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KORLE AND THE MOSQUITO: HISTORIES AND MEMORIES OF THE ANTI-MALARIA CAMPAIGN IN ACCRA, 1942–5*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2011

JONATHAN ROBERTS
JONATHAN ROBERTS
Affiliation:
Mount Saint Vincent University
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Abstract

From 1942 to 1945, British and American armed forces attempted to eradicate malaria in Accra by dredging the sacred Korle Lagoon and spraying the city with pesticides. They also conducted experiments on the biting patterns of mosquitoes by using human subjects as bait. But, despite the extent of the anti-malaria campaign, it is largely forgotten by the inhabitants of Accra, and those who do remember it regard it as a nominal event in the history of the city. This article contrasts the official military history of the anti-malaria campaign with oral evidence to determine why the event fails to resonate in the collective memory of the residents of Accra.

Keywords

West AfricaGhanacolonialismhealthhuman rightsmedicinetechnologywar
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , November 2010 , pp. 343 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Public Records and Archives Administration Department, Accra (PRAAD), ADM 5/3/46, Report on Service Malaria Control (Accra and Takoradi, May 1945), 25.

2 Ibid. Appendix ‘A’, 7.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid. Appendix ‘A’, 8.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid. Fig. 15 and Appendix ‘A’, 14–15.

7 Ibid. 31.

8 National Archives and Records Administration, USA (NARA), R. 705, Major Eugene L. Vickery, ‘History of the medical section Africa-Middle East Theatre, Sept. 1941, to Sept. 1945, prepared under the direction of the Chief Surgeon, Eugene W. Billick, Colonel, Medical Corps, Cairo, Egypt, 1945’, 11 Dec. 1945, 213. Specifically, Chief Surgeon Eugene Billick referred to the African populations of the Gold Coast as a disease reservoir with an ‘African bloodstream’ that harboured malaria parasites.

9 F. De Boeck, ‘Beyond the grave: history, memory and death in postcolonial Congo/Zaïre’, in R. Werbner (ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London, 1998), 33.

10 R. Werbner, ‘Beyond oblivion: confronting memory crisis’, in Werbner, Memory, 1–17.

11 J. Cole, ‘The uses of defeat: memory and political morality in East Madagascar’, in Werbner, Memory, 104–25.

12 Both Alexander Butchart and Megan Vaughn have emphasized the disciplinary authority of applied biopower in colonial Africa: M. Vaughn, ‘Health and hegemony: representation of disease and the creation of the colonial subject in Nyasaland’, in D. Engels and S. Marks (eds), Contesting Colonial Hegemony (London, 1994); A. Butchart, The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body (New York, 1998).

13 Dede is a Ga name for the firstborn girl-child.

14 In Ga, a deity with a shrine is known as a jemawon (pl. jemawoji), and a priest of a jemawon is known as a wulomo. The jemawoji often have lesser spirits, known as woji, attached to them as ‘children’.

15 Privy Council Appeal No. 31 of 1958. H. E. Golightly and another v. E. J. Ashrifi and others. Delivered by Lord Denning from the West African Court of Appeal (Accra, 1961).

16 Interview with Korle Wulomo, Accra, 30 Dec. 2005. This slogan is an Akan term of praise that is chanted at a chief or a king (in addition to other praises) as a way of expressing the confident gait of a powerful political figure. In the case of Korle, it is a statement that evokes the haughty nature of the goddess.

17 Nora, P., ‘Between memory and history: les lieux de mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Interviews with Korle Wulomo, Accra, 3 and 16 Feb. 2005.

19 M. Kilson, Kpele Lala: Ga Religious Songs and Symbols (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 127.

20 Or, as Reindorf states it, ‘a profanation’ that ‘provoked the vengeance of the fetishes upon them’ (C. Reindorf, History of the Gold Coast and Asante: Based on Traditions and Historical Facts, Comprising a Period of More Than Three Centuries from about 1500 to 1860 (Accra, 1895), 22).

21 Kilson, Kpele Lala, 127.

22 M. J. Field, Religion and Medicine of the Gã People (London, 1937), 57, n. 2; interview with Korle Wontse, Accra, 30 Mar. 2005.

23 Interview with Korle Wulomo, 16 Feb. 2005.

24 M. E. Kropp Dakubu, Korle Meets the Sea: A Sociolinguistic History of Accra (New York, 1997), 12. Naa Korle is also a linguistic marker of Ga identity, expressed in the saying ‘ekoole ya nshon’, which literally means that ‘his/her Korle goes to the sea’. This phrase is used to validate the linguistic competence and ethnic identity of a Ga speaker.

