2 - The Unsettling Contact: Epidemics, Biomedicine, and the Ideology of Order

Summary

The last three decades of the nineteenth century marked the period when biomedicine reached adulthood in the development of public sanitation, pathological discoveries, and general awareness that many tropical diseases are carried by insects and other arthropods. As biomedical science embraced, absorbed, routinized, and extended advances in biomedicine, it endeared itself to the colonial state in Kenya. Biomedicine became a critical ingredient of imperial expansion and remained integral to the colonial state's project of institutionalizing a new political, economic, cultural, and biomedical order.

The search for meanings, solutions, and compromises in addressing the critical issues of sickness, therapies, survival, and death against the backdrop of emergent epidemics, which spiraled during the establishment and institutionalization of colonial rule, continued to be a major preoccupation of the colonial state. Unfortunately, the search was tainted by preconceived biases. African initiatives were considered antiquated residues of cultural systems of the past that had no place in the emergent world of biomedical science as framed and relayed to the local populations by the colonial state. The colonial authorities summarily dismissed African experiences and approaches as belonging to the domain of ritual and witchcraft, rather than the realm of thought and action. By relegating African initiatives on epidemic prevention and control to the domain of illegal, unscientific, and repugnant practices, the state denied local voices a place in the official discourse of prevention and cure of various pestilences.

This chapter examines the striking limitations in the dialogue between traditional society and the proponents of biomedical science during the formative period of colonial governance. It delves into how the traditions, hallowed approaches, and self-image of Western biomedicine triggered off intercultural conversations in Kenya by projecting an image of unrivaled power over the prevention and control of epidemics. The establishment of institutions such as hospitals and laboratories as manifestations of the progress of biomedical science is examined against the backdrop of the apprehensions, mistrust, and subaltern conversations that gained wide currency among indigenous societies in early colonial Kenya. The critical connection between biomedicine and the intended result of extending short lives and preventing sudden deaths during epidemics was compromised by two main factors: first, the perverted notion that biomedical science was the absolute science, with a universal definition not subject to local interpretation; and second, the force-driven nature of the public health campaigns.