The Roll Back Malaria initiative launched in 1998 and the President's Malaria Initiative of 2005, combined with the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor residual spraying, dramatically reduced malaria mortality across Sub-Saharan Africa in the first decades of the twenty-first century. By 2015, malaria deaths had fallen by more than 60 percent from their 2000 peak. The mosquito remained, however, the leading infectious disease threat across tropical Africa, killing hundreds of thousands of children annually.

African writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — from Chinua Achebe to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ben Okri — write in cultures where the mosquito is an intimate presence and malaria a lived experience rather than a historical curiosity. The malaria bed net has become a minor literary prop of contemporary African domestic life, and the contrast between the global medical campaign against the mosquito and the continuing reality of malaria deaths inflects the social realist tradition of African literature with a specifically biological dimension of vulnerability.