25 Gold Coast Civil Service List (London, 1900), 13. The Civil Service Handbook stated that malaria emanated from humid, marshy areas or places with upturned earth.

26 Compare with Swanson, M., ‘The sanitation syndrome: bubonic plague and urban native policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1909’, Journal of African History, 18:3 (1977), 387–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ngalamulume, K., ‘Keeping the city totally clean: yellow fever and the politics of prevention in colonial Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, 1854–1914’, Journal of African History, 45:2 (2004), 185Google Scholar.

27 For more detail on the discovery of the mosquito vector, see E. R. Nye and M. E. Gibson, Ronald Ross: Malariologist and Polymath: A Biography (New York, 1997).

28 K. D. Patterson, Health in Colonial Ghana: Disease, Medicine, and Socio-economic Change, 1900–1955 (Waltham, MA, 1981), 252. See P. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1989), 109. In French West Africa, medical officials followed similar policies of urban segregation: see M. J. Echenberg, ‘Black Death, White Medicine’: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Sénégal, 1914–1945 (Portsmouth, NH, 2001), 27.

29 R. E. Dumett, ‘The campaign against malaria and the expansion of scientific medical and sanitary services in British West Africa, 1898–1910’, African Historical Studies 1:2 (1968), 169–71. British colonial officials used the phrase ‘native reservoir’ as a spatial distinction for areas of colonial cities that were considered to be threats to the health of colonial officials. Europeans in the tropics were sent to ‘European reservations’, distanced from local populations by at least a quarter of a mile. G. Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, 1991), 266.

30 Dumett, ‘Campaign’, 171.

31 Dickson, K. B., ‘Evolution of seaports in Ghana: 1800–1928’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 55:1 (1965), 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tudhope, W. T. D., ‘The development of the cocoa industry in the Gold Coast and Ashanti’, Journal of the Royal African Society 9:33 (1909), 34–45Google Scholar.

32 PRAAD, ADM 11/1/1756, C. W. Welman, Ga State Stools: Report on Enquiry into the Alleged Destoolment of Tackie Yaoboi, Ga Mantse, 1921, 9–11, 14–16. The dispute surrounding the dredging of the lagoon was part of a larger battle to remove the Ga paramount chief, Taki Yaoboi, from office. See R. Gocking, Facing Two Ways: Ghana's Coastal Communities under Colonial Rule (Lanham, MD, 1999), 185.

33 PRAAD, CSO 3/1/157, Accra (Korle) Lagoon, 22 Aug. 1927, 3.

34 PRAAD, CSO 3/1/164, Korle Lagoon Measures to Prevent Spreading of Mosquitoes, ‘Notes by J.P. Ross. President of Accra Town Council’, 11 Aug. 1927.

35 PRAAD, CSO 3/1/157, Accra (Korle) Lagoon; Gold Coast Colony Blue Book (Accra, 1927–8). There are no extant records showing that the project was approved by the priest of Korle, but colonial correspondence indicates that the Colonial Secretary of the Gold Coast recommended that the committee consult with the House of Korle and the Ga chiefs: see PRAAD, CSO 3/1/167 Korle Lagoon – Application of a Committee to, ‘Notes by the Secretary of Native Affairs’, 6 Oct. 1927.

36 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 2.

37 PRAAD, CSO 11/10, 3271, Memorandum of the Director of Medical Services, 2 Feb. 1943. The British plans to dredge the Korle Lagoon also went against the expert opinions of the Malaria Commission of the League of Nations Health Organization, which favoured ‘bonification’ programmes that relied on the use of quinine and the amelioration of living conditions over engineering schemes. See League of Nations, Health Organization, Malaria Commission, Principles and Measures of Antimalarial Measures in Europe (Geneva, 1927), 9, cited in R. Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Baltimore, 2007), 127.

38 F. M. Bourret, The Gold Coast: A Survey of the Gold Coast and British Togoland, 1919–1946 (London, 1949), 154; D. P. McBride, Missions for Science: U.S. Technology and Medicine in America's African World (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 168; F. M. Bourret, Ghana: the Road to Independence, 1919–1957 (Stanford, 1960), 147. The Gold Coast contributed 65,000 men to the British Army, Air Force, and auxiliary services.

39 Bourret, Gold Coast, 156.

40 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 28.

