Postwar Africa Research Articles

Jessica Lynne Pearson (2018) - The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa, Cambridge- Mass, Harvard University Press

Recensé : Jessica Lynne Pearson, The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa, Cambridge- Mass, Harvard University Press, 2018, XII + 324 p.

The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa Jessica Lynne Pearson

<i>The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa</i> Jessica Lynne Pearson

Jessica Lynne Pearson. The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa.

Jessica Lynne Pearson. The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa.

The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa by Jessica Lynne Pearson

Reviewed by: The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa by Jessica Lynne Pearson Laura Jane McGough Jessica Lynne Pearson. The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. xii + 260 pp. Ill. $49.95 (978-0-674-98048-8). Pearson's new book The Colonial Politics of Global Health shows how the World Health Organization's origins and development in Africa and the politics of the postwar period of decolonization were intimately intertwined. Based on extensive use of diplomatic and institutional archival material from France, Senegal, and Geneva, Pearson paints a compelling portrait of how colonial priorities and fears shaped the early development of the WHO, including the location of the Africa Regional bureau in Brazzaville, the selection of health priorities (maternal and infant health, nutrition, and disease eradication campaigns), and, ultimately, limited the scope and effectiveness of the WHO's efforts in Africa during the 1950s. [End Page 308] Why did the French (and other colonial powers) fear the WHO? With its authority to collect data on the health conditions of people in non-autonomous territory and "engage with populations that had no official voice at the UN" (p. 68), the WHO's presence potentially threatened to expose adverse conditions, undercut colonial authority, and stoke anticolonial agitation. France's response was to keep close watch on the WHO by successfully advocating for the location of the Africa Regional Office in Brazzaville, the capital of the AEF (Afrique Equatoriale Française), fostering closer ties with other colonial powers (especially Belgium and Portugal), and hosting conferences and supporting organizations that highlighted French medical expertise and achievements in the African colonies while excluding African voices. France's advocacy prevailed, most notably over Liberia—the only independent country in Africa, which proposed Monrovia as a location for the new Regional Office. Despite French efforts to keep "'close surveillance' of all WHO activities in the region, with the goal of 'blocking its extension, within the constraints of our limited means'" (p. 104), the new leadership at the WHO Regional office described the shortcomings of Brazzaville as an unhealthy location and exposed French colonialism to widespread critique. French reactions to the negative reports were angry. As a 1949 internal French memo indicated, "We would like to note that all of our fears about the installation of the WHO in Africa have now been confirmed" (p. 89). As Pearson explains, the loss was not just to the French empire, but more critically to the WHO's ability to focus on health. While other WHO Regional Committees discussed screening technologies for tuberculosis or strategies for malaria elimination, the Regional Committee for Africa spent its time on petty decisions, such defending its decision to hire a Public Information Officer. The structure of the new WHO offices indirectly supported anti-colonialism by aligning to geography rather than to imperial boundaries. WHO's different regional offices subdivided the overseas French territories, and reoriented the African territories towards each other rather than towards the metropoles, with the outspoken Liberian delegates as examples of an independent African country. In addition, by collecting worldwide data on the health and well-being of populations, the WHO provided a method for evaluating the success of colonial regimes and holding them accountable. Maternal and infant mortality data indicated much higher levels of mortality than in developed regions—and highlighted the adverse consequences of colonial rule. Despite the efforts of French-supported institutions such as the CIE (Centre international de l'enfance) to frame poor child health in French African territories as an inevitable problem of modernization and industrialization, critics such as Eugénie Eboué-Tell seized on these data to tell a story of hardship, social and economic inequality, and "psychological disequilibrium" imposed by colonialism (p. 129). She was one of the few Africans to attend a CIE conference. CIE's three-year courses on social pediatrics also reinforced the same message of "poor health outcomes and social instability as unfortunate but natural products of industrialization, urbanization, and economic development" (p. 140). The tensions between colonial authorities and the WHO played out in the major health efforts of...

