Paper short abstract:

During the 1960s and 1970s, population control theorists and demographers viewed the future of Africa negatively, as one of over-population. Subverting this discourse, African medical professionals used alternate visions of the family and of the future to drive their efforts.

Paper long abstract:

During the 1960s and 1970s, population control theorists and demographers viewed the future of the Africa negatively, predicting poverty and resource scarcity as a result of over-population. This exercise in future-making was driven by international geo-politics and post-war eugenics. These prophecies gained immense traction in the West, especially in the USA, and drove the agendas of donor organisations like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller, and USAID. Newly-independent African nations, awakened to this vision of a non-internationally competitive trajectory adopted some of the rhetoric of these policies in order to shape their own post-colonial visions of the future.

Not all shared this vision for an African future. In 1986 the Confederation of African Medical Associations and Societies (CAMAS) recognised that most people seeking contraception did so with the aim of birth spacing, rather than family limitation. Many had a “high ideal family size”. CAMAS was principally concerned with primary health care and leveraging concern for over-population into funding broader healthcare initiatives. They, and other medical professionals were accessing donor funding for family planning, but seldom with any interest in over-population. Instead they were reacting to local health concerns, using alternate visions of the future to drive their efforts. In this paper, I look at how African professionals turned prophecies of over-population into locally useful visions of health and prosperity.