Event location
Seminars will take place at Seminar Room 218, FHH (Frederik Holsts hus), 12:15-13:30.
Zoom link for those wishing to attend online.
Abstract
The 1950s were a decade of remarkable advances in tuberculosis research and control globally – and as the first antitubercular chemotherapies became available, Kenya emerged as a key site for testing and developing new treatment and control regimens. Yet historical source material, and consequently medical histories, are largely silent on the context of anticolonial war in which this work took place. This paper examines TB control efforts in 1950s Kenya in the context of the Mau Mau uprising. It shows that the areas with the heaviest TB disease burden which became the focus of TB research and interventions – the capital city Nairobi and the surrounding Kikuyu reserves of central Kenya – were also precisely the areas where Mau Mau hostilities were concentrated. In the face of gaps and silences in the documentary record, I demonstrate how visual analysis can offer new opportunities for probing the intersection of disease control and political control. Photographs of late-colonial TB control initiatives reveal how counterinsurgency measures such as the forced removal of the Kikuyu population in fact facilitated opportunities for disease control interventions and medical knowledge production. This not only uncovers rare insights into African experiences of colonial medicine, but highlights how colonial power relations and violence invariably impacted and shaped health-related interventions.
This research forms part of a larger project on TB control and the politics of public health in late- and post-colonial Kenya, 1950s and 1960s. The project examines how TB-related knowledge production in the form of medical research as well as public health interventions were embedded in regional, continental, imperial and international scientific networks and public health concerns; at the same time, it shows how policies and practices were entangled with the local politics of decolonisation and development. The project seeks to connect hitherto disparate historiographies, integrate different scales of analysis, and make innovative use of neglected sources in order to offer an African history of tuberculosis in global perspective.
Bio
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann is social historian of twentieth century South Africa and Kenya, with a particular interest in questions of race and class, labour, identity, state formation, knowledge production, and medicine. She is the author of Privileged Precariat: White Workers and South Africa’s Long Transition to Majority Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Danelle is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and research associate at the University of the Free State, South Africa.