Pub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000304
Tunde Decker
Abstract This article tells one of the many stories that remain largely untold despite the vast literature on colonial Lagos history. Although the social history of Lagos has witnessed increasing interest on the part of historians and scholars from other disciplines and has been told in relation to sex, childhood, social welfare, state, gender and elitism, many personal renditions of the city’s history are hidden from mainstream narratives. The article examines one such personal history. In particular, it exhumes narratives from the phenomenological content of Adunni’s story – of teenage and early adult years, largely lived in the late colonial period. Adunni’s personal experiences speak to those of other living (though few) individuals whose status as living archives often enriches scholarly interrogations but who are regarded as sources of history rather than history itself. This article presents Adunni as a telling example of this neglected aspect of colonial Lagos history.
{"title":"Girl at the margin: historicizing Adunni’s subjective rendition of colonial Lagos, 1930–60","authors":"Tunde Decker","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000304","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article tells one of the many stories that remain largely untold despite the vast literature on colonial Lagos history. Although the social history of Lagos has witnessed increasing interest on the part of historians and scholars from other disciplines and has been told in relation to sex, childhood, social welfare, state, gender and elitism, many personal renditions of the city’s history are hidden from mainstream narratives. The article examines one such personal history. In particular, it exhumes narratives from the phenomenological content of Adunni’s story – of teenage and early adult years, largely lived in the late colonial period. Adunni’s personal experiences speak to those of other living (though few) individuals whose status as living archives often enriches scholarly interrogations but who are regarded as sources of history rather than history itself. This article presents Adunni as a telling example of this neglected aspect of colonial Lagos history.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"23 1","pages":"315 - 333"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84478214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/s0001972022000225
T. Green
[...]although I did try to make references to Foucault’s biopower framework, which Hannah alludes to (in mentions of Giorgio Agamben’s work on the pandemic), I certainly did not develop these ideas fully. Since publication, I have become aware of other elements that I certainly would have included had I had more time for research. [...]of writing (December 12), data shows that Covid-19 has killed around 225,000 people on the African continent in almost two years, whereas roughly 9 million people die in Africa every year. 172,500 of these deaths have occurred in just 6 countries: [...]the total recorded Covid-deaths in the rest of the continent are less than 55,000. [...]all this to treat a disease that, as the mortality figures discussed above show, is less severe in Africa than existing endemic diseases on the continent. Since the book came out, I have conducted interviews for Collateral Global that confirm this analysis.
{"title":"The impacts of Covid policy responses in Africa: The Covid Consensus one year on","authors":"T. Green","doi":"10.1017/s0001972022000225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972022000225","url":null,"abstract":"[...]although I did try to make references to Foucault’s biopower framework, which Hannah alludes to (in mentions of Giorgio Agamben’s work on the pandemic), I certainly did not develop these ideas fully. Since publication, I have become aware of other elements that I certainly would have included had I had more time for research. [...]of writing (December 12), data shows that Covid-19 has killed around 225,000 people on the African continent in almost two years, whereas roughly 9 million people die in Africa every year. 172,500 of these deaths have occurred in just 6 countries: [...]the total recorded Covid-deaths in the rest of the continent are less than 55,000. [...]all this to treat a disease that, as the mortality figures discussed above show, is less severe in Africa than existing endemic diseases on the continent. Since the book came out, I have conducted interviews for Collateral Global that confirm this analysis.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"77 1","pages":"404 - 406"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85503750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000213
Abigail H. Neely
Drawing from research reports, epidemiological models, newspaper articles, press conferences and white papers from national governments, universities and organizations such as the WHO, he pieces together a story of rapid consensus that would have been hard to imagine in 2019. Perhaps, then, it is less about the character of people’s political leanings (authoritarian or not) and more about a racialized understanding of Covid-19 (the ‘China virus’), driven by China’s influence on isolation and quarantine measures, that determined who has supported public health measures and who has not. The expansion of the social safety net in the USA, the global uprisings in the summer of 2020, and a new attention to the central tenet of public health – to care for and protect the vulnerable – have all offered new possibilities for thinking about how we live together and how we support one another in this world.
