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SOCIAL HISTORY, BIOLOGY, AND THE EMERGENCE OF HIV IN COLONIAL AFRICA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2013

Tamara Giles-Vernick ,
Ch. Didier Gondola ,
Guillaume Lachenal  and
William H. Schneider
Tamara Giles-Vernick*
Affiliation:
Institut Pasteur-Paris
Ch. Didier Gondola*
Affiliation:
Indiana University-Purdue University
Guillaume Lachenal*
Affiliation:
Université Paris 7 Denis-Diderot
William H. Schneider*
Affiliation:
Indiana University-Purdue University
*
Authors' email: tamara.giles-vernick@pasteur.fr
gondola@iupui.edu
lachenal@univ-paris-diderot.fr
whschnei@iupui.edu
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Abstract

This essay considers how historians of Africa can draw from and critically contribute to biomedical debates. Recent virological research has established that the HIV/AIDS pandemic began with the passage of simian immunodeficiency viruses into human populations in the first half of the twentieth century. Current debates on the emergence of HIV are an opportunity for historians to engage with biomedical research to rethink social, political, and environmental histories of Africa. While biomedical writings focus on HIV ‘origins’, we propose a broader look at the historical changes associated with the beginnings of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Keywords

HealthdiseasemedicineCentral AfricaHIV/AIDSenvironmenturban
Type
JAH Forum: Health and Illness in African History
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 11 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The authors would like to thank Jim Webb for helpful comments on and conversations around this article.

References

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15 Iliffe, African AIDS. The first book-length analysis, Grmek's History of AIDS, insightfully recognized iatrogenesis as an important means of transmission.

16 While colonial authorities did conduct smallpox vaccination campaigns, there was never a vaccination campaign against sleeping sickness. Arm-to-arm inoculation was a technique predating colonial campaigns. Iliffe, African AIDS, 7.

17 Iliffe, African AIDS, 16.

18 Timberg and Halperin, Tinderbox.

19 Ibid. 50–1, 57.

20 De Sousa et al., ‘High GUD’, e9936.

21 The railway was constructed between 1921 and 1934. Pépin uncovers intriguing medical reports from the Congo-Océan Railway construction that document a mysterious, fatal illness among railroad construction workers (‘Cachéxie de Mayombe’). Its symptoms were ‘suggestive of AIDS’. Pépin, Origins, 36–9.

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23 See for instance de Sousa et al., ‘High GUD’, e9936; Pépin, Origins, 45–6, 91, and 93.

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29 Our expanding group is in the early stages of developing this research.

30 Keele et al., ‘Chimpanzee reservoirs’, 523–6. On the ‘cut hunter’ see Pépin, Origins, ch. 4.

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37 Giles-Vernick and Rupp, ‘Visions’, 59–60 and 63.

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39 The first hunting laws in French Equatorial Africa (1916) created several hunting permits for purchase, giving sport and commercial hunters more latitude than African hunters in the numbers and types of game they could kill. These laws also limited the number of gorillas that could be killed; chimpanzee hunting was not outlawed until 1929–30.

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48 De Sousa et al., ‘High GUD’, e9936.

49 De Sousa et al., ‘High GUD’, e9936.

50 Colonial sources indicate the absence of ‘sex work’ and serial prostitution in Central Africa prior to French and Belgian colonization. For example, in his Enquête coloniale dans l'Afrique française occidentale et équatoriale (published in 1930), French ethnographer Maurice Delafosse links prostitution to urbanization and ‘European civilization’; see Gondola, Villes miroirs, 111.

51 In the late 1920s, alarmed by what they perceived as endemic ‘prostitution’, colonial authorities ruled it a moral, health, and criminal matter. They suspected that sex traffickers had set up maisons de passe (unregulated brothels) in African settlements but lacked the means to ascertain the brothels’ existence or to conduct widespread police operations. Instead, they registered single women (filles publiques) and rounded them up for regular medical exams. Lauro, A., Coloniaux, ménagères et prostituées au Congo Belge, 1885–1930 (Loverval, Belgique, 2005)Google Scholar, 166 and 177.

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53 See discussion at <http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?root=17227>.

54 Gondola, Villes miroirs, 111. The need for Victorian men to have a ménagère (African maid) camouflaged their view of the colony as a place replete with ‘sexual opportunities’ since the ménagère provided a rampart against the ‘venereal peril’. Lauro, Coloniaux, 33, 68, and 92.

