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Lords of the fly: colonial visions and revisions of African sleeping-sickness environments on Ugandan Lake Victoria, 1906–61

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2011

Kirk Arden Hoppe
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Extract

Sleeping-sickness control in southern Uganda created ideological openings for the articulation of colonial visions of African environments. Competing colonial agendas, Ugandans' positions in their own environments, and Ugandans' resistance and responses to colonial schemes determined how such visions played themselves out in practice. The emerging power of colonial science played an important role in colonial attempts at constructing nature and defining Africans' relationship with their environments through disease control. The combination of forced depopulations, strategic clearings, and planned resettlement in British sleeping-sickness control schemes in southern Uganda set in motion a cycle of long-term land alienation from 1906 to 1962 that reflected the particular relations between British science, environmental intervention, and colonisation.

Résumé

Le contrôle de la maladie du sommeil au sud de l'Ouganda a crée des ouvertures idéologiques pour l'articulation de visions coloniales des environnements africains. Des agendas coloniaux en compétition avec les uns les autres, la position des Ougandais dans leur propre environnement, et la résistance et les résponses des Ougandais aux projets coloniaux ont déterminé comment ces visions se réalisent en pratique. Le pouvoir émergeant de la science coloniale a joué un rôle important dans les efforts coloniaux pour construire la nature et pour définir les rapports entre les Africains et leur environnement en contrôlant la maladie. La combinaison de facteurs tels que la