The African Origin of Vaccination
Photo by Lucio Patone on Unsplash
When I read that Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett leads the NIH team among the discoverers of COVID 19 vaccines I was not surprised. The person who first introduced inoculation (the theoretical and methodological root of vaccination) to what would become the United States was an Akan, or Twi language speaker, from what is today the West African nation of Ghana, enslaved in colonial Boston. It is not that Dr. Corbett has any more or less direct route to this technical ability than any other expert on vaccines just because she is Black. But my absence of surprise comes as a science historian’s realization that ‘of course’ she was capable of such scientific brilliance. Quiet as it is kept, people of African descent have always been equal to Whites in every way. The African origins of vaccination have been kept very quiet, indeed.
The story of the introduction of smallpox inoculation to colonial North America is fascinating on many fronts, including its demonstration that European’s enslavement of human beings as their property was as untenable from the very beginning as its residual racism is today. In that story, initially found in the diary of a Boston minister, Cotton Mather, son of the first President of Harvard University, one finds the African origins of our current salvation from coronavirus and its racist context.
Mather was given an enslaved man by his Puritan church congregation in 1706, historian Katherine Koo tells us. He was property, payment, a resource to elevate his family to the comforts of its stature in colonial Boston society. Mather felt free to re-name him for a Biblical slave named Onesimus. As was often the case with such purchases, Mather looked over his goods. It was often valuable for an enslaved person to have already had an old-world disease like smallpox (but not one like yaws) which would immunize their ‘property’ from future devaluation and destruction. Mather asked him whether or not he had had smallpox. W. Montague Cobb reports Mather’s letter to the Royal Society of London, July 12, 1716:
“I do assure you that many months before I met with any Imitations of treating ye Small-Pox, with ye Method of Inoculation, I had from a Servant of my own, an Account of its being practiced in AFRICA. Enquiring of my Negro-Man ONESIMUS, who is a pretty Intelligent Fellow, Whether he ever had ye Small-Pox, he answered YES and NO; and then told me that he had undergone an Operation, which had given him something of ye Small-Pox and would forever preserve him from it adding, That it was often used among ye Guaramantese [Coromantee], and whoever had ye Courage to use it was forever free from ye Fear of Contagion. He described ye Operation to me and showed me in his Arm ye Scar, and his description of it made it the same that afterwards I found related unto you by your Timonius [referring to Dr. Emanuel Timonius’ report on the success of what was then the “obscure and little understood practice” of inoculation in Constantinople in 1713, see Koo 2007, 14].” Cobb 1981, 1200.
Smallpox was a devastating problem and Mather was sufficiently scientific that he began to inquire about Onesimus’ report among other enslaved Africans in Boston. (You do know, don’t you, that slavery was instituted in Massachusetts Colony at about the same time it was in Virginia, and its practice built the economies of all 13 colonies?). Confirmed, Koo reports he then attempted to get the cooperation of the colony’s most highly credentialled physician, the Scotsman, Dr. William Douglass, to try inoculation on Europeans. But Douglass was not having it. For one thing, he had already fallen under a prejudice against Africans (including only those demeaned by slavery in his experience), a prejudice supported by the overwhelming pomposity of the British who believe their Christian culture made of them the only real human beings. He suggested it was foolish to listen to anything an African had to say. What is more, and this does seem reasonable, he believed the proposed medical practice most likely to be a plot to kill them.
Consider the Western medical context of his devaluation of inoculation. British medicine had benefited from some of the most ancient ideas still hanging around their Enlightenment, like the Galenic humoral theory of Roman times. In Crucible of God, David Levering Lewis explained the Moors or Muslims were the successors of the Roman Empire as the more developed world, beyond that which eventually recovered in the ‘europenses’ as Christendom. It was in places like al Andalus (Moroccan Imazgen- and Syrian-controlled Iberia) where the ancient arts, from Hebrew and Greek to Latin and Arabic-inscribed ideas, were translated and refined from 711 to 1492. I speculate that this is probably the true African and Arab origin, if not of inoculation, of a trade network for its broad intercontinental dissemination, partly because the other origin the Royal Academy found was in Turkey. Turks, of course, were also within that Muslim pale and, according to the early traveler al Bekri, Ghana (Wagadu) was also connected in trade, having incorporated a Muslim town within their multi-religious state. At any rate, Northwest European knowledge was definitely marginal to that world and insular. By the time of the 1721 smallpox epidemic in Boston, the Galenic practice of bleeding people with leeches (available at any barber shop/surgeon’s office that displayed its candy-cane sign) was the state of their art.