{"title":"Toby Green, The Covid Consensus: the new politics of global inequality. London: C. Hurst & Co. (hb £14.99 – 978 1 78738 522 1). 2021, 294 pp.","authors":"Abigail H. Neely","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000213","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing from research reports, epidemiological models, newspaper articles, press conferences and white papers from national governments, universities and organizations such as the WHO, he pieces together a story of rapid consensus that would have been hard to imagine in 2019. Perhaps, then, it is less about the character of people’s political leanings (authoritarian or not) and more about a racialized understanding of Covid-19 (the ‘China virus’), driven by China’s influence on isolation and quarantine measures, that determined who has supported public health measures and who has not. The expansion of the social safety net in the USA, the global uprisings in the summer of 2020, and a new attention to the central tenet of public health – to care for and protect the vulnerable – have all offered new possibilities for thinking about how we live together and how we support one another in this world.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"11 1","pages":"401 - 403"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78662154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000158
M. Reddy
Relatedly, faith-based organizations were also influential in response efforts during Ebola and Zika, in part due to their ability to withstand time (in contrast to politicians, who come and go), as Chigudu correctly indicates.4 Ultimately, The Political Life of an Epidemic would greatly benefit from more comparative work with other epidemics, and in terms of political and social context. [...]it is hard to discern what is novel about this particular case study and what is generalizable. Overall, The Political Life of an Epidemic powerfully illustrates how the transformation of the bureaucratic state, in addition to the contentious politics of urban government, led to a public health disaster.
{"title":"Simukai Chigudu, The Political Life of an Epidemic: cholera, crisis and citizenship in Zimbabwe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hb £78.99 – 978 1 108 48910 2; pb £26.99 – 978 1 108 73344 1). 2020, v + 230 pp.","authors":"M. Reddy","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000158","url":null,"abstract":"Relatedly, faith-based organizations were also influential in response efforts during Ebola and Zika, in part due to their ability to withstand time (in contrast to politicians, who come and go), as Chigudu correctly indicates.4 Ultimately, The Political Life of an Epidemic would greatly benefit from more comparative work with other epidemics, and in terms of political and social context. [...]it is hard to discern what is novel about this particular case study and what is generalizable. Overall, The Political Life of an Epidemic powerfully illustrates how the transformation of the bureaucratic state, in addition to the contentious politics of urban government, led to a public health disaster.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"121 1","pages":"387 - 389"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90744384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000249
P. Richards
[...]faced with a world of disease hazards we have all helped to create, he proposes that our best hope may lie with activist engagement of the kind apparent in the HIV and AIDS response, where those most affected by the problem became adept at pushing both science and politics towards sustainable solutions. A high degree of integration between hierarchies of science and market institutions – the result, for example, of having a government scientific adviser with a background in private-sector pharmaceutical research – would be seen as a textbook example of the Williamson approach, effectively reducing transaction costs by coordinating policy demand and research supply. At the end, Alex de Waal excuses himself: ‘the policies and practices needed range far beyond the scope of this book’ (p. 230). [...]we must be patient and await the sequel, which promises to be as compelling reading as the present potent offering.
