Quinine, Whisky, and Sun Helmets: Amateur Medicine in British East and South-Central Africa, 1890-1939

<p>Historians have extensively studied colonial doctors in Africa, and the connection between colonial medical services and imperial power. The focus has, however, fallen almost exclusively on medical practice by trained, qualified, and professional doctors and nurses, and neglected amateur treatments carried out by white settlers. This project explores amateur medical treatment in rural parts of British East and South-Central Africa, primarily Kenya and Rhodesia, between 1890 and 1939. It draws upon a range of memoirs, novels, letters, and advice books, most notably the memoirs of white settler women including Karen Blixen, Elspeth Huxley, Hylda Richards, and Alyse Simpson. The time period is characterised by a marked contrast between the emergence of tropical medicine and hygiene on the one hand, and, on the other, a continuation of nineteenth-century medical ideas, techniques, and widespread fears of the tropical climate. During the 1890s, tropical medicine and hygiene developed as specialised professional fields of expertise. Yet despite substantial tropical medical advances during and after the 1890s, the disease environment of East and South-Central Africa remained associated with high mortality and morbidity for white settlers. White bodies continued to be viewed, in the popular mind, as profoundly vulnerable to the African environment. Pre-germ theory etiologies of disease and treatment techniques persisted within white settler communities. This thesis studies the medical skills, ideas, and practices of white settlers in the region. It demonstrates that much of settlers’ medical care was performed by other settlers, positioning amateur treatment as crucial to colonial health. The discussion considers advice produced and disseminated through the flourishing print culture of African guidebooks and tropical medical handbooks; tropical outfitting; the translation of popular medical and hygiene advice into white settler practice; and the amateur treatment techniques (most importantly, quinine, alcohol, and disinfectant) and body protection methods that feature in memoirs and letters. Malaria forms a major theme in amateur treatment and prevention. The thesis also examines white settler women’s amateur medical practice in African communities, and the shifting patterns of agency and colonial hegemony within these intimate medical encounters. It argues that settlers’ medical practice displayed a distinctive set of techniques and ideas that adapted, re-worked, and re-interpreted professional medical advice. It concludes that settlers’ amateur medical practice formed an essential element of colonial medicine and bolstered British authority in the region.</p>

Quinine, Whisky, and Sun Helmets: Amateur Medicine in British East and South-Central Africa, 1890-1939

<p>Historians have extensively studied colonial doctors in Africa, and the connection between colonial medical services and imperial power. The focus has, however, fallen almost exclusively on medical practice by trained, qualified, and professional doctors and nurses, and neglected amateur treatments carried out by white settlers. This project explores amateur medical treatment in rural parts of British East and South-Central Africa, primarily Kenya and Rhodesia, between 1890 and 1939. It draws upon a range of memoirs, novels, letters, and advice books, most notably the memoirs of white settler women including Karen Blixen, Elspeth Huxley, Hylda Richards, and Alyse Simpson. The time period is characterised by a marked contrast between the emergence of tropical medicine and hygiene on the one hand, and, on the other, a continuation of nineteenth-century medical ideas, techniques, and widespread fears of the tropical climate. During the 1890s, tropical medicine and hygiene developed as specialised professional fields of expertise. Yet despite substantial tropical medical advances during and after the 1890s, the disease environment of East and South-Central Africa remained associated with high mortality and morbidity for white settlers. White bodies continued to be viewed, in the popular mind, as profoundly vulnerable to the African environment. Pre-germ theory etiologies of disease and treatment techniques persisted within white settler communities. This thesis studies the medical skills, ideas, and practices of white settlers in the region. It demonstrates that much of settlers’ medical care was performed by other settlers, positioning amateur treatment as crucial to colonial health. The discussion considers advice produced and disseminated through the flourishing print culture of African guidebooks and tropical medical handbooks; tropical outfitting; the translation of popular medical and hygiene advice into white settler practice; and the amateur treatment techniques (most importantly, quinine, alcohol, and disinfectant) and body protection methods that feature in memoirs and letters. Malaria forms a major theme in amateur treatment and prevention. The thesis also examines white settler women’s amateur medical practice in African communities, and the shifting patterns of agency and colonial hegemony within these intimate medical encounters. It argues that settlers’ medical practice displayed a distinctive set of techniques and ideas that adapted, re-worked, and re-interpreted professional medical advice. It concludes that settlers’ amateur medical practice formed an essential element of colonial medicine and bolstered British authority in the region.</p>

Plant Stories are Love Stories Too: Moss + Curation

In 2020, after a year of dreaming, we officially embarked on the development of Moss Projects: Curatorial Learning + Research, an educational and philosophical space that aims at peeling away the colonial layers of the art museum, within the context of Turtle Island (now North America), to imagine something else. This initiative supports peer-to-peer pedagogies alongside Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour-led and allied inquiry and practices, valuing diverse knowledge systems and modes of organization beyond dominant parameters of curation, art, and art history. As white settler and Black Canadian curators, we are founding Moss Projects as a collaborative, reflexive, and praxis-based process, utilizing our professional resources for curatorial incubation and to establish spaces and mechanisms for sharing cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary methodologies.

