Keeping the City Totally Clean: Yellow Fever and the Politics of Prevention in Colonial Saint-Louis-Du-Senegal, 1850-1914

This article explores the ways in which French colonial authorities met the life and death challenge. represented by the re-emergence of yellow fever epidemics in Saint-Louis-du-Senegal at a time when physicians knew very. little about the etiology, diagnosis, transmission and treatment of most infectious and parasitic diseases. The discussion focuses on changing strategies and policies designed to address yellow fever threats, the attitudes and priorities of the authorities, the limits of \u27colonial medicine\u27 and the responses of. people affected by sanitary measures. The article argues that because of the ignorance of the etiology and epidemiology of yellow fever, policies were misdirected and did not achieve their primary goals. Even after the introduction of germ theory, the gap between medical thinking and practice persisted for another decade. The African urban working class and underclass were the first victims of this state of affairs. The article also examines the conflict between the interests of public health, commerce and, privacy rights

Pandemic, plague, pestilence and the tropics: critical inquiries from arts, humanities and social sciences

The Tropics have long been associated with exotic diseases and epidemics. This historical imaginary arose with Aristotle’s notion of the tropics as the ‘torrid zone’, a geographical region virtually uninhabitable to temperate peoples due to the hostility of its climate, and persisted in colonial imaginaries of the tropics as pestilential latitudes requiring slave labour. The tropical sites of colonialism gave rise to urgent studies of tropical diseases which lead to (racialised) changes in urban planning. The Tropics as a region of pandemic, plague and pestilence has been challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel coronavirus did not (simply) originate in the tropics, nor have peoples of the tropics been specifically or exclusively infected. The papers collected in this Special Issue disrupt the imaginary of pandemics, plague and pestilence in association with the tropics through critical, nuanced, and situated inquiries from cultural history, ethnography, cultural studies, science and technology studies, Indigenous knowledge, philosophy, anthropology, urban studies, cultural geography, literature and film analyses, and expressed through distinctive academic articles, poetry and speculative fiction

Plague and Violence in Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, 1917-1920

In this article I will examine the impact of the plague epidemics that hit the urban colonial society in Saint-Louis between 1917 and 1920. This research shows that because the poor, who lived in appalling hygienic conditions, were the most affected, the measures taken against the plague soon became discriminatory. The refusal by the medical authorities to find a compromise between what was necessary to prevent further contagion and the cultural and religious practices of the poor, especially funeral rites, provoked anger amongst the poor and resulted in a disobedience campaign which lasted several months. This crisis revealed a deep gap between the medical authorities who advocated the use of force against the rebels on the one side, and the political authorities on the other. Although well-know figures such as Carrera and Blaise Diagne intervened with the inhabitants of the contaminated areas, they failed to reconcile the two sides. The frightening idea of seeing the epidemics reach the better-off classes pushed the authorities to declare a state of emergency, force the recalcitrants to go to the lazaret, and set fire to the contaminated areas. The evacuated remained homeless until the day when the decision was made to rebuild Guet-Ndar

Plague and Violence in Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, 1917-1920

In this article I will examine the impact of the plague epidemics that hit the urban colonial society in Saint-Louis between 1917 and 1920. This research shows that because the poor, who lived in appalling hygienic conditions, were the most affected, the measures taken against the plague soon became discriminatory. The refusal by the medical authorities to find a compromise between what was necessary to prevent further contagion and the cultural and religious practices of the poor, especially funeral rites, provoked anger amongst the poor and resulted in a disobedience campaign which lasted several months. This crisis revealed a deep gap between the medical authorities who advocated the use of force against the rebels on the one side, and the political authorities on the other. Although well-know figures such as Carrera and Blaise Diagne intervened with the inhabitants of the contaminated areas, they failed to reconcile the two sides. The frightening idea of seeing the epidemics reach the better-off classes pushed the authorities to declare a state of emergency, force the recalcitrants to go to the lazaret, and set fire to the contaminated areas. The evacuated remained homeless until the day when the decision was made to rebuild Guet-Ndar

Beyond Resistance: Therapeutic Itinerary in Saint-Louis-du-Senegal between Indigenous and Scientific Medicine, 1820–1920

Drawing on oral traditions and archival materials, this article examines the validity of claims made by the French colonial physicians and administrators that the African patients’ mistrust of and resistance to biomedicine had to do with their superstition, apathy, and ignorance, as well as with the pressure exercised upon them by healers, marabouts, and midwives. It argues that the African patients’ therapeutic choices were rational and were informed by their cultural history