{"title":"Alex de Waal, New Pandemics, Old Politics: two hundred years of war on disease and its alternatives. Cambridge: Polity (hb £50 – 978 1 5095 4779 1; pb £15.99 – 978 1 5095 4780 7). 2021, 296 pp.","authors":"P. Richards","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000249","url":null,"abstract":"[...]faced with a world of disease hazards we have all helped to create, he proposes that our best hope may lie with activist engagement of the kind apparent in the HIV and AIDS response, where those most affected by the problem became adept at pushing both science and politics towards sustainable solutions. A high degree of integration between hierarchies of science and market institutions – the result, for example, of having a government scientific adviser with a background in private-sector pharmaceutical research – would be seen as a textbook example of the Williamson approach, effectively reducing transaction costs by coordinating policy demand and research supply. At the end, Alex de Waal excuses himself: ‘the policies and practices needed range far beyond the scope of this book’ (p. 230). [...]we must be patient and await the sequel, which promises to be as compelling reading as the present potent offering.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"3 1","pages":"409 - 410"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85157888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0001972022000146
Jacinta Victoria S. Muinde
Historical and political decisions (by both colonial and postcolonial states), including urban planning defined by racial segregation and spatial inequalities, failed public health infrastructure, and the postcolonial government’s struggle to maintain political power ‘converged to create a “perfect storm” for a ruinous cholera outbreak’ (p. 86). [...]Chigudu discusses what he terms ‘multiple ontologies’ to show the different forms, experiences and meanings the cholera epidemic took. [...]the exploration of historical memory and political subjectivities generated by the epidemic illustrates political consciousness amidst feelings of abandonment by the state.
{"title":"Simukai Chigudu, The Political Life of an Epidemic: cholera, crisis and citizenship in Zimbabwe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hb £78.99 – 978 1 108 48910 2; pb £26.99 – 978 1 108 73344 1). 2020, v + 230 pp.","authors":"Jacinta Victoria S. Muinde","doi":"10.1017/S0001972022000146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000146","url":null,"abstract":"Historical and political decisions (by both colonial and postcolonial states), including urban planning defined by racial segregation and spatial inequalities, failed public health infrastructure, and the postcolonial government’s struggle to maintain political power ‘converged to create a “perfect storm” for a ruinous cholera outbreak’ (p. 86). [...]Chigudu discusses what he terms ‘multiple ontologies’ to show the different forms, experiences and meanings the cholera epidemic took. [...]the exploration of historical memory and political subjectivities generated by the epidemic illustrates political consciousness amidst feelings of abandonment by the state.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"13 1","pages":"386 - 387"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91103497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/s0001972022000195
Marissa Mika
The questions and preoccupations animating this book were not so much about decolonizing global health as they were about how to write with sensitivity, honesty and integrity about the history of biomedical research and care in Eastern Africa. The theoretical architecture of the book was informed by discussions of experiments travelling 1 and the promises and shortcomings of the antiretroviral technofix for HIV. 2 I also engaged with scholars writing about the material realities of biomedicine in Africa, including debris, 3 traces, 4 improvisation, 5 capacity, 6 scrambling for Africa, 7 and Africa as a living laboratory. 8 ‘Decolonization’ was not on my radar. In the book, I write that we have ‘so much to learn from how Ugandan physician intellectuals, fieldworkers savvy in forging friendships, resilient patients, and invested caretakers keep things going: be they buildings, bodies, experiments, kitchens, therapeutics, blood banks, or optimism’ (p. 24).
