Sleeping-Sickness-Trypanosomiasis Books

". . . the author displays a rare scholarly and academic acumen in mastering the dynamics behind the spread of Sleeping Sickness and other dreaded diseases in Uganda. this book is highly recommended for social as well as natural scientists, students and policy makers." - Social Justice Review

"The encompassing perspective Jonathan Musere provides in his discussion of African sleeping sickness supports the growing recognition of, and the need for, understanding in terms of a 'web of causation'. . . . this is, indeed, an important book, as is its main message about the devastation of colonialism and about the importance of understanding trypanosomiasis in Uganda, or for that matter, any disease and epidemiological phenomenon in the context of a whole range of interacting socio-cultural, political, economic, and historical as well as environmental, demographic, and biomedical factors." - H.K. Heggenhougen, in Canadian Journal of African Studies

This is a brilliant examination of colonial history from an innovative cultural studies apporach. Hoppe explores a rather modest, but important, facet of the European colonial project in East Africa: the scientific attempt to control the tsetse fly and the sleeping sickness it carried. Beginning with a fascinating exploration of how colonial scientists were cast (and cast themselves) as examples of the imperial, masculine hero, Hoppe constructs an fascinating and highly readable tale of environmental and social engineering. Hoppe convincingly shows that, by restructuring African environments (many of the "cleared" zones would eventually become state controlled national parks) and controlling African settlement and movement, colonial agents actively employed "objective" science to further the British colonial project. Hoppe's use of cultural studies within the field of colonial history is innovative, refreshing, and highly rewarding. This is one of the most interetsing and innovative books on African colonial history in some time.

The tsetse fly, and the animal and human trypanosomiasis ("nagana") it transmits, is a major, uniquely African problem, causing misery and hindering economic development over huge regions. Lyons's book adds greatly to our understanding of efforts to control the "fly," not least because she very effectively exploits Belgian, British and Sudanese archives. As a full study of policy and practice in the major colony of the Belgian Congo, it also adds an important dimension to the history of African environments, previously dominated by research on British Africa. The main contrast between the two approaches was that Britain sought to control tsetse-friendly areas by modifying the landscape, basically waging war against vegetation, while Belgium sought to minimize infection among human populations through forced resettlement and coercive quarantine measures. This enhanced Africans' resentment and sense of injury under Belgian rule, but both policies barely grasped how colonial-era changes aided the spread of fly belts. "Colonial Disease" is a fine if primarily documentary study, and would probably be better with more access to materials in Congo/Zaire. Though it has some good interview data, its fieldwork component is less strong than J. Giblin, "The Politics of Environmental Control in Northeastern Tanzania," and the forbidding classic by J. Ford, "The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology." F. Lambrecht, "In the Shade of an Acacia Tree" is a Belgian-American's vivid memoir of 1950s glossinology, or tsetse science.