‘The Problem of the Health of the Native’: Colonial Rule and the Rural African Healthcare Question in Zimbabwe, 1890s–1930

Abstract

This article addresses one of the intriguing paradoxes of colonial Zimbabwe's early twentieth-century medical history, that despite the unusually early interest in rural healthcare showed by the colony's political leadership and senior, non-medical bureaucrats, until the 1930s the colony's rural healthcare infrastructure remained tentative, sporadic and makeshift. The article endeavours to solve this puzzle by seeking for answers in the divergent visions held by the medical and non-medical policymakers and the intractable debates about African healthcare. By tracing these protracted debates to the turn of the century, the article revises the popular depiction of colonial rural healthcare reform as an essentially post-World War I phenomenon. Moreover, it also argues that the collage of reasons, including the colonists’ enlightened self-interest, which have been proffered by historians to explain healthcare reform in other colonies were, in colonial Zimbabwe, neither self-evident nor uncontested.