Contribution short abstract:

This paper looks at how medical professionals were entangled in power asymmetries. Persistent narrative tropes of “White-Men-in-a-Room- Making-Decisions” and the ‘triumph’ of Western medicine created mythical exchanges and cloud the factual record. How do we ethically historicise these narratives?

Contribution long abstract:

This paper focusses on films created for different audiences in the Global North (UK and USA) illustrating the power asymmetries which came with colonisation. Looking at the way these ‘colonial’ narratives are constructed provides opportunities for how archive collections could be framed in the future. Critical engagements with films and archives can help us understand the impact of past history on the world in which we live now.

The Global South became a free-for-all for colonial powers to prospect for new medicines, supporting its colonisation by creating new markets by producing medicines to enable the colonisers to survive. Closely aligned to this is the medical profession itself; medics and doctors have been in a privileged position historically as their profession is borderless and in the vanguard of colonial influence.

Looking at archive collections forensically, through a decolonising lens, film (whether documentary or fictional) reveals persistent narrative tropes. One of colonial entanglements or “White-Men-in-a-Room- Making-Decisions”, will be shared from Entebbe Encounter (1989) which redramatises the circumstances behind an outbreak of sleeping sickness in Uganda in 1901. Another, showing the ‘triumph’ of Western medicine over traditional medicine being reframed as a pivotal cultural exchange from DDT Versus Malaria (1946) and Jivaro and his drugs (1957).

Considering our understanding of colonial history, we can critique the credibility of these colonial encounters as they are presented on film; are they fact or myth? Their legacy leaves us with questions about how we ethically historicise these narratives.