A few of my former students tweeted about racism and Covid-19 vax testing in Africa, specifically DRC over the past 24 hrs. It is an important topic that links medical violence and legacies of colonialism in Africa. 1/
I can't cover everything, so I'm going to stick to a few areas. 1. Ghana (former Gold Coast). British army didn't fully understand malaria, so they used African labor to create trap shacks and got migrant laborers to serve as bait to study mosquito attraction. 3/
What did this mean? Test subjects (human beings) sat in obscenely hot shacks and could not move or escape while mosquitos fed on them for hours. Obviously there was no consent process. Yikes. 4/
British and American troops also poisoned the Korle Lagoon, a sacred place in Ghana. They sprayed water with toxic chemicals, pyrethrum aerosol bombed and sprayed the urban area of Accra. So many health and environmental problems in the longterm. 5/
The French did things a little differently in the Congo. They created sanitary police force to address concerns with mosquitos, yellow fever, and malaria. What did this mean? Elites received health training in prestigious educational settings. 6/
Some worked in labs for the Institut Pasteur, while others joined the sanitary police force. They had to find, research, and remove larvae, distribute toxic gases, and other "necessary" tasks. Sometimes they even removed houses and communities allegedly for pub health reasons. 7/
Of course, deeply politicized and racialized. Non-elites experienced health regimes through surveillance, destruction of communities, and the policing of social practices. They were bodies to be vaxxed, experimented upon, and exploited. Foucault's pan-o and biopower, yo! 8/
Let's talk Nazi Germany. Did you know that Nazi Germany sterilized countless African-Germans without consent in the 1930s and 1940s? Germany experimented upon and executed many African Germans during the Holocaust, as well. 9/
After the fall of France, tirailleurs (African soldiers who fought for France) faced German flamethrowers, artillery, death marches, execution squads, and eventually POW camps. 15-20k in camps with minimal food, bad medical care, physical violence and random killings. 10/
Pulmonary disease and illnesses became huge issues that led to death for many tirailleurs interned in camps. Léopold Senghor wrote about his time in the camps in Hosties Noires. It is a painful read, but oh so necessary. 11/
What's the point? Medical violence and colonialism are intricately bound, even in the post-colony. So many WWII case studies, but this is the tip of the iceberg. Tomorrow we'll talk about something fun: getting drunk and partying in Congo during WWII. Sanchez out! DS
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