Abstract
AbstractThe Northern Territories Protectorate and its people were located on the economic and political margins of Britain's Gold Coast Crown Colony (now Ghana) throughout the colonial period. The article examines how the region's peripherality allowed the Gold Coast Tsetse Control Department to carry out an extensive campaign of bush clearing and resettlement along northern river valleys from the 1930s to 1950s, with little supervision by the Gold Coast Medical Department or northern officials. Intended to control human and animal sleeping sickness and to meet the economic preferences of the colony's central administration, this campaign had the effect of greatly increasing the exposure of northern communities to another disease, onchocerciasis, causing widespread blindness and contributing to a serious public health crisis in the early independence era.
Highlights
The Northern Territories Protectorate and its people were located on the economic and political margins of Britain’s Gold Coast Crown Colony ( Ghana) throughout the colonial period
The relationship between colonial tsetse control and independence-era onchocerciasis reveals much about public health work on the margins of the state, about the striking degree of agency vested in individuals operating with little oversight during and after the Second World War, and about the misapplication of colonial-era science, which was subordinated to the broader economic and political concerns of the Gold Coast government
This paper has explored the connections between two public health problems over a long period of time
Summary
Burkina Faso, Nigeria, West Africa, health, disease, development, environment, colonial administration. Facing the prospect of diminished revenues, at this point the colonial administration invested heavily in short-term control measures against the outbreak itself (using quarantine camps and drug treatments) and in a more expansive control programme against the disease’s insect vector, the tsetse fly. This vector control programme was run by the Gold Coast Anti-Tsetse Department. This paper extends and critiques earlier work by charting links between the two diseases: between the northern Gold Coast’s tsetse control programme — often represented in the existing literature as a success for colonial science — and a serious epidemic of onchocerciasis which was only recognised shortly before independence. The relationship between colonial tsetse control and independence-era onchocerciasis reveals much about public health work on the margins of the state, about the striking degree of agency vested in individuals operating with little oversight during and after the Second World War, and about the misapplication of colonial-era science, which was subordinated to the broader economic and political concerns of the Gold Coast government
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