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Begin forwarded message:

> From: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 6 March 2008 18:28:35 GMT
> To: "Linda Amarfio" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Medical Anthropology Seminar (20/05/08): Slimes and Death- 
> Dealing Dambos: Water, Industry and the Ga
>
> ** MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY SEMINAR **  MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY SEMINAR **
>
> Jointly organised by
> The Research Group for the Anthropology and History of African  
> Biosciences, LSHTM; and
> the Centre for Research in International Medical Anthropology,  
> Brunel University
>
>
> Title: Slimes and Death-Dealing Dambos: Water, Industry and the  
> Garden City on Zambia’s Copperbelt*
>
>
>
>
> Speaker : Lyn Schumaker, Centre for the History of Science,  
> Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
>
> Abstract: This paper describes the role of water in the development  
> of Zambia’s Copperbelt, using a case study of malaria control at  
> the Roan Antelope Mine and adjoining town of Luanshya.  In response  
> to a mortality crisis in 1927-1930 that made worker recruitment  
> difficult, the mine funded a malaria control and general sanitation  
> programme devised by the Ross Institute for Tropical Diseases in  
> London. Ross Institute researchers employed an environmentally  
> informed approach based on the work of Ronald Ross, who had  
> elucidated the life cycle of the malaria parasite. The Roan Mine  
> programme achieved substantial success by 1931, and other mines  
> followed their example - significantly, during the first major  
> period of urbanisation on the Copperbelt. This ensured that the  
> mining towns took their particular form through overlapping  
> processes of medicalisation and industrialisation that shaped the  
> internal structure of the towns and transformed their peri-urban  
> environment.
>
> 	I focus on the starting point of this story -- the mortality  
> crisis that convinced Roan Mine to introduce malaria control  
> measures that would profoundly reshape the waterscapes of the  
> Copperbelt. Mining in colonial Africa often entailed huge losses of  
> life as mine owners sacrificed worker health to get production  
> swiftly underway or keep it going in times of economic recession.  
> At Roan the construction period caused such losses that both  
> European and African workers began to avoid the mine - Europeans  
> because of tales of malaria and blackwater fever that reached them  
> in the principal white recruitment centres in South Africa and  
> Africans because of tales of a dangerous snake spirit inhabiting  
> the river and its environs.
>
> 	I use evidence gathered from interviews with retired miners from  
> the Copperbelt (Luanshya and Kitwe, 2000-02) and a rural site with  
> a high concentration of retired miners (Zambia’s Luapula Province,  
> 1999-2004). A research assistant conducted interviews in May and  
> October 2006 with retired malaria control workers who worked from  
> the late 1930s to the 1990s, as well as elderly residents of Roan  
> and Luanshya who recalled their experiences of the effects of  
> malaria control from the 1930s. We conducted further interviews in  
> July 2007 with ritual specialists and local inhabitants resettled  
> to make way for the mine. Medical and other records from the Roan  
> Antelope Mine have been preserved, allowing a view of the malaria  
> control programme in the context of the mine’s development. Records  
> of the Ross Institute held at the LSHTM provide a detailed account  
> of the views of the medical experts who devised the programme.  
> Malcolm Watson (1873-1955), in charge of malaria control at the  
> Ross Institute, also published a book and numerous articles on the  
> Copperbelt malaria control programme. The writings of mine  
> personnel, colonial administrators, missionaries and Copperbelt  
> doctors have enriched this project, as have the exuberant accounts  
> of Copperbelt development written by the actors in its early  
> history. Indeed, African stories of the Luanshya snake pale in  
> comparison to the magical accounts of the Copperbelt landscape  
> written by early prospectors, missionaries and administrators, as  
> well as the overwrought metaphors employed by the malaria expert,  
> Malcolm Watson. There was method in this magic, as we shall see,  
> for these accounts bolstered mining companies’ and malaria experts’  
> claims to a benevolent purpose guiding their capture and  
> transformation of the African landscape.
>
> 	In important ways this transformation of land and water had  
> benevolent effects recognised by the miners and Luanshya’s  
> residents, who embraced malaria control as a welcomed aspect of  
> medical and industrial modernity. Nevertheless, stories of the  
> snake would re-emerge during later environmental crises at the  
> mine. In the following sections I will argue that tales of the  
> snake and tales of malaria represented different moral and material  
> constructions of the first health crisis that afflicted Roan, and  
> that both were deeply engaged with the larger environment of the  
> mine. Ultimately, measures taken to deal with the snake and the  
> wetlands it inhabited, and measures taken to deal with malaria by  
> radically changing those wetlands, illustrated key features of  
> African and European ideas about the proper ownership and treatment  
> of the environment, as well as the relationships Africans developed  
> with colonial industry.
>
> Date: Tuesday 20th May
>
> Time: 12.45 - 2pm
>
> Venue: Room 364, Keppel Street
>
> *** ALL ARE WELCOME ***
>
>


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