confined to particular centres, 
since there was little or no travelling. The native 
method of trade with the sea coast was for each tribe 
to convey the goods to the boundary of its territory, 
and there to hand them over to the traders of the 
adjoining one. From my window I can see the place 
where the N’Gounje enters the Ogowe, and so far only 
might the Galoas living round Lambarene travel. 
Any one who went beyond this point, further into the 
interior, was eaten. 
When the Europeans came, the natives who served 
them as boats’ crews, or as carriers in their caravans, 
moved with them from one district to another, and if 
any of them had the sleeping sickness they took it 
to fresh places. In the early days it was unknown on 
the Ogowe, and it was introduced about thirty years 
ago by carriers from Loango. Whenever it gets into 
a new district it is terribly destructive, and may carry 
off a third of the population. In Uganda, for example, 
it reduced the number of inhabitants in six years from 
300,000 to 100,000. An officer told me that he once 
visited a village on the Upper Ogowe which had two 
thousand inhabitants. On passing it again two years 
later he could only count five hundred ; the rest had 
died meanwhile of sleeping sickness. After some time 
the disease loses its virulence, for reasons that we 
cannot as yet explain, though it continues to carry ofi 
