Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the centrality of maps and map making during smallpox control programms in Africa. Mapping epidemics, allowed for the othering of Africa and Africans' ideas about the disease and its control measures, yet and at a local level it became an instrument of governmentality.

Paper long abstract:

When in the late 1960s, the World Health Organisation announced its global smallpox eradication plan, there existed a huge collection of maps. Clearly, smallpox control programmes in many parts depended heavily on thorough data collection and mapping, yet scholarship has remained silent on the centrality of maps to the visual culture of public health. This paper explores the role of disease maps in the final stages of smallpox eradication in Africa. Using maps from the World Health organisation databases and archival data, this paper argues that data from this collection helped define the smallpox problem and challenge of eradication in Africa, particularly the presumed resistance to control measures. More importantly, maps became medium and primary articulators of power, serving the interests of global health experts. However, in Africa, specifically in colonial Zimbabwe, disease maps increasingly became central to the visual culture of public health and exerted broad influence on debates over labour migration and governmentality. Not only did mapping pathologised migrants from Nyasaland and Portuguese East Africa but also fostered the idea of Portuguese East Africa as inherently a distinct place of sickness.