A rural physician trained by apprenticeship, Zabdiel Boylston was, however, willing to take Mather up on Onesimus’ method. Cobb reported that he vaccinated 286 people in the epidemic period between 1721 and 1722, including Mather’s son. Of these, only 6 died. During the same time there were 7,500 smallpox cases in Boston, of which 844 died. The science showed the African method to be a resounding success. Subsequently, inoculation spread throughout the colonies. Thomas Jefferson would benefit from it and may have lived because of it. In 1796 the English physician Edward Jenner would refine a safer version of the method using cowpox (first sampled from an English woman working as a milkmaid).
While subsequent iterations would lead to storable vaccines, like the ones developed for COVID, this important medical practice was in fact introduced to the West by Africans who were the first to practice it in the Americas. The late historian Selwyn H. H. Carrington once told me they were experimenting with it on new diseases on Caribbean plantations. Its original innovation may have involved Africans and/or Arabs, but definitely not Western Europeans. It is the theoretical development of the idea that one could prevent disease by receiving a careful, prophylactic dose of the same or similar disease that is its brilliance. And like the development of sanitation, sterilization, and germ theory, inoculation brought about among the greatest transformations in human health. It also opened up new possibilities for migrations and colonization. Its introducers would share that brilliance with its beneficiaries.
Anatomist, anthropologist, and activist W. Montague Cobb first wrote of Onesimus’ contribution in the African American Journal of the National Medical Association. His article was related to the idea of “the Black as Non-Person,” showing that no other science historian had mentioned Onesimus’ role in medical advance despite the fact that most had read Mather’ diary. Subsequently, an article on the history of inoculation in the Journal of the American Medical Association refers to an African, essentially as a nameless instrument of White physicians. A recent book on Vaccination by Arthur Allen in 2003 finally names him in the story of the first North American inoculations, but refers to him as a “Lybian” -- which makes no sense for anyone who knows anything about the transatlantic slave trade, especially since Mather refers to the city of his origin as “Guaramantese,” well known in the slave trade at that time and nowhere in Lybia. My graduate students considered it possible that the author (a journalist) could only imagine the contribution coming from a whitened part of North Africa. When I inquired with the author, he said he thought he had read it somewhere, now buried in his papers.
Onesimus’ Coromantee (or Coromantins) were a spartan society and part of the Asante Empire before defeated in battle and enslaved. They were often associated with rebellion in America, including the leadership of the Maroon wars in Jamaica that defeated the British in 1739 to gain permanent sovereignty over ‘Crown Land’ in its mountainous interior. Michael Mullin’s Africa in America shows that, in the 18th century when European slave traders knew African ethnicities, the Coromantee were recognized as able, if dangerous, workers. They were known to have been in New York in the vicinity of its two major slavery rebellions while Onesimus was in Boston. There, archaeologists of the African Burial Ground Project discovered a heart-shape symbol on an 18th century coffin lid that may have been the Akan Adinkra symbol, Sankofa, emblemizing respect for the lessons of the past.
This story is not just about the omission of Blacks contributions from history, but the blind assertion that whiteness is required of any who are to be included among the real, and therefore credited, human beings in the world. The contested exceptions (Obama and King) only prove the rule. That racist arrogance and oversight of Black’s humanity invaded the context of Onesimus’ time, as it does his memory today. Mather and his charitable congregation imagined Africans should be their obedient instruments and property while also imagining the enslaved, for the sake of White’s own moral cover, to be like members of their Christian families. The liberal racism of Mather’s Religious Society for Negroes required that Africans be loyal and were taught to read in order to recite catechism. Onesimus was also allowed a wife. But he disappointed Mather, becoming increasingly “froward” (uncooperative, difficult or sullen) which Mather, generous in his own mind, could not understand. Like the common variety of White racism today, Mather blamed Onesimus for having an unfathomable problem that was actually the problem of Mather’s insufferable self-deception. Mather did not empathize with Onesimus as a human being like himself. Onesimus expected real empowerment such as that employed when rejecting Mather’s offer to make him Christian.
