A Mission to Sanitize: Public Health, Colonial Authority, and African Agency in Western Nigeria, 1900-1945

Abstract

Studies on empire have shown that colonialism generated new disease environments and complicated old disease experiences in Africa. These conditions necessitated a mission to sanitize Africans and their environment in British West Africa since the colonies had to be conducive for European colonial officials and their African labor, especially given the region’s image as the “white man’s grave.” However, colonial administrations lacked the skills, adequate personnel, and materials to transform territories like western Nigeria into desired healthy locations for European personnel or colonized Africans. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, most Africans resisted the preventive health measures introduced in Yoruba towns, including environmental sanitation projects to reduce mosquito breeding spots. This was not simply because the initiative threatened African livelihood but rather because many Africans were too poor to pay the cost of the British modernizing projects, including pipe-borne water and odor-proof latrine buckets. As most Africans resisted some of these initiatives and negotiated others to improve their health and social conditions, their politics of resistance shaped public health development in western Nigeria. This is significant to African history because it reveals how the administrative policing of environmental sanitation and health adds nuance to our understanding of empire, particularly the complex relationship between Africans of different social classes and between Africans and the colonial governments in Western Nigerian towns.