Disease and biomedicine: Colonial strategies in Southern Africa

In the late nineteenth century, the germ and cell theories and parasitology heralded the scientific discipline of biomedicine, an empirical approach to healing. Subsequently, the metaphoric connotations attached to disease, which, in the Victorian sickroom, simultaneously defined nurses and patients, gave way as the clinical gaze focused solely on the disease and placed the patient in parentheses. This study documents the disciplinary power of biomedicine and traces its influence through late nineteenth-century Victorian England to the colonial arena of late imperial expansion, southern Africa. Biomedicine, re-imagined in the tropics as tropical medicine, enabled the colonial authorities to medicalize native bodies, to discipline them, and to rationalize the drawing of racial boundaries.; At the end of the nineteenth century, the metaphorical interpretations of disease transformed, legacy of evolution and Social Darwinism, and the ideological shift fed the perception that disease and degeneration were intimately related, a move that cast the diseased body as other, alien. Such a perception was influential in Africa since the African body was already constructed as diseased and degenerate. When colonial doctors arrived in Africa, fueled by the desire to save the natives of the Dark Continent from disease and suffering, they were surprised to find efficient indigenous healing systems in operation. Perceiving these systems as antitheses to science, and perhaps threatening to their own biomedical systems, the doctors denigrated and suppressed them.; Employment of the degenerative theory is obvious in the colonial management of two important diseases in southern Africa: malaria, endemic to Africa, and tuberculosis, introduced by Europeans. Colonial doctors declared war on malaria, but when failure seemed imminent, they turned to a more achievable form of victory and medicalized African bodies as vectors of infection. Tuberculosis, in contrast, colonized thousands of African bodies, which allowed doctors not only to medicalize black bodies and construct them as different to white bodies but also to exploit them in the name of capitalism, specifically gold mining.