The history of medicine in colonial Africa is a well-studied domain; and there is no lack of research on the anthropology of biomedicine in contemporary Africa. In between the two, an entire sequence of African medical history – corresponding to the periods of late colonialism, independence, nation-building, the Cold War and neo-liberal reforms – seems to go missing. This book fills this void, and it does so with theoretical depth and extraordinary empirical material. The book retraces the Swiss experience of scientific research in Africa since the mid-twentieth century. It follows an institutional thread: the history of the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basle, seen from the perspective of its two outposts in a former French and in a former British colony, respectively: the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques (CSRS) in Ivory Coast, and the Swiss Tropical Institute Field Laboratory in Tanzania (STIFL). But the book is much more than a case-study: it recounts fascinating pages in the history of public health, nutrition and malaria research. It explores the uncharted territory of post-colonial medical science, and offers a precious prehistory of what is now known as global health.
This is a surprising topic at first sight: what has Switzerland – which was never an imperial nation – got to do with decolonisation and medicine in Africa? Lukas Meier shows that the answer goes well beyond the anecdotal. The significance of Swiss scientists in Africa is not only linked to major industrial-philanthropic players such as Novartis and Nestlé (whose involvement in nutrition studies in Ivory Coast makes for an absorbing chapter of the book), but also to the specific place of science and scientists in the political history of decolonisation. Science took a prominent role in the redefinition of colonial relationships at the moment of African independences: colonial scientists reinvented themselves as experts for the development of new nations, while the history of colonialism was officially rewritten as a benevolent process of knowledge and technology transfer. For example, the post-1960 trajectory of Ivory Coast illustrates how post-colonial science, education and development enabled a reinforced rather than loosened colonial ties after independence. In that context, the weak political presence of Switzerland on the continent became a comparative advantage: Meier demonstrates that Swiss scientists could strategically appear as ‘depoliticized’. They were able to embody development ‘in a pure state’, untainted by colonialism. As the history of the CSRS reveals, the French scientists of the ORSTOM (the former French colonial scientific agency) took advantage of this image by integrating Swiss scientists into their large research centre of Adiopoudoumé, near Abidjan. Swiss science was, because of its very lack of a colonial past, the vanguard of the new post-colonial science; and its presence in Ivory Coast was instrumental in decolonising French science in the colonies. Not without paradox, this benign image enabled Swiss actors to rise as major players in the African scientific landscape.
Meier’s book proposes a series of microhistories of Swiss–African collaborative research, from the age of DDT and modernisation after the Second World War to the ‘Africanisation’ of Swiss scientific institutions in the 1990s, in the context of harsh economic restrictions. The focus of Swiss actors allows Meier to adopt a lateral perspective on the French and British decolonisation, on the trajectory of independent Tanzania and Ivory Coast and on the effects of neo-liberal reforms in these countries – an astute way to look at African history. The central hypothesis of the book is that science and decolonisation were mutually constitutive: the idea of development (guided, by definition, by scientific expertise) was the key operator between the two terms, as it redefined, legitimised and eventually destabilised the relations of dependence inherited from the colonial experience. The book explores how the coupling of expertise and intervention, which is integral to the modernist definition of development, has been problematised in various ways: its successive chapters analyse the extractive, utopian and elitist logics of colonial science; the fully functional development-science nexus of the post-independence years; and the gradual disentanglement between research and intervention from the 1980s, associated with the drastic neo-liberal reforms of the Ivorian and Tanzanian states. Meier shows that the loosening of the modernist science-development nexus not only resulted in renouncing the aim to ‘transform’ Africa, but also in a valuation of basic science per se and an increased spatial concentration of interventions – leading to the creation of ‘enclaves of excellence’. The last chapter, focused on research on malaria conducted in Tanzania, illustrates this, with the fascinating stories of the trials of the ‘Pattoroyo vaccine’ and of the IPT (Intermittent preventive therapy) strategy. The book eventually succeeds in revealing both the historical layers and the fundamental contingence of our current ‘global health’ configuration. It is not by accident, finally, that the book reads like a succession of utopian schemes and failed projects, of deceived ‘expectations of modernity’, of forgotten miracle solutions and abandoned experimental villages: the landscape of global health in Africa is shaped by this past of scientific futures and failures – which could have been discussed more explicitly as such.
The book is theoretically ambitious, for good reasons. Meier was faced with a greatly contrasting set of sources: the ‘seductive order’ of colonial governmental archives, the fragile archives of African states, and the perpetually relocated, perpetually threatened documentation of European scientific institutions and private firms. Drawing from the propositions of ‘histoire croisée’ and historical anthropology, he proposes for this reason a reflective approach to archives, and makes a frequent use of biographies, of case-studies within case-studies, of connections and comparisons between the various sites of his research. This makes for demanding reading, but the result is a goldmine of original stories of science, politics and public health in Africa.
