British “Health Effort” in Colonial Africa

Abstract

This chapter covers the British obsession for the separation of Africans from Europeans in residential patterns in order to insulate the two from the one-way contagion of diseases (from Africans to Europeans) alleged by the Europeans during the period in which they declared wars on epidemic infections in the colonial territories. It was curious that, despite the fact that the Europeans abhorred the tropics due to hot climate and associated diseases, most British officials thought at first they were invulnerable, to the extent that officials wore short khaki pants and sleeveless shirts, no matter how hot the temperatures might be in the tropical rainforest or the desert areas of Africa. Given that most of the new facilities would be constructed primarily for Europeans, the building policies resulted necessarily in segregation between whites and blacks and, in many instances—as in Accra, Ghana, Douala in Cameroon, and Dar-es-Salaam, in Tanganyika—the policy met violent resistance from Africans whose land and businesses were expropriated or moved to a different part of the countryside or city to provide space for European settlement. In Ghana, Governor Sir Matthew Nathan was very clear about what the Africans could bring to European sections, “if people were not segregated, as he thought Africans were not concerned about sanitation and doubted that they ever would” (Roberts 2003: 2).