Paper short abstract:

This paper charts the unbuilding of several East African laboratories, intertwined with the life of the scientist who worked in and sought to re-work them (1960s-80s). Attending to post-colonial ‘Africanisation’, reconstructing an exceptional story of hope and failure, it sheds light onto the lasting double-bind of universal promise and material inequality in today’s African ‘global health’ science.

Paper long abstract:

In 2015, medical science in Africa remains riddled with questions of ownership and priorities, collaborative justice, and the transfer of capacity and authority. Half a century ago, these concerns were addressed as ‘Africanisation’, a visionary project, and a practical and administrative challenge. Africanisation, and subsequent attempts at creating African science remain present, often as present absences – forgotten, hidden, occasionally remembered – in ‘global health’s’ ongoing struggles with scientific and political-economic inequality.

This paper examines one moment of 1970s Africanisation by tracing the unbuilding of an African laboratory (1950s-1980s) – not just metaphorically but by attending to purposely erased and projected but unbuilt scientific edifices in Kenya and Tanzania, that are linked by the biography of Dr W, the Kenyan scientist who learned and worked in them, dreaming of and engendering transformations.

It begins with an old research station in Tanzania where Dr W was trained and assisted British scientists. Later, as the famous station's first African director, he demolished his laboratory to build a modernist multi-storey institute befitting a new scientific Africa. It was never built, but Dr W took this project for a new, national laboratory back to his native Kenya, where he planned a science city away from the city, with laboratories, housing and social infrastructure. Yet, before construction began, Dr W was hospitalised with a psychiatric disorder. After his release he established, with his wife and technician, another small laboratory, first in a rented room, then in a semi-permanent building at home, and continued experimenting with medicinal plants, until he died.

The paper charts a biography of loss: of projects and hopes, as well as of capacity and infrastructure. From the abandonment of a globally networked laboratory built for imperial eternity, to the disappearance of an ephemeral mud-building surrounded by hopes for an African science. At the site of the latter, a wooden signboard: 'Manyasi (trad.medicine) African Science Research Foundation', emblazoned with the (Tanzanian) symbol of African socialism, is al that remains, under a stack of firewood: a monument to one instance when a different African science had been imagined, before it was discredited as mere dream: unrealistic aspiration without material basis, misguided refusal of 'universal' scientific excellence - or, as in this particular case, pathology.

While Dr W’s tragedy is exceptional, its pathology resonates with Franz Fanon’s diagnostic meditations on schizophrenia. Drawing on Gregory Bateson’s work on this medical problem, remembering this biography brings to our attention the ‘double-bind’ of inequality and universality, domination and freedom, which remains at the heart of global public health science.