{"title":"From Africanizing oncology to decolonizing global health: reflections on the biomedical turn in African health histories","authors":"Marissa Mika","doi":"10.1017/s0001972022000195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972022000195","url":null,"abstract":"The questions and preoccupations animating this book were not so much about decolonizing global health as they were about how to write with sensitivity, honesty and integrity about the history of biomedical research and care in Eastern Africa. The theoretical architecture of the book was informed by discussions of experiments travelling 1 and the promises and shortcomings of the antiretroviral technofix for HIV. 2 I also engaged with scholars writing about the material realities of biomedicine in Africa, including debris, 3 traces, 4 improvisation, 5 capacity, 6 scrambling for Africa, 7 and Africa as a living laboratory. 8 ‘Decolonization’ was not on my radar. In the book, I write that we have ‘so much to learn from how Ugandan physician intellectuals, fieldworkers savvy in forging friendships, resilient patients, and invested caretakers keep things going: be they buildings, bodies, experiments, kitchens, therapeutics, blood banks, or optimism’ (p. 24).","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"25 1","pages":"397 - 399"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78251641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/s0001972022000377
M. Sheftel
{"title":"Robert Molteno, 11 January 1943–31 January 2022","authors":"M. Sheftel","doi":"10.1017/s0001972022000377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972022000377","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"124 1","pages":"414 - 416"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86574641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/s0001972022000171
Jonathan D. Shaffer
lights the creativity and ingenuity necessary to refashion ‘the resources and oncological technologies brought through transnational cancer research partnerships to meet the needs of Ugandan cancer patients and their caretakers’ (p. 9). This is what she means by Africanizing Oncology. Conceptually, Mika deploys the term ‘experimental infrastructure’ ‘to describe the constellation of physical facilities, research questions, care practices, data collection procedures, and human labor that makes research and care function on a day-to-day basis at the Uganda Cancer Institute’ (p. 10). This framing and up-close analysis of experimental infrastructures, along with their contingent socio-material practices, are important for understanding the space of constrained possibility that characterizes the day-to-day work of Ugandan physicians, nurses, community health workers and researchers. If ‘research is our resource’, as the UCI slogan goes (p. 9), what does this say about a global health political economy that values certain experimental infrastructures over others? This case opens a more general question: how does global public health and biomedical knowledge get constructed and travel in a world riven by extreme inequality? What are the arrangements that enable anomalous healthcare delivery practices (the construction and maintenance of novel demonstration programmes, centres of excellence, extraordinary case examples, etc.) such as the UCI to serve as ‘epistemic hinges’2 capable of translating local experience into evidence, and evidence into extra-local (or global) justifications and demands for material redistribution for care delivery? More historically deep and geographically broad case studies like this one are important sites of social-scientific research. They are diagnostic of a broader field of symbolic and material struggle and can shed light on contemporary efforts to decolonize global health.
{"title":"Marissa Mika, Africanizing Oncology: creativity, crisis, and cancer in Uganda. Athens OH: Ohio University Press (hb US$80 – 978 0 8214 2465 0; pb US$34.95 – 978 0 8214 2509 1). 2021, 260 pp.","authors":"Jonathan D. Shaffer","doi":"10.1017/s0001972022000171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972022000171","url":null,"abstract":"lights the creativity and ingenuity necessary to refashion ‘the resources and oncological technologies brought through transnational cancer research partnerships to meet the needs of Ugandan cancer patients and their caretakers’ (p. 9). This is what she means by Africanizing Oncology. Conceptually, Mika deploys the term ‘experimental infrastructure’ ‘to describe the constellation of physical facilities, research questions, care practices, data collection procedures, and human labor that makes research and care function on a day-to-day basis at the Uganda Cancer Institute’ (p. 10). This framing and up-close analysis of experimental infrastructures, along with their contingent socio-material practices, are important for understanding the space of constrained possibility that characterizes the day-to-day work of Ugandan physicians, nurses, community health workers and researchers. If ‘research is our resource’, as the UCI slogan goes (p. 9), what does this say about a global health political economy that values certain experimental infrastructures over others? This case opens a more general question: how does global public health and biomedical knowledge get constructed and travel in a world riven by extreme inequality? What are the arrangements that enable anomalous healthcare delivery practices (the construction and maintenance of novel demonstration programmes, centres of excellence, extraordinary case examples, etc.) such as the UCI to serve as ‘epistemic hinges’2 capable of translating local experience into evidence, and evidence into extra-local (or global) justifications and demands for material redistribution for care delivery? More historically deep and geographically broad case studies like this one are important sites of social-scientific research. They are diagnostic of a broader field of symbolic and material struggle and can shed light on contemporary efforts to decolonize global health.","PeriodicalId":80373,"journal":{"name":"Africa : notiziario dell'Associazione fra le imprese italiane in Africa","volume":"111 1","pages":"393 - 394"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79312599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}