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60 Pépin, in his search for ‘patient zero’, minimizes the role of transfusion. Providing little evidence to support his claim, he concludes that because so many children received blood transfusions, they represented ‘epidemiological dead ends’. Pépin, personal communication, June 2010; Pépin, Origins, 159–60.

61 Piot, P. and Bartos, M., ‘The epidemiology of HIV and AIDS’, in Essex, M., Mboup, S., Kanki, P. J., Marlink, R. G., et al. (eds.), AIDS in Africa (New York, 2002), 200–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baggaley, R. F., Boily, M. C., White, R. G., and Alary, M., ‘Risk of HIV-1 transmission for parenteral exposure and blood transfusion: a systematic review and meta-analysis’, AIDS, 20:6 (2006), 805–12CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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63 The earliest identified transfusion in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) took place in Tanganyika; it was conducted by a Belgian doctor on a European officer suffering from blackwater fever. Lejeune, E., ‘Transfusion sanguine après hémoglobinurie grave’, Annales de la société Belge de la médecine tropicale, 1 (1921), 299–300Google Scholar.

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66 Schneider, ‘History of blood’.

67 Lemey et al., ‘Tracing the Origin’, 6588–92.

68 See Pépin and Labbé, ‘Noble Goals’, 744–53. For smallpox, see Schneider, W. H., ‘Smallpox in Africa during colonial rule’, Medical History, 53:2 (2009), 193–227CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

69 For example, see Hahn et al., ‘AIDS as a zoonosis’, 607–14.

70 Early critiques include; Dozon, J.-P. and Fassin, D., ‘Raison épidémiologique et raisons d’État. Les enjeux socio-politiques du SIDA en Afrique’, Sciences sociales et santé, 7:1 (1989), 21–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fassin, D., Quand les corps se souviennent: expériences et politiques du sida en Afrique du Sud (Paris, 2006), 228–38Google Scholar; Lock and Nguyen, Anthropology, 103–7; Packard, R. M. and Epstein, P., ‘Epidemiologists, social scientists, and the structure of medical research on AIDS in Africa’, Social Science & Medicine, 33:7 (1991), 771–94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

71 Tousignant, N., ‘Trypanosomes, toxicity and resistance: the politics of mass therapy in French Colonial Africa’, Social History of Medicine, 25:3 (2012), 625–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; G. Lachenal, ‘Biomédecine et décolonisation au Cameroun, 1944–1994: technologies, figures et institutions médicales à l'épreuve’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Université Paris 7 Denis-Diderot), 2006.

72 Foucault, M., ‘Crise de la médecine ou crise de l'anti-médecine? (1976)’, Dits et écrits 1954–1988, Volume 1 (Paris, 2001), 813–28Google Scholar.

73 For discussion of accidents during French sleeping sickness campaigns, see Tousignant, ‘Trypanosomes’; and Bado, J.-P., Eugène Jamot, 1879–1937: le médecin de la maladie du sommeil ou trypanosomiase (Paris, 2011)Google Scholar.

74 Although it never figured into campaigns, intravenous malaria treatment also transmitted hepatitis C in Cameroon. Pépin et al., ‘Risk factors’, 772 and 774.

75 Similarly, see Little, L. K., ‘Plague historians in lab coats’, Past and Present, 213:1 (2011), 289–90CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

76 Our team would welcome additional participants with relevant expertise in West Africa.

77 Ginzburg, C., ‘Clues: roots of an evidential paradigm’, in Ginzburg, C., Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, 1989), 96–125Google Scholar.

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79 HIV transmission from Haiti to the United States, for instance, was epidemiologically successful only once, despite continuous contact between Haitian and American populations. M. Worobey, ‘From natural hosts to other species. What can we learn?’, Paper presented to the conference, ‘Simian viruses and emerging diseases in humans’, Université Paris Diderot, 9 June 2010, Paris.

80 For a problematic example, see Wolfe, N., The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age (New York, 2011)Google Scholar. For a critical perspective on this view, see Lachenal, G., ‘Lessons in medical nihilism. Virus hunters, neoliberalism and the AIDS crisis in Cameroon’, in Geissler, P. W. (ed.), Para-states of Science: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on Biomedicine, Government and Public in 21st-century Africa (Durham, NC, forthcoming 2013)Google Scholar.

81 On the importance of investing in health care structures and training to prevent pandemic emergence, see also Bogich, T. L., Chunara, R., Scales, D., Chan, E., et al., ‘Preventing pandemics via international development: a systems approach’, PLoS Medicine, 9:12 (2012), doi: 10.1371/journal/pmed.1001354CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.