Lords of the fly: Environmental images, colonial science and social engineering in British East African sleeping sickness control, 1903-1963

My dissertation asserts that British sleeping sickness control in Uganda and Tanganyika was both a significant and an initiating vehicle of colonial intervention in the Lake Victoria basin. In Uganda, sleeping sickness research and control coincided with the establishment of colonial rule; in response to an epidemic in 1901, medical officials depopulated the northern Lake Victoria shore and islands. For many in Uganda, therefore, sleeping sickness control was the first extensive British intervention into their lives. Again, with the British occupation of Tanganyika in 1922, sleeping sickness officers were likely to constitute the first colonial presence in tsetse-infested areas to the east and south of Lake Victoria. British officers depopulated large areas of Tanganyika--forcibly relocating people in sleeping sickness settlements.;In this work I explain the extent to which sleeping sickness policies involved social engineering and a restructuring of African environments. Settlements became contested spaces where colonial officers actively attempted to control Africans' access to local resources and to rationalize (in their view) Africans' economic activities. Depopulation schemes transformed African landscapes in many ways, including creating the geographical and ideological preconditions for the establishment of national parks later in the century.;Oral interviews conducted in Uganda and Tanzania in 1993 and 1994 and an examination of colonial archival and literary sources form the basis of my research. Archival and published texts support my conclusion that the British politics of saving Africans from sleeping sickness was central to the establishment of colonial power and the expansion of the power of Western science. Furthermore, oral sources assert that local people understood sleeping sickness control in the context of their relationship to environments and experiences with the colonial state. Africans perceived depopulations as a British strategy of land alienation and not as an issue of health. Both the formulation and enactment of sleeping sickness control cross-cut complex matrices of power relationships among colonial officials, the African elite and non-elite. By examining the multiple, conflicting and dynamic exchanges involving sleeping sickness control, I demonstrate the links which exist between social history, environmental history and the history of Western science in East Africa.