Black Bodies and White Doctors: Knowledge in the Service of the Colonial Project
Eighteenth-century sketches of faces, drawn by the German physician Petrus Camper, present the African man's face as closer to a beast and further from the "ideal beauty" represented by the white man.
In 2005, the French right-wing government put forward a controversial bill in the National Assembly (lower chamber of Parliament) called the "Law on Recognition of the Nation and National Contribution for the Benefit of Returning French". Article 4 of it states that school curricula should refer to a "positive role." for colonization. Although this article was abolished at the time, it revealed the existence of a large section of the French political and intellectual elites who still look proud of the colonial era, and consider it a positive role, implicitly or unconsciously, considering it a historical stage necessary to bring the colonial peoples out of the darkness of backwardness to the lights of modernity .
But in contrast to these right-wing elites, an influential sector of researchers emerged within the French scientific research streams working on the history of this era, or what it considers as the black scar on the body of the republic. Perhaps Delphine Peretti Curtis' book, Black Bodies and White Doctors: The Making of Racial Prejudice, in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, [1] published at the end of last year, is one of the effects of this academic orientation.
Cortes' new book, which was originally a doctoral thesis defended by the author in 2014 in the Department of History at the University of Axe-Marseille, comes in the context of the emergence of a remarkable number of historical studies that dealt with the study of colonial medicine and the relationship of race to colonial narratives. In 2011, Jean-Paul Baddou published his book "Doctor of Sleeping Sickness or Trypanosomiasis" on the biography of Eugene Gamot (1879-1937), one of the most prominent African colonial physicians at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the same year, Anne Cornet published her reference book on Health Policies and Social Control in Rwanda (1920-1940). In 2016, the book “The Changing Man: Races and Decadence – the 17th and 19th Centuries” by Claude Olivier Doron was published.
But Delphine Cortes' work, unlike previous works, is based on a rigorous historical methodology based primarily on document interrogation. It therefore appears as the first in-depth investigation into the way in which the question of medicine in African colonies was dealt with in the specialized writings of the period, especially dictionaries and medical treatises, and studies on human races, especially reports of colonial expeditions. Hence, it documents the emergence of racial theories applied to African peoples in French medical science, and their development before their decline in the mid-twentieth century. Through these documents, she sheds light on the processes of "racialization" of the body, sexuality, and sexuality of the peoples of Africa, in a society in which science is gradually replacing religion as a source of knowledge, under the weight of the rise of positivism. The racist narrative developed by scholars is reinforced by political power to serve the colonial project, i.e. the body becomes an instrument of colonialism.
The Jungle Doctors and the Race Matrix
The researcher first reviews the prevailing history of racial patterns created in the eighteenth century by naturalists, such as the Swedish Carolus Linnaeus, the French Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, and the German Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, to divide the human race by resorting to classifications. They aimed to demonstrate the physical, moral, and intellectual superiority of Europeans, and based their theories on observations of skin or the size and shape of skulls or genitals. These theories agreed on the idea of a single human race divided into unequal races, which remained faithful to Christian thought that advocated the unity of the human race according to Genesis, and discussions in the natural sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were characterized by a strong presence of the religious dimension.
By highlighting the stereotypical mechanisms of colonial African peoples, as well as their gradual development between the initial stages of knowledge for naturalists and bush physicians, this book makes it possible to understand how biases have become scientific 'knowledge' lastingly ingrained in minds today.
During this early period in the history of colonial medicine, the “black race” was seen as a homogeneous unit in medical writings, but the rise of the “jungle medicine” movement led by the French colonial authorities since the mid-nineteenth century, which was accompanied by the prevalence of positivism and categorization with The religious narrative, making these postulates of the unity of the race fade away little by little under the pen of the colonial doctors, who began to appear in their writings - which are reports they send periodically from the African bush in which they roam towards the colonial center in Paris - new racial classifications, distinguishing the black peoples of South Africa The Sahara and its classification, from the Cape of Good Hope in the south to Sengambia in the north (a historical name for a geographical area in West Africa located between the Senegal River in the north and the Gambia River in the south).