41 The United States Air Force also conducted an anti-malaria campaign in Dakar, but their efforts were hindered by resistance by French authorities and an outbreak of bubonic plague: Echenberg, ‘Black Death’, 227–37.

42 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 10.

43 Ibid. 10, 15.

44 A. A. Sandosham and V. Thomas, Malariology: With Special Reference to Malaya (Singapore, 1983), 23–4; M. Watson, The Prevention of Malaria in the Federated Malay States: A Record of Twenty Years' Progress (London, 1921).

45 Ngalamulume, ‘Keeping the city’, 200.

46 Ronald Ross, the discoverer of the mosquito vector for malaria, encouraged the use of ‘mosquito patrols’ to sweep out larvae from ponds and water supplies in urban British West Africa, but the Colonial Office preferred to relocate government officials to hill stations. See G. A. Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Man (New York, 1978), 127; Curtin, P. D., ‘Medical knowledge and urban planning in tropical Africa’, American Historical Review, 90:3 (1985), 595CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Odile Georg, Pouvoir Colonial, Municipalites et Espaces Urbains: Conakry – Freetown des Annees 1880 a 1914, II (Paris, 1997), 124.

47 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 4.

48 Ibid. 5 & Appendix ‘B’, 1–2. A study conducted by British malariologists in 1942 indicated that the spleen rate (frequency of enlarged spleens caused by malaria) in the Accra suburbs of Nima and Kanda was 55 and 60 per cent, respectively, and that eight out of ten children tested positive for malaria.

49 For a recent scientific evaluation of the antimalarial properties of Ghanaian herbs, see Asase, A. and Oppong-Mensah, G., ‘Traditional antimalarial phytotherapy remedies in herbal markets in southern Ghana’, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 126:3 (2009), 492–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 F. Rocco, Quinine: Malaria and the Quest for a Cure that Changed the World (London, 2003), 182.

51 Patterson, Health, 36.

52 C. M. Poser and G. W. Bruyn (eds.), Illustrated History of Malaria (New York, 1999), 93.

53 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 5.

54 Ibid. 5.

55 Ibid. Appendix ‘B’, 1–2.

56 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 21. In the 1940s, the US army switched from citronella oil to a synthetic topical made of dimethyl phthalate (DMP), Indalone, and Rutger's 612 (in a formula of 6:2:2). J. R. Busvine, Disease Transmission by Insects: Its Discovery and 90 Years of Effort to Prevent It (New York, 1994), 143–4.

57 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, figs. between 22 and 23.

58 Ibid. 22. A grain weighs 64·799 mg, and 7000 grains make one pound. See also NARA, R. 705, Vickery, ‘Medical section’, 219.

59 D. A. Williams and T. L. Lemke, Foye's Principles of Medicinal Chemistry, 5th edn (Baltimore, 2002), 9; K. J. Arrow, C. Panosian, and H. Gelband, Saving Lives, Buying Time: Economics of Malaria Drugs in an Age of Resistance (Washington, 2004), 130–2.

60 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 22. Mepacrine, a bright yellow crystalline compound (C23H32Cl3N3O⋅2H2O), was sold by Bayer under the brand name Atabrine. See W. Sneader, Drug Discovery: A History (Chichester, West Sussex, 2005), 381–2.

61 Addae, Modern Medicine, 159.

62 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 12. Pyrethrum is made from the powder of chrysanthemum flowers. Paris green is a larvicide made of a toxic double salt of copper arsenate and copper acetate (C4H6As6Cu4O16) that forms a distinctive, emerald-green powder. See T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002), 46–7; Busvine, Disease Transmission, 132; Packard, Tropical Disease, 124–5.

63 DDT was developed in 1942 by the Swiss company J.R. Geigy Co. and sold as an insecticide under the brand name Gerasol (Packard, Tropical Disease, 141).

64 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 20–1.

65 Ibid. 12.

66 Ibid. 13. The British had already built a working sea outfall at the smaller Klotey Lagoon.

67 Ibid. 31.

68 Pan American had already planned the construction of about 45 miles of ditches around Accra airport. See NARA, R. 705, Vickery, ‘Medical section’, 209; PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 17.

69 Ribbands, C. R., ‘Moonlight and house-haunting habits of female anophelines in West Africa’, Bulletin of Entomological Research 36 (1945), 395–415CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, Appendix ‘A’, 5. See Ribbands, ‘Moonlight’.

71 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 25.

