Paper short abstract:

HAT’s spread into the African interior propelled tropical medicine into recesses of empire; either ‘side’ was unfamiliar with the others’ medical traditions. The present paper focuses on these parallel circuits of knowledge and their particular dynamics in former Portuguese Africa and beyond.

Paper long abstract:

The campaigns against HAT during the early 1900s as the epidemic grew were marked by the emergence of tropical medicine as the new science equipped with 'magic bullets'. As HAT catapulted the microbiological revolution into the recesses of empire, in the African interior, it propelled human and material resources into an unknown hinterland. The radical measures tropical medicine engendered brought it into contact with local medical traditions which as HAT spread across the continent were also obliged to deal with a novel threat to people's well-being and livelihoods. In some areas however where HAT had been endemic for some time, local healers were very much aware of the disease and developed methods to counter it. Like tropical medicine, these ideas and methods also 'travelled' as populations migrated and were the subject to quarantine, tests and trials. However these 'bodies of knowledge' operated in different circuits that interacted on an irregular basis - If at all - so that their dynamics were generally autonomous and rarely inter-dependent. The present paper wishes to address the particular dynamics of these circuits of knowledge, and the diverse ways in which their encounters occurred depending on the natural environments and social contexts in which they took place. In order to do so, it compares experiences in different localities and regions in Africa, including former Portuguese colonies such as Angola and Guinea with other, neighbouring areas where HAT became the focus of control and eradication campaigns.