Jessica Lynne Pearson: The colonial politics of global health: France and the United Nations in postwar Africa

Jessica Lynne Pearson: The colonial politics of global health: France and the United Nations in postwar Africa

Communist states and post-war Africa

Communist states and post-war Africa

Race, biopolitics and liberal development from the Jim Crow South to postwar Africa

In this paper I document links between the racialised biopolitics that characterised theUSgovernment interventions in theUSSouth in the early 20th century, and theUSA's and theUK's late colonial and early development strategies in Africa. I do so by interrogating why Thomas Campbell, the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) head of African‐American agricultural extension, was chosen byUSphilanthropic elites and approved by theUK's Colonial Office to co‐direct a 1944–1945 survey of educational facilities in Africa. I show that it was Campbell's experiences and expertise with “improving” rural life through strategies of self‐help and character‐ and community‐building – key markers of a liberal way of development – that made his presence on the survey seem essential to both theUSAandUKelites. By so doing, this paper documents the importance of theUSDA's biopolitical interventions in theUSSouth for understanding the historical geography of late colonialism and liberal forms of development, thus contributing to critical geographies of development.

The “Development Syndrome”: building and contesting the SICAP housing schemes in French Dakar (1951–1960)

After the Second World War, European welfare planning was transposed to the African colonies. With regard to housing, this meant a true turning point in urban policy. Under a development slogan, colonial powers for the first time massively invested in the housing of African urban dwellers. This was especially the case in French Dakar, Senegal, where the Société Immobilière du Cap Vert (SICAP) was one of the most productive housing institutions in post-war sub-Saharan Africa. This article, however, argues that the development discourse mobilized by the colonial government not only formed the basis to modernizing the city but also served as an instrument to legitimize a new kind of residential segregation, a phenomenon I call the “Development Syndrome”. Yet Africans were no passive victims of development schemes. This article brings to the fore various forms of agency that were evoked by the ambiguous motivations underscoring the SICAP housing and resettlement schemes.

Reproducing Portuguese Villages in Africa: Agricultural Science, Ideology and Empire

This article examines the political and ideological uses of agronomic research, focusing on state-directed rural white settlements in Angola. Implemented ‘against the tide’, in the mid-1950s, with Angola’s African anti-colonial movement already under way, these schemes contained numerous contradictions. Under a modernising agenda, the Estado Novo dictatorship created the colonatos of Cela and Cunene, with the expressed purpose of reproducing Portuguese rural villages in Africa, settling poor Portuguese peasants and perpetuating colonial rule. Drawing on a range of primary sources from Portuguese colonial and scientific archives and the literature on Angola, I analyse the relationship between policymakers and the agricultural engineers mobilised to study the soils and its agricultural suitability in the regions chosen for the colonatos. I show that several experts criticised state-sponsored development of white rural settlements and exposed the policy’s drawbacks. I also place this particular example within the context of the existing literature on the history of science and development in post-war Africa. I will argue that the Portuguese version of the ‘developmentalist’ colonial state was burdened with an anti-progressive ideology that criticised industrialisation, urbanisation and proletarianisation, ignored technical and scientific conclusions, and despised settlers’ aspirations of upward mobility, seeing such aspirations as potentially politically disruptive. According to this model, the ideal type of white settler – modest, rooted in the land, earning only enough to get by – would be emulated by the African peasant, ensuring both social peace and colonial order. The failure of this experiment illustrates the (dis)connection between science and ideology in the last years of the Portuguese Empire, and the social and economic cost of their disengagement.

Promoting Health, Protecting Empire: Inter-Colonial Medical Cooperation in Postwar Africa

Comment l’anticolonialisme à l’onu a-t-il influencé la coopération en matière de santé en Afrique après 1945 ? À travers deux organisations – la Commission de coopération technique en Afrique et le Centre international de l’enfance – cet article montre comment les empires coloniaux ont poursuivi la coopération technique inter-coloniale dans leur manière de répondre aux critiques de l’onu et de prévenir l’ingérence des institutions internationales en Afrique.

