The Big Read: Pick your annus horribilis

27 July 2016 - 10:37 By SHAUN SMILLIE

Zika, global terrorism, Brexit, Prince, David Bowie and Gugu Zulu - these events and more have social media users asking whether 2016 is being directed by Quentin Tarantino. There are hashtags such as #2016worstyearever and memes like "Dear 2016 Y U no end soon".Many bad things have happened, but can we say this year is the worst in the history of mankind, since our ancestors fought vicious wars, survived terrible diseases and dealt with other general calamities?To find out, we surveyed some people in the know and asked them for their annus horribilis.72000 BCThis was the year mankind came closest to extinction. It was so bad it seems like science fiction. The culprit was a volcanic eruption that exploded with the force of 1.5 million Hiroshima-sized bombs.Speaking to Slate magazine, author David Baker said it plunged the world into a nuclear winter during which ash and dust blocked out the sun for years.Temperatures fell and genetic studies suggest large numbers of humans were wiped out. It is estimated that the human population was reduced to between 3000 and 10000 people. These survivors repopulated the world and we're all descended from them.1348This was the year the Black Death took hold. In the space of a year-and-a-half, a third of Europe's population was wiped out.To protect against it, author Peter Frankopan has said that people took to avoiding "every fleshly lust with women". Others marched barefoot while self-flagellating.It didn't work and the death toll continued to mount.1658In March that year the first boatload of slaves arrived at Cape Town."The arrival of slaves in the Cape was worse than the arrival of colonists," explained poet Diana Ferrus. These slaves came from Angola, and two months later were joined by more slaves from West Africa.It marked, she said, the start of three-and-a-half centuries of oppression in South Africa."This date for me is very personal as my ancestors were slaves," said Ferrus. Her family is connected to the February clan who were slaves from Mozambique.1492This was the year Christopher Columbus stepped onto the new world, but, to author Peter Shulman, 1492 opened the way to far more blood-letting in the old world.That year Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella completed their conquest of Moorish Granada. Within a couple of years, the half-million Muslim inhabitants had been killed, converted, made slaves or expelled. The Jewish population suffered a similar fate.Of course, in the Americas, Columbus's arrival heralded an era that would see millions killed through conquest and disease.1916A hundred years ago this month mass slaughter took place on the Western Front of the first cross-continental war. World War 1 was in its second year and Allied forces had launched a massive offensive along the Somme River in France."There was mass mortality," said Francis Thackeray, a palaeoanthropologist at Wits University. The British army was to suffer its worst day ever when 20000 troops were killed on the opening day of the offensive.South Africa wasn't spared. In mid-July, SA forces were sent into Delville Wood. The man who ended up commanding those forces was Thackeray's cousin."Three thousand went in, and only 400 came out," said Thackeray.1918World War 1 may have ended in 1918, but in the closing months of that year another terror befell humankind, said historian Bill Nasson.Tens of millions of people died when Spanish influenza swept across the globe."In two to three months, 360000 South Africans died of the disease, and you can compare this to the 10000 South Africans who died in World War 1," said Nasson.2016For geneticist Himla Soodyall, 2016 is the worst year ever, but it doesn't have anything to do with the terror attacks, Donald Trump or our continuing economic woes - it has to do with invasion of technology.She feels that social media and the internet are bombarding us with too much information and we cannot cope."More and more information is flooding our brains, and we are not conditioned to deal with this overload and react to it. We are living in the wild, wild west," Soodyall said...

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