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This licentiate thesis describes and analyses the modern history of the socio-technical systems for urban water supply and sanitation in East Africa with focus on Uganda and Kenya. The key objective of the thesis is to evaluate to what extent the historic processes frame and influence the water and sanitation services sectors in these countries today. The theoretical approach combines the Large Technical Systems approach from the discipline of History of Technology with New Institutional Economics. Throughout, urban water and sanitation service systems are regarded as socio-technical systems, where institutions, organisation and technology all interact. The thesis consists of three separate articles and a synthesis in the form of a framework narrative. The first article provides a discussion of the theoretical framework with special focus on the application of Public Goods theory to urban water and sanitation. The second article describes the establishment of the large-scale systems for water supply and sanitation in Kampala, Uganda in the period 1920-1950. The third article focuses on the politics of urban water supply in Kenya with emphasis on the period 1900-1990. The main findings in this thesis are that the socio-technical systems for urban water and sanitation evolve over long periods of time and are associated with inertia that makes these systems change slowly. The systems were established in the colonial period to mainly respond to the needs and preferences of a wealthy minority and a technological paradigm evolved based on capital-intensive and large-scale technology. Attempts to expand services to all citizens in the post-colonial period under this paradigm were not sustainable due to changes in the social, political and economic environment while incentives for technological change were largely absent. History thus frames decisions in the public sphere even today, through technological and institutional inertia. Knowing the history of these socio-technical systems is therefore important, in order to understand key sector constraints, and for developing more sustainable service provision. / <p>QC 20101122</p>

This thesis is a revised history of the Royal Niger Company. It seeks to include perspectives and narratives missing from the company's history. These are the contribution of its African employees to the company's trading and military operations as well as the link between the company's need for managers and skilled artisans that could work in the disease climate of the Niger with the rise of a new social class in West Africa. This class here, referred to as Anglicized Africans, came into existence as Africans acquired western education and artisan training in missionary schools on the West Coast of Africa. Without the Anglicized Africans, maintaining trading stations and steam vessels on the Niger would not have been possible. At the same time, working for the company gave Anglicized Africans opportunities for material and social advancement not available to other indigenous people. The Anglicized Africans who worked with the RNC in the early colonial phase of company rule would later play a critical role in colonial politics and anti-colonial nationalism. This study draws attention to their antecedents to help us better understand their later role in the colonial and post-colonial states. The thesis also explores how the company's operations affected existing social and political structures in West Africa. The most significant conflicts were the company's wars with the Nembe Kingdom and the Sokoto Caliphate. The internal political changes within the Nembe Kingdom due to the Akassa War have not been discussed in previous company histories. This revised history of the company explains how conflict with the RNC caused the balance of power within the Nembe state to shift to a previously marginalized Christian faction led by Anglicized Africans. The thesis also expands on the company's operation of a fully functioning army of African and European soldiers, the largest British fighting force on the Niger from 1886 to 1899. The tactics and strategy of this semi-autonomous military force are explored for the first time, and the integration of the Constabulary into the West African Frontier Force is covered in more detail than has previously been done. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis is a revised history of the Royal Niger Company. It seeks to include perspectives and narratives missing from the company's history. Previous histories of the company have not sufficiently included the perspectives of the Africans who interacted with the company as employees, customers, competitors, and adversaries. This dissertation seeks to remedy this problem by using archival sources to glean information about the lives and perspectives of these Africans. It also covers the conflicts between the company and indigenous polities, especially the Akassa War, in more detail than has previously been done. It also seeks to clarify the somewhat muddled history of the transition of the Royal Niger Constabulary into the West African Frontier Force. The Constabulary was a precursor of the Frontier Force, and the transition of its personnel and traditions into the new force is one of the lasting legacies of the company.

This thesis examines how Black queer men and transmasculine individuals navigate Black heteronormative and White queer spaces in New Orleans. Over the last few decades, articles, including anthropological and sociological, have focused on the relationship between race, gender performance, sexuality, and emotional expression among men such as Christian (2005), which analyzed how Black queer men expressed their masculinity within queer spaces (Christian 2005). This thesis builds on this literature to explore how societal and cultural pressures of masculinity can hinder Black queer men institutionally, socially, and romantically.

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The specters of violence and economic insecurity have haunted the Sudan since its independence in 1956. The United States Congress has held numerous hearings on the Sudan's civil war and U.S. television news outlets have reported on the conflict since 1983. While attempting to engage the Sudan in a viable peace process, the U.S. Congress has been beset by ineffectual Cold War paradigms and an inability to understand the complexities of the Sudan civil war. U.S. television news programs, on the other hand, engaged in a process of oversimplification, using false dichotomies to reduce the conflict into easily digestible pieces. This thesis will analyze the overall tone and focus of U.S. Congressional hearings and television news broadcasts on the Sudan and demonstrate the problematic factors in their portrayals of the war.

This thesis discusses how the gender dynamics and religious festivals of the Yoruba people in Isaga Orile were not affected by colonialism. The study draws on various accounts, particularly from the Church Missionary Society’s journals, to attest to colonialism's restructuring of male political hegemony. Focusing on two major festivals, Gelede and Oro, the study argues that men's inclusion in Gelede reinforces female supremacy, while the Oro society shows men's hegemony and restrains women from its activities. The study found that gender dominants in these festivals played complementary roles by mirroring female and male roles within the Isaga Orile political system. The study concludes that these festivals strengthened political and gender dynamics in pre-colonial times and continued to do so during the British colonial regime, providing opportunities for women and men to assert their dominance and complement each other's roles in society, despite the restructuring of male political hegemony by colonialism.

Studies on empire have shown that colonialism generated new disease environments and complicated old disease experiences in Africa. These conditions necessitated a mission to sanitize Africans and their environment in British West Africa since the colonies had to be conducive for European colonial officials and their African labor, especially given the region’s image as the “white man’s grave.” However, colonial administrations lacked the skills, adequate personnel, and materials to transform territories like western Nigeria into desired healthy locations for European personnel or colonized Africans. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, most Africans resisted the preventive health measures introduced in Yoruba towns, including environmental sanitation projects to reduce mosquito breeding spots. This was not simply because the initiative threatened African livelihood but rather because many Africans were too poor to pay the cost of the British modernizing projects, including pipe-borne water and odor-proof latrine buckets. As most Africans resisted some of these initiatives and negotiated others to improve their health and social conditions, their politics of resistance shaped public health development in western Nigeria. This is significant to African history because it reveals how the administrative policing of environmental sanitation and health adds nuance to our understanding of empire, particularly the complex relationship between Africans of different social classes and between Africans and the colonial governments in Western Nigerian towns. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation is about the history of British preventive health in western Nigeria from the late nineteenth century to the end of the second world war. It contributes to the social history of medicine, health, and environment as it explores Africans’ experience of British imperial hygiene and public sanitation programs. Specifically, the study focuses on how public health projects such as potable water, public latrine, and waste management shaped people’s lives and how Africans shaped the health initiatives in return. The study argues that most of the preventive health programs the British colonial authorities introduced in western Nigerian towns during the period under review had a minimal impact on African health. This was because the colonial government and most Africans had opposing views on how public health initiatives should be executed in an environment of budget restraints and poverty. The study thus shows how Africans resisted some public health initiatives and negotiated others in an attempt to improve their health and social conditions. By exploring major colonial initiatives that sought to transform the Nigerian environment into a more healthy place and the people into environmentally responsible subjects, the study argues that colonized Africans were not passive onlookers during the transformation of their public health system. Rather, their politics of resistance shaped colonial health development.

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