Customer Reviews

The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900-1940 (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine)

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The tsetse fly, and the animal and human trypanosomiasis ("nagana") it transmits, is a major, uniquely African problem, causing misery and hindering economic development over huge regions. Lyons's book adds greatly to our understanding of efforts to control the "fly," not least because she very effectively exploits Belgian, British and Sudanese archives. As a full study of policy and practice in the major colony of the Belgian Congo, it also adds an important dimension to the history of African environments, previously dominated by research on British Africa. The main contrast between the two approaches was that Britain sought to control tsetse-friendly areas by modifying the landscape, basically waging war against vegetation, while Belgium sought to minimize infection among human populations through forced resettlement and coercive quarantine measures. This enhanced Africans' resentment and sense of injury under Belgian rule, but both policies barely grasped how colonial-era changes aided the spread of fly belts. "Colonial Disease" is a fine if primarily documentary study, and would probably be better with more access to materials in Congo/Zaire. Though it has some good interview data, its fieldwork component is less strong than J. Giblin, "The Politics of Environmental Control in Northeastern Tanzania," and the forbidding classic by J. Ford, "The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology." F. Lambrecht, "In the Shade of an Acacia Tree" is a Belgian-American's vivid memoir of 1950s glossinology, or tsetse science.