From the Subcontinent with Love

“Africa weaves a magic spell around even a temporary visitor,” wrote the former Indian high commissioner to East and Central Africa, Apa Pant, in 1987, echoing the allure that the continent had over him and other fellow Indian diplomats. But the diplomatic roles of men like Pant and the history of Indian engagement with Rhodesia has not, until now, been explored. This article argues that the central role of India in the colonial world ensured that London reined in the white settler Rhodesian government from enacting discriminatory legislation against its minority Indian populations. After Indian independence in 1947, the postcolonial government shifted from advocating specifically for the rights of Indians overseas to ideological support for the independence of oppressed peoples across the British colonial world, a mission with which it tasked its diplomatic representatives. But after India left its post in Salisbury in 1965, Indian public rhetorical support for African nationalist movements in Rhodesia was not matched by its private support for British settlement plans that were largely opposed by the leading African political parties in the country, colored by private patronizing attitudes by India's representatives toward African nationalists and the assumption that they were not yet ready to govern themselves.

Ongoing Conversations: Collaboration across positionality, time, and space

This article explores positional artistic and curatorial motivations for ethical collaborative work in the context of contemporary arts and social justice. Case studies include exhibition installations in settler institutions that challenge dominant, monolithic representations of what “belonging” means in contested sites like Canada. In doing so, this ongoing work between white settler curator and Black queer artist reflects on some of the decolonizing possibilities and limitations of critical cross-cultural collaboration and exhibition-making over time and across space.

reading with Simpson and Lindberg: re-membering kinshipties, layered bodies and visitation (w)rites

This article reads with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe writer and independent scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Nêhiyaw legal scholar and novelist Tracey Lindberg. The practice of reading with involves heeding textual instructions and prioritising narrative terms of engagement. Indigenous bodies layered with resurgent potential in Lindberg’s and Simpson’s fictions refuse to re-centre the legacy of white settler coloniality. Attending to the process of reading with, as a relational undertaking, involves re-apprising cross-generational legacies and re-membering collective responsibilities.

Reframing Suicide

What can narratives of suicide tell us about diasporic and Indigenous relationships to the white settler state? This article engages relational critique to examine trans/femme/bisexual South Asian Canadian filmmaker Vivek Shraya's short film I want to kill myself (2017) and queer Cree/Métis filmmaker Adam Garnet Jones's feature film Fire Song (2015). Both films challenge the spectacularity of suicide, effectively situating suicide on a continuum of “slow death.” However, the films also stage distinct relationships between suicide, community, and the state that emerge from diasporic and Native positionalities within a white settler society. Whereas Shraya's diasporic struggle with suicide is alleviated by forging community within settler spaces, Fire Song counters pathologizing depictions of reserve communities by emphasizing resurgent Indigenous practices and their refusal of settler logics.

Boer War

The Boer War of 1899–1902, also termed the Anglo-Boer War or South African War, was waged by Britain to establish its imperial supremacy in South Africa and by Boers/Afrikaners to defend their independent republican order and control of the destiny of the white settler states they had secured in the interior. Large, long, controversial and costly, the Boer War was a colonial conflict which finally completed the British imperial conquest of the Southern African region. As is to be expected of a war that has a widely recognized significance not only in the history of European imperialism in Southern Africa but in world history more generally, literature on the 1899–1902 conflict is, simply, enormous. Scholarship is available not merely in English and in Afrikaans, but also in Dutch, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and even in Japanese. As it happens, more recent decades have seen the publication of sizeable bibliographies covering a century of writings on the Boer War in German and in Dutch. Although it could obviously not be claimed that every aspect of the 1899–1902 period—military, political, economic, social, or cultural—has been treated, evenly or otherwise, by so vast a body of literature, the sheer quantity of work available has to influence the scope and selectivity of any Boer War bibliography of this kind. While this bibliographic article includes some seminal early pieces, it is weighted toward more recently works and, in particular, includes scholarship which contains detailed bibliographies covering aspects of warfare (battles, sieges) that are not a specific focus of the approach taken here. Secondly, other classifiable areas of historiography which fall beyond the limits of this article, such as war memory and commemoration, and postwar economic reconstruction and political state-making, are treated—in some instances, quite substantially—in single-author general overviews and in multi-author edited treatments. In other respects, this article goes beyond more conventional historical terrain in including the war’s literary and cultural influences.

Suicide justice: Adopting Indigenous feminist methods in settler suicidology

White settler colonies around the world have long reported disproportionately high rates of Indigenous suicides, a consequence of the continuing violence of imperialism. This article posits a need for interdisciplinary approaches to address this crisis and therefore turns to humanist methods developed in Indigenous and feminist scholarship. I analyze texts from U.S. psychologist Edwin Shneidman to rearticulate their relationship to what I call settler suicidology. I then evoke literary critic Eve K. Sedgwick’s reparative reading method to reimagine suicide prevention as suicide justice, reading the novel There There by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) to advocate for distributive justice as a new approach to Indigenous suicide crises. My term suicide justice names increasing accountability between settler suicide workers and the communities they seek to serve.