72 NARA, R. 705, Vickery, ‘Medical section’, 217.

73 S. Addae, The Gold Coast and Achimota in the Second World War (Accra, 2004), 157–8.

74 Gold Coast Blue Books, 1942–5. There is no specific mention of the evacuation of any villages in the Public Works or Medical and Sanitary Department annual reports. The 1943 Blue Book did note a special warrant for £10,000 for ‘anti-malarial’ measures, and the expenses of the Medical Department of the Gold Coast increased by £22,000 in 1944–5, but antimalarial measures were only one reason for these increased allotments. Additionally, the Health Department spent £3,000 on ‘anti-malarial’ measures in 1944–5, but there was no mention of relocating villages. See PRAAD, ADM 7/5/64, Gold Coast Estimates, 15.

75 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 25 and Appendix A, 7. Ribbands duplicated this experiment on a smaller scale in Sekondi: see Ribbands, C. R., ‘Effects of bush clearance on flighting of West African anophelines’, Bulletin of Entomological Research 37 (1946), 33–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, Appendix A, 7; Magoon, E. H., ‘A portable stable trap for capturing mosquitoes’, Bulletin of Entomological Research, 26 (1935), 363–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. B. Silver, Mosquito Ecology: Field Sampling Methods, 3rd edn (Dordrecht, 2008), 580–2.

77 Magoon, ‘Portable stable trap’, 363. Humans were used in dozens of experiments as bait for mosquitoes in the twentieth century, but usually with protective netting (Busvine, Disease Transmission, 169, 175).

78 NARA, R. 705, Vickery, ‘Medical section’, 215.

79 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, Appendix ‘A’, 8.

80 D. Killingray, ‘Imagined martial communities: recruiting for the military and police in northern Ghana’, in C. Lentz and P. Nugent (eds.), Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention (London, 2000), 120–7.

81 Addae, Modern Medicine, 26.

82 For information on labour migration in the Gold Coast Colony, see J. Crisp, The Story of an African Working Class: Ghanaian Miners' Struggles, 1870–1980 (London, 1984).

83 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, Appendix ‘A’, 8.

84 NARA, R. 705, Vickery, ‘Medical section’, 219. The British switched from pyrethrum to DDT in March 1945: see PRAAD, CSO 11/11/124, Accra Anti-Malaria Scheme – Financial Implications of, ‘Telegram to the Resident Minister from the Colonial Office’, 22 Sept. 1944.

85 NARA, R. 705, Vickery, ‘Medical section’, 213.

86 The intervention of sanitary inspectors in the compounds of Accra (and the fines levied, which could be as high as £1) were perceived as an encroachment into Ga religious and domestic spaces and did little to encourage the residents of the city to cooperate with broader goals of sanitary reform. See J. Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Portsmouth, NH, 2000); Addae, Modern Medicine, 129.

87 NARA, R. 705, Vickery, ‘Medical section’, 218.

88 PRAAD, CSO 3/1/162, Korle Lagoon. For example, in 1937 the colonial government paid £35 to acting Korle Priest Nee Tettey Quaye Molai for the rights to fill in some marshy areas of the lagoon.

89 Gold Coast Independent, 17 June 1944, 150; 30 Sep. 1945, 239. The ongoing disputes over the office of priest of Korle were not resolved until Nummo Ayiteh Cobblah II was installed in 1946 (Funeral Programme, Nummo Ayiteh Cobblah II, 2002).

90 Interview with Fuseni Bomba, Accra, 19 Dec. 2005; interview with Mama Moshie, Accra, 20 Dec. 2005; interview with Saidu Mossi, Accra, 18 Dec. 2005; interview with John Borketey, Accra, 28 Dec. 2005; interview with Andrew Nikoi Dsane, Accra, 23 Dec. 2005.

91 Busvine records one example of the use of birdlime on clothing to collect tsetse flies in Principe in 1907, but there is no documentary record of adhesive clothing used to collect mosquitoes in Accra: Busvine, Disease Transmission, 169.

92 Interview with Otia Badu, Accra, 20 Dec. 2006.

93 Interview with Oblitey Commey, Accra, Feb 25, 2005; interview with Old Soldier Lamptey, Accra, 25 Feb. 2005.

94 Interview with Oblitey Commey.

95 Interview with Oblitey Commey; interview with Old Soldier Lamptey.

96 Interview with John Borketey, Accra, 28 Dec. 2005.

97 Interview with Dr Quartey-Papafio, Accra, 10 Sept. 2010; interview with Korle Wulomo, 3 Feb. 2005; interview with Robert Ayitey Quaye, Accra, 30 Dec. 2005; interview with Mr Annan (elder at Korle We), Accra, 31 Jan. 2008.

