In April 1914, as Europe was moving towards war, Dakar, the capital of present-day Senegal, was hit by an epidemic of bubonic plague that within a year, according to one account, wiped out nearly 15 percent of the city's population.
In response, the French colonial authorities imposed harsh measures on the African population, which included restrictions on movement, the establishment of quarantine camps, forceful vaccinations and the burning of homes. The epidemic was part of what has come to be known as the Third Plague Pandemic that circled the globe between 1855-1959, during which European administrators across Africa implemented similar measures in other colonial cities. Nairobi's business district, for example, was razed down following an outbreak in 1902.