Abstract
This article shows how French doctors based in Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, the capital of colonial Senegal, conceptualised the Senegambian region as a diseased environment and Africans as carriers of infectious agents. It explains how perceptions of the hot tropical climate, combined with outbreaks of epidemic diseases and seasonal allergies, were instrumental in the processes of urban transformation through hygienic measures such as waste removal, the closing of cemeteries, and the imposition of new building codes. The article also shows how the stigmatisation of Africans was implicated in the forced removal of the urban poor – firstly from the city centre, and later from the entire city-island. Colonial medical knowledge in Senegal was initially based on the miasma theory, however, germ theory was adopted in the aftermath of the 1900 yellow fever epidemic. Both theories, in relation with racialism, impacted the urban landscape in Saint-Louis, Senegal.
Highlights
Production and Reproduction of Medical KnowledgeThe challenge posed by the hot tropical climate, the epidemic and endemic diseases, as well as seasonal allergies, helped increase the visibility of the French colonial doctor in Saint-Louis
This article shows how French doctors based in Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, the capital of colonial Senegal, conceptualised the Senegambian region as a diseased environment and Africans as carriers of infectious agents
Taking into consideration the background of previous studies of urban segregation in Africa, this article narrows to a more specific goal to show how French doctors based in Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, the capital and port city of colonial Senegal, conceptualised the Senegambian region as a diseased environment and Africans as carriers of infectious agents, and how this produced a medical knowledge that led to the stigmatisation of both the environment and the indigenous urban poor
Summary
The challenge posed by the hot tropical climate, the epidemic and endemic diseases, as well as seasonal allergies, helped increase the visibility of the French colonial doctor in Saint-Louis. During the second meeting of the Hygiene and Public Salubrity Council, the day on January 11, 1868, the three doctors determined that the previous year’s yellow fever epidemic was imported to Saint-Louis, it found locally “the necessary conditions for taking on the disastrous character that its passage showed” (A.N.S/H 20, 1868) They again elaborated on the local conditions in question, including the topography of the land, the frequent breezes from the south, the two cemeteries located in the slums of Guet-Ndar and Sor, and the repulsive “pestilential emanations” they released. The application of this germ theory in Senegal only gained momentum in the wake of the 1900 yellow fever epidemic
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