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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/27588 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Alade, Adebisi |
| Contributors | Ibhawoh, Bonny, History |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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