After Africa’s wars, a ‘new day’ for building peace Interview: Judy Cheng-Hopkins visiting a youth centre in Gihanga, Burundi, a peacebuilding project supported by the UN

Concerned about the fragile state of countries that have recently emerged from war — and their vulnerability to new bouts of violence — the UN in 2005 established the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), an intergovernmental body led by member states. The PBC currently has six countries on its active agenda, all of them in Africa (Burundi, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and the Central African Republic). Also in 2005, the UN set up the Peacebuilding Support Office, as a secretariat for the PBC. Since 2009 that office has been headed by Assistant Secretary-General Judy Cheng-Hopkins. From Malaysia, she has had wide experience in various UN food relief, refugee and development agencies, including working in East and Southern Africa for a decade for the UN Development Programme. In October, shortly after a visit to assess UN peacebuilding projects in Burundi, Ms. Cheng-Hopkins spoke with Africa Renewal’s managing editor, Ernest Harsch, about the challenges facing post-war Africa.

A policing partnership for post-war Africa? Lessons from Liberia and southern Sudan

The paper examines partnerships between the police and local groups engaged in policing in two fragile African states – southern Sudan and Liberia. There is a tendency in Africa for such partnerships to function as local policing activities assisted by the police. This is in contrast to the model more familiar in the West, where partnerships tend to function as the police assisted by local policing activities. The article evaluates two examples of the African alternative model. First, a long-standing partnership in southern Sudan where policing is provided by customary chiefs. Second, one that is emerging in Liberia in the wake of the failure of a partnership based on community police forums. The relative success of the first model and the relative failure of the second model and its replacement by the first, raise the question of what constitutes a suitable and sustainable policing partnership in a fragile state.

Teacher Trainees in Ghana in the Early 1960s: Women and the Teaching of Home Science

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 8 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 103 TEACHER TRAINEES IN GHANA IN THE EARLY 1960s Women and the Teaching of Home Science RICHARD GLOTZER LILA ENGBERG I was happy I could impress Ghanaian illiterate women ... these women are old and will die away soon, giving way to the young folk; ... why not help the young girls to develop in one way or another? I therefore concluded to try and have a Housecraft course ... Prologue1 Young women were presented with unprecedented opportunities and challenges in the newly independent Ghana of the early 1960s. In their own words, a small group of teacher trainees reflect on how their upbringings and early education prepared them for the challenge of making a place for themselves in a society where rapid transition to western style modernity and resilient traditional values coexisted in uneasy rivalry, often mediated by vestiges of colonialism. Relying on interviews with their former teachers, archival sources, and autobiographies, this article examines three aspects of these women’s lives: their use of critical thinking skills—developed in a school curriculum discouraging critical thought; the influence of families on school achievement; and their assessment of future life and career aspirations. 1. Drafts this paper were presented at the Canadian Association for African Studies Annual Meeting, Sherbrooke, Quebec (May, 1999), and the Midwest Alliance for African Studies, University of Kansas at Lawrence (October, 1999). Grants from the Rockefeller Archives Center, North Tarrytown, N.Y. to the first author for a larger project on Anglo-American relations in post-war Africa, supported portions of this research. 104 Ghana Studies • volume 8 • 2005 Introduction In 1943 Fred Clarke, one of Britain’s foremost educators, prepared a typescript memorandum, Mass Education of African Peoples, recommending greatly expanded opportunities for girls and women in education and society . Looking ahead to the post war period, Clarke sought a gradual inclusion of women into an expanded educational system leading to broader roles in African societies. Writing for colleagues on a Colonial Office Subcommittee , his ideas were subsumed in Mass Education in African Society (1944), a report largely silent about women. Tampering with African family roles and social structure at a time when large numbers of young African men would be demobilizing after war service seemed inadvisable.2 Within a few short years Britain’s post-war African development plans would be in disarray. The Gold Coast Colony, believed to be the most advanced and stable of Britain’ s West African territories achieved home rule in 1951 and independence as Ghana in 1957. Gone were the gradualist notions of infrastructure development.3 In its place was the scramble to develop national institutions, embracing Ghanaian aspirations and western style modernity while preserving African authenticity. The government’s rapid expansion of places in primary education led to increased competition for scarce places at the secondary level.4 With elementary education now compulsory, just over 500,000 children were 2. CO 879/148, CO No. 186., 1944, Colonial Office Archives, Kew, London, U. K., also Timothy Parsons, “Dangerous Education? The Army as School in Colonial East Africa”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 28, 1 2000, pp. 112–134. 3. In the 1940s the Elliot Commission on Higher Education in West Africa recommended establishing one English speaking University for the whole of British West Africa to serve Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria. By the l950s, popular sentiment, symbolized by the 1958 All Africa People’s Party Conference in Accra, dashed plans for a single university (to be based in Ibadan, Nigeria) in favor of national institutions. Clive Whitehead (1987) “The ‘Two-way Pull’ and the Establishment of University Education in British West Africa”, History of Education, 16, 2, pp. 119–133. 4. Foster, Philip (1965), Education and Social Change in Ghana. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 179–219. Glotzer and Engberg • Teacher Trainees in Ghana in the Early 1960s 105 in school, with many expecting to go on for post-primary education, also slated to become compulsory. While twice as many boys were at primary and middle school as girls, this represented a marked improvement over the...