The fieldwork of bushland doctors led to the development of gender descriptions of the population in order to clarify racial classifications as well as knowledge of Africans. Although this African diversity gradually appeared in the French perception, some ethnic stereotypes remained important and present, such as black hypersexuality or sexual reversal (or gender transmutation) in Africa. Delphine Curtis has worked to clarify the intertwining of theories about race, gender, and gender within these discourses and reports, as well as the similarity of rhetorical devices used to define the other, whether female and/or black. At the same time, she also sheds light on how these racist representations were nourished through scientific controversies and political interests in that period, whose central concern was how to expand, control, and benefit financially from the colonial sphere.
A Belgian health worker in Beni, Congo, 1937.
The researcher argues that these racial stereotypes of colonial physicians, such as black bodies' resistance to pain, do not serve exclusively to fuel statistics and representations: they sometimes affect medical practice itself. Naval physicians, such as Dr. Thale in 1866, endorsed the bias of African strength, an inherited trait of slavery, and attempted to provide scientific explanations for it. This power comes, according to them, from an intellectual inferiority that would weaken the reaction of the nervous system, and thus eliminate any sense of pain. Physicians' practices may thus be modified toward a course of ugliness, unprecedented, since some sources mention surgeries performed on black men or women without the use of anaesthesia, either because of a shortage of anesthetics or because anesthesia was deemed unnecessary. The bush doctors' reports were full of stories of quick recovery for Africans following medical procedures considered painful and risky. The writer points out that all the autopsies that were performed on black individuals during this period reveal the underlying desire to support general principles of race, evolutionary, multigenerational or monogenetic, and on the other hand, encourage the goals of colonialism in the emergence of medical thinking focused on concrete issues, Such as the physical abilities, strengths and weaknesses of the black body, and the risks associated with interactions between settlers and colonists, foremost among them the specter of crossbreeding, as well as the ability of Africans to “receive civilization.” The body thus becomes a "political tool".
black industry
This interest in the colonial field is clearly shown by the package of reports written by a wide range of bush doctors, who held ranks in the French army, that is, their medical work was part of their activity at the front. By extrapolating these reports, the researcher reveals a package of perceptions developed by French colonial medicine for Africans. The black African man who lives in hot countries is an ideal working machine, enjoying superhuman immunity and physical strength that is not comparable to his European counterpart. This is not a matter of praise, but it is basically colonial expediency that wants to transform this natural physical strength into a working force useful for the colonial project.
This scientific knowledge about Africans can be exploited in the interest of raising the birth rate in colonial Africa, maintaining the health of the indigenous population in order to increase the workforce and the number of potential soldiers within the colonies.
Here, the main objective of this field medical research is evident, as its scientific concern comes in a second degree behind its political and economic concern of placing the precise definition of the colonized peoples at the service of the colonial project. Knowing the population makes it easier to manage and control them in order to prevent any rebellion, but at the same time it also makes it possible to “make blacks,” in the words of Colonial Minister Albert Sarrot in 1923 or colonial physician Gustave Levreau in 1943. That is, this scientific knowledge can be exploited In favor of raising the birth rate in colonial Africa, and maintaining the health of the indigenous population in order to increase the workforce and the number of potential soldiers within the colonies, in an approach of social reproduction based on dealing with man as one of the material means of production.
In this context, the researcher refers to the scientific perceptions that prevailed at the time about African women who have "an undeniable advantage for the function of the mother, and more specifically during the course of pregnancy and childbirth, compared to European women who are characterized by fragility". This African feature was one of the pillars of colonial medicine in dealing with colonial peoples, in the context of increasing the numbers of the workforce, or what was known as the “black industry.”
