Confronting whiteness and decolonising global health institutions

Abstract

Centuries ago, Voltaire satirised the glorification of white men's benevolence in his novel of 1759 Candide. The reader follows Candide's erratic adventures, observing his self-defined good intentions and denial of his own complicity in the atrocities he sees. The text describes the naive optimism of those not directly affected by structural violence but complicit in the creation of the social structures and institutions that enable it. Candide contains a powerful warning. As Carlos Wallace has argued: “Ignorance is a progressive thinker's enemy; acceptance, awareness, accountability and action are the tools of the informed; of people who want change and do all they can to achieve it.”