Lords of the Fly: Sleeping Sickness Control in British East Africa, 1900-1960

From Book News, Inc.
The sleeping sickness control efforts of British colonialists in Uganda and Tanzania were a major form of environmental and social engineering, in which control officials forcibly depopulated areas infested with the tsetse fly (the carrier of sleeping sickness) and mobilized African labor to clear spaces and create barriers between fly-infested zones and "strategically located" new villages. In his environmental and cultural history of the sleeping sickness control strategies, Hoppe (history, U. of Illinois at Chicago) argues that the interventions were central to the occupation and organization of what the colonial power considered politically and economically marginal areas of the colonies. He further argues that an emerging and masculine gendered cultural and political authority of science was a profound influence on the shape of colonial sleeping sickness control, while African responses to control interventions shaped both scientific understanding and the formation and implementation of sleeping sickness control policy.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Book Description
British sleeping sickness control in colonial Uganda and Tanzania became a powerful mechanism for environmental and social engineering that defined and delineated African landscapes, reordered African mobility and access to resources. As colonialism shifted from conquest to occupation, colonial scientists exercised much influence during periods of administrative uncertainty about the role and future of colonial rule. "Impartial" and "objective" science helped to justify the British "civilizing mission" in East Africa by muting the moral ambiguities and violence of colonial occupation.


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Environmental history of British sleeping sickness policy that links trypanosomiasis control with other colonial social engineering mechanisms in the region.


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