Health Policy Economy in Equatorial Guinea

Abstract

Medical interventions played a pivotal role in the European colonization
of Africa. Morbidity and disease were a constant preoccupation for colonial medical officers, the military, scientists, politicians, settlers, and members of the religious orders alike. The role of medicine and science in the architecture of the colonial administration is, therefore, inextricably intertwined with the legitimization of occupation, and the projects of the ‘civilizing mission’. The development of a biomedical discourse as part of the Spanish colonial enterprise in Equatorial Guinea contributed, from a very early stage, to the construction of what we understand by “Africa”, and of the African body as
a site of disease, requiring social repair, and as a subject of knowledge and observation in a repressive colonial state. Biomedical technologies served as powerful instruments of consolidation of colonial structures, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century. The present essay addresses the following questions: How was this biomedical knowledge produced and implemented, and what specificities characterized it? How was it brought into circulation both in colonial Guinea and in metropolitan Spain?
To what extent these biomedical technologies contributed to the solidification of the architecture of colonial power? Finally, often in postcolonial regimes health and fear are conflated under one same category, and act as stratagems of socio-political repression. The systemic pathology of dictatorships incorporates, as part of its etiology, clinical manifestations that include the obstruction of democratic values, and the fostering of socio-economic inequalities. The re-appropriation of concrete aspects of the colonial
biomedical apparatus is therefore useful to problematize questions of duration, reproduction and repetition under the current regimes.