Description
Book SynopsisSituating sleeping sickness control within African intellectual worlds and political dynamics, Webel prioritizes local histories to understand the successes and failures of a widely used colonial public health intervention—the sleeping sickness camp—in dialogue with African strategies to mitigate illness and death in the past.
Trade Review“Rather than examining sleeping sickness controls relational (or reactive) to colonial interventions, Weber instead puts Africans’ understandings of the problem, in all their complex diversity, at centre stage…. The result is a book which is both sensitive and remarkable. Setting the bar to new heights, this book does an excellent job of effectively decentralising the western historical narratives that so many of us have tacitly absorbed, and perpetuated, for so long.” * European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health *
“Striking a deft balance between historical analysis and training historical attention to contemporary global health endeavors in Africa, Webel makes a substantial, original contribution to the history of science and medicine in Africa, the relationship between public health and politics in early colonial Africa, and African history more broadly.”
“Reading Mari Webel’s history of sleeping sickness control in German colonial East Africa in a time of global pandemic feels disturbingly relevant.” * H-Net/H-Africa *