98 Conversations initiated by the author with the mallam and elders of the mosque in Nima during 2005 turned up no memories of the anti-malaria campaign.

99 Gold Coast Echo, 9 Mar. 1889, 3.

100 PRAAD, ADM 11/1/1747, Correspondence, ‘Acting Governor to the Secretary of State’, 16 Mar. 1908, 79; and ‘Medical Department Report’, 5 Jun. 1908, 153; J. Roberts, ‘The Black Death in the Gold Coast: African and British responses to the bubonic plague epidemic of 1908’, Gateway: An Online Graduate Journal, available at http://grad.usask.ca/gateway/archive10.html (last visited 2 Nov. 2010).

101 Cole argues that memory is shaped through a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the community, and that it exists ‘intersubjectively, stretched across individuals and the wider social and cultural environment that they inhabit’ (J. Cole, Forget colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (Berkeley, 2001), 27–2).

102 De Boeck, ‘Beyond the grave’; R. Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago, 2002), 5.

103 Paul Connerton argues that commemoration is not just a remembering of the past, but a re-presentation of the past event, altered to provide contemporary meaning: P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York, 1989), 43.

104 Cole, Forget Colonialism?, 26. Jennifer Cole argues that commemoration can be considered a form of moral practice, a ‘way of instantiating relationships with and commitments to others’.

105 Werbner, ‘Beyond oblivion’, 1; De Boeck, ‘Beyond the grave’, 25.

106 Bourret, Gold Coast, 153–4.

107 Ibid. 155–6. Eight of the editors were chosen for a two-week visit to England, where they were given facilities to send radio broadcasts back to the Gold Coast.

108 Gold Coast Independent, 20 Jan. 1945, 13.

109 Gold Coast Independent, 30 Sep. 1945, 237; Findlay's assumption that malaria killed one-quarter of African children in Accra is not borne out by evidence but was a plausible guess based on the rates of malaria fever experienced by white newcomers to the West African tropics: see P. D. Curtin, Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa (Cambridge, 1998), 1.

110 Gold Coast Independent, 30 Sep. 1945, 237.

111 In a similar case, Myron Echenberg noted a sense of resignation among the African population in Dakar during anti-plague efforts by the French and the Americans in 1944. He suggests that the Darkarois endured the spraying of DDT by sanitary officials because some of their leaders had accepted Western biomedical aetiologies: Echenberg, Black Death, 242–3.

112 Interview with Prof. Stephen Addae, Accra, 19 Aug. 2010.

113 NARA, R. 705, Vickery, ‘Medical section’, 215.

114 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 31.

115 PRAAD, CSO 11/11/128, Control and Maintenance of Accra and Takoradi Anti-malarial Drainage Scheme – European Staff for, ‘Letter from Resident Minister's Office, Achimota, Accra to General Headquarters, West Africa, O.C., No. 114 Wing, Accra’, 24 May 1945.

116 PRAAD, CSO 11/11/124, Accra Anti-Malaria Scheme – Financial Implications of, ‘Telegram to the Resident Minister from the Colonial Office’, 22 Sept. 1944.

117 Gold Coast Medical Reports, 1944, 6; PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 35. By 1945, the length of the drainage ditches and canals totalled more than 350,010 yards.

118 In 1945, the Public Works Department did not even have a budget to screen the windows of bungalows in the city: PRAAD, CSO 10/1/65, Bungalow no. 11, Second Road, Accra, Mosquito Proofing at, ‘Director of Public works. Memo to Colonial Secretary’, 5 Apr. 1945.

119 PRAAD, ADM 5/3/46, Malaria Control, 37.

120 Gold Coast Observer, 16 Aug. 1946, 162. DDT powder was for sale at the price of 4 shillings per tin.

121 Gold Coast Observer, 7 Jun. 1946, 45.

122 By the late 1960s, mosquitoes in different parts of the world began to develop resistance to DDT (Packard, Tropical Disease, 162–3). Additionally, Rachel Carson's popular work, Silent Spring, raised public concerns about the effects of DDT on wildlife and led to a ban on the chemical in the USA in 1975 (R. Carson, Silent Spring (New York, 1962)).

123 Funeral Programme, Nummo Ayiteh Cobblah II.