Making and unmaking public health in Africa

This excellent volume explores the diverse meanings of public health in Africa. Our current vision of public health – as work by modern governments to protect and promote the health of citizens – is most fully embodied in twentieth-century European welfare and socialist states. But in Africa, as the contributors show, we cannot take these meanings for granted. In the introduction Prince argues that pre-colonial understandings of health extended beyond the boundaries of the body, and interventions such as witch cleansing also aimed to ensure the fertility of land and livestock. During the early colonial period the provision of biomedicine was patchy: whilst governments conducted preventative campaigns against diseases such as sleeping sickness, missionaries provided curative services. Colonial administrations half-heartedly exported public health to Africa during the 1940s, and newly independent African governments continued to implement public health programmes to secure development. More recently, while structural adjustment programmes impeded health care development, discourses of global health are now prominent and a proliferation of NGOs target specific needs.

Colonialism · Economic growth · Embodied cognition · Health care · Political science · Public health · Sociology · Work (physics) · HIV/AIDS Impact and Responses · Law · Medicine · Nursing

• Partial Publics

  Open Access•Stacey Ann Langwick•Current Anthropology•2015

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• Global health photography behind the façade of empowerment and decolonisation

  Open Access•Arsenii Alenichev, Koen Peeters Grietens et al.•Global Public Health•2024

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