Onesimus won his freedom by posing his objections to his enslavement. Historian Sterling Stuckey said that daily attitude of objection, the act of simply being human rather than another’s property, was ultimately how African Americans required an end to slavery within 160 years of Onesimus’ arrival. But he was still obliged to chop wood for Mather’s family for the rest of his life. It is the continuing fact of racism, that Whites (as Mather’s people had legally become since 1691) continue to see themselves as the only real, complete people in the room. So, recent science historians do not credit him on record. That untenable relationship with ‘the other’ would be expressed honestly by Onesimus, who knew he was the full-grown man who introduced his culture’s superior medical practice to a brutal society, perhaps all the more brutal for its falsely humane conceits (see W. Montague Cobb’s 1981 “Onesimus: the First Black Major Contribution,” JNMA, Katherine Koo’s “Strangers in the House of God” in the 2007 Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society to which I belong, and Ibram Kendi’s 2016 Stamped from the Beginning for Mather’s Puritan racism, or Willie Jennings’ 2010 Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race for the Portuguese beginning of the lie that slavery was Christian charity [publisher provides links, here]).
So, around the story of the first to introduce inoculation to North America is the story of irreconcilable differences between the racist’s view of Black people’s identity and Black people’s own truth. How many times I, as a Black scientist, have seen similar misconceptions fueling the behaviors of whites 300 years later. They often expect us to be their instruments (as Aristotle fallaciously argued for enslavers), even from which to take other’s ideas they would leave uncited. Or, the Hidden Figures Margot Shetterly demonstrated. Or to steal opportunity, as was recently revealed by Ed Dwight, “Kennedy’s man”: an African American test pilot forced by Chuck Yeager’s racism to relinquish his chance to be among the first astronauts. Standing above his wounds, Dwight would turn to a life as a successful artist (I Was Poised to be the First Black Astronaut. I Never Made it to Space. | 'Almost Famous' by Op-Docs - YouTube).
Many of us stand above our wounds, perhaps as Onesimus did, though we do not know what became of him and his. And when we confront the “slings and arrows” of the outrageous fortunes foisted upon Black people by Whites who feel entitled to have their way with us, like Mather, they quickly assume there is something wrong with Black people. ‘Despite all we have done for those who came to us as savages,’ they might still say. There is nothing wrong with Black people, only the inequitable condition foisted upon them by Whites is wrong. Robin DiAngelo has been insightful about the psychological damage White racism has done to Whites, requiring of them “White Fragility.” Their defensiveness is not only fear of being caught lying and stealing, but represents the absence of empathy created by centuries of it. Disempathy is evidence that most Whites still see themselves as the only real, complete human beings in the room, lest they reveal their damages. They refuse to tell Onesimus’ story and tell Edward Jenner’s instead, though Jenner himself acknowledged being recipient of the idea, from whom and where he did not say in his 1796 report (1).
Africans and Native Americans have never needed White people. Their human society was always complete. In fact, the latter built the foundations of Western industrialization and wealth with Black’s labor on Native land. Economic historian Joseph Inikori demonstrates that. The moral propaganda, that the continuing occupation is benevolent, must deny an understanding of the full human capacity of people of African descent. This denial is as much exemplified by the omission and distortion of their national and world histories in schools’ curricula as it is by a knee on a neck. On the other hand, with the exaggerated notion of the occupier’s largesse (Christianity, civilization, medicine) as moral cover, Whites are taught, still, that Blacks should somehow feel indebted to them. But the monotonous secret is that Whites owe Blacks, even for their salvation in the age of COVID.
As I see it, White racism is the first epidemic creating health disparities before 2020, now compounded by a second, coronavirus epidemic. Since Onesimus, Blacks have been on the forefront of treatments for both disorders.
Note 1
I recently heard a long infomercial for a peanut butter company that claimed its discovery of the product that had long been the only commonly reported black invention, by the Tuskegee scientist George Washington Carver. Can we not even be credited aloud for peanut butter?
Author’s Biography
Michael Blakey is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology, Africana Studies and American Studies, and Founding Director of the Institute for Historical Biology, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. He was scientific director of New York’s African Burial Ground Project at Howard University and is a member of the Scholarly Advisory Committee that helped design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is currently completing a book on race and racism in science and society for Oxford University Press.
(c) 2021 Michael Blakey