Curtis also points to another dimension in dealing with the African female body, in which scientific objectivity is mixed with eroticism. Behind the pretexts of the scientific study of a number of doctors and naturalists is a desire to “represent the sensual exoticism of black women” as well as “the tendency to voyeur.” Cortes had expanded on this topic in a master's thesis she discussed at the University of Provence in 2007 under the title "Representations of the African woman's body in the French medical and anthropological discourse from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century." Here, the black body appears permissible for the colonizer, not only as a useful labor machine, but as an obedient sexual machine.
Mobile pediatric clinic in Leopoldville (today called Kinshasa), Congo.
The researcher worked on a model of photographs representing, in particular, nude women from the Khoikhoi (Nambia) and Khoisan peoples, in front of a tropical garden, found in the collection of Roland Bonaparte, the French Prince and President of the French Geographical Society from 1910 until his death in 1924. By scanning the archives of photographs accumulated in colonial collections, the researcher discovers the centrality of "women's breasts" in particular to the view of the bush physicians. This centralism is not necessarily sexually motivated, but rather there is a form of the well-established model of “motherhood” in a number of medical writings of the period, where African women were used as a propaganda model in the Parisian center in order to return French women to the matrix of “social conservatism” that It sagged after the disintegration of feudal society. Colonial medical reports portrayed the "African mother" as providing breastfeeding to her children to an advanced age, not wearing a corset, leaving room for a luxurious breast that could not be limited or hidden. The French colonial anthropologist Georges Brouil, in his book “A Brief Table of the Exploration and Exploration of French Equatorial Africa” (published in 1918), linked the sexual arousal of the African female body, by focusing on “breast,” with its financial return in social reproduction through breastfeeding. But then a few years later, the psychoanalytic school of thought would come to the fore, and Freud, in relative terms, would dismantle this colonial fondness for the "typical African breast" through the theory of motivation and psychosexual development.
Based on physicians' reports and observations, the researcher concludes that the status of black men and black women is not identical in the medical discourse with regard to sexuality. A black man is a taboo, and a taboo, as a white woman can lose her social value if she has a physical relationship with him. On the other hand, the relationship of a white man with a black woman is considered less socially taboo.
entrenched prejudices
By highlighting the stereotyping mechanisms of the peoples of colonial Africa, as well as their gradual development between the initial stages of knowledge for naturalists and bush physicians, this book makes it possible to understand how biases have become a scientific 'knowledge' lastingly ingrained in minds today, even after their complete abolition. In the middle of the twentieth century.
In the introduction, the researcher asks the question: “Is the era of racial prejudice over? And over the chapters of her research trying to deny it. Since the stereotypes about black bodies that were legalized by medical and scientific authorities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many of them are still entrenched in the consciousness of large sections of European peoples, and have even become entrenched in the consciousness of the colonial African peoples themselves. Indeed, Western medical practices are still - in part - captive to the superior view of African peoples. If the writer does not refer to this, it seems useful to refer to the story of the hepatitis C virus, which was mentioned in the study of the French researcher Guillaume Lachenal “When colonial medicine leaves traces”, [2] Which seems to be an example of this persistence: at the beginning of the 1990s, surveys were launched in forest areas in Central Africa to assess the spread of hepatitis C virus among the local population, which is transmitted mainly through blood or during blood transfusions or contaminated injections, and causes infection in a number of Many people develop chronic liver damage, often fatal. The results, which were shocking to virologists, show that viral hepatitis is largely present in these isolated and landlocked areas, where the elderly are particularly affected, and prevalence rates reach 60% in some villages.
Twenty years later, the mystery is coming to an end: research in Cameroon and the Central African Republic has shown that viral hepatitis was widely transmitted to the population through non-sterile injections during medical campaigns carried out during the colonial era. In other words, this epidemic reveals that colonial medicine, sometimes presented as a 'positive effect' of colonialism, was a catastrophe for the transmission of blood-borne pathogens. And so the hepatitis C epidemic appears, quite tragically, as a form of the "continuing curse" of colonialism, though it practically ended half a century or more ago, but it nevertheless continues in unseen forms.
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