Here’s a hint: Hundreds of millions of people will be watching this spot tomorrow at noon, 177 years after this sketch was made.

If I had better planned my African development lectures, I might have given my talk on the legacies on slavery tomorrow morning, sandwiched between MLK Day and Obama’s inauguration. Poetic. Alas, I ignorantly scheduled that subject for next week.

I’m not completely out of step with the times, however. Tomorrow I will talk about Africa, climate, and development.

What’s the link to the photo? The Washington of 1832, while not exactly a malarial swamp, was pretty close. Lots of pools of standing water in those grasses, not to mention the Potomac. In a sub-tropical clime, you should know what that means.

Know this character?

That is Zachary Taylor, 12th President of the United States. Three of his five children died of malaria. Never heard of him? That may be because he died 16 months into his term of gastroenteritis–essentially a Staph infection.

Before we sow too much doom and gloom on African, it helps to put a few of these geographic impediments in perspective. 177 years hence, and probably much sooner, we might reasonably expect to see the world tuned to a former African swamp where millions cheer the march of equality and democracy.

(Thanks to Michael Clemens for the photo.)