Precarious Conditions: A Note on Counter‐Insurgency in Africa after 1945

This paper looks at the politics of surfaces, and the practices of veiling (and unveiling) and of white men wearing blackface in counter‐insurgency efforts in post‐war Africa. The sten gun beneath the veil, the unveiled woman with a bomb in her handbag and the counter‐gangs masquerading as African guerillas all embody specific kinds of violence; they also embody a political imaginary in which racial and cultural lines are more fluid than previous studies of these periods suggest; indeed, they raise questions about what makes a race, a gender or a regiment: are racial and national categories learned, mimicked, or are they literally skin deep? My question, however, is not why do people dress up as guerillas or as Western women to wreak havoc on their enemies, but how historians of post‐war Africa might understand such actions. To this end I want to read accounts of counter‐insurgency, Fanon's famous essay, the memoirs of British soldiers in Kenya and Rhodesian soldiers in Rhodesia and some of the volumes of Rhodesian wartime fiction through the lens of transgender literature, looking at how various crossings, and the multiple markers thereof, shed light on broader issues of hierarchy, race and gender at the time of decolonisation.

A History of Post-War Africa

A History of Post-War Africa

A History of Postwar Africa

A History of Postwar Africa

A History of Postwar Africa. John HatchUnited States and Canadian Publications on Africa in 1963. Peter Duignan

<i>A History of Postwar Africa</i>. John Hatch<i>United States and Canadian Publications on Africa in 1963</i>. Peter Duignan

A History of Postwar Africa. By &lt;italic&gt;John Hatch&lt;/italic&gt;. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger. 1965. Pp. 432. Cloth $8.50, paper $2.95.)

A History of Postwar Africa. By John Hatch. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger. 1965. Pp. 432. Cloth $8.50, paper $2.95.) Get access A History of Postwar Africa. By Hatch John. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger. 1965. Pp. 432. Cloth $8.50, paper $2.95.) Robert L. Hess Robert L. Hess University of Illinois, Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 71, Issue 3, April 1966, Pages 1030–1031, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/71.3.1030 Published: 01 April 1966

A History of Postwar Africa

A History of Postwar Africa

A History of Postwar Africa

Journal Article A History of Postwar Africa Get access A History of Postwar Africa. By John Hatch. London: Andre Deutsch. 1965. 432 pp. Bibliog. Index. 50s. Tom Soper Tom Soper Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 42, Issue 1, January 1966, Page 143, https://doi.org/10.2307/2612479 Published: 01 January 1966