Residual unprotection: aflatoxin research and regulation in Senegal's postcolonial peanut infrastructures

Abstract

In the early 1960s, a potentially carcinogenic substance, aflatoxin, was identified in peanuts. In this article, I explore how aflatoxin was known–and unknown–through and for the infrastructures designed, from the late nineteenth century, to stimulate and support peanut farming in Senegal. Anticipated European standards stimulated a narrow field of knowledge and know-how oriented towards control-for-export, bypassing Senegalese farms, food, and bodies. Investigations of aflatoxin's carcinogenicity were actively suppressed, challenged, and silenced. That (post)colonial infrastructures supported peanuts as an export cash crop and a target of European regulation–but not as part of local ecologies and foodways–mattered for how they were deemed (not) worth knowing as potentially contaminated and carcinogenic from the 1960s. I develop the notion of residual unprotection to highlight how the enduring effects of colonial infrastructures distributed (through regulatory gaps) and obscured (through non-knowledge) the potential harmfulness of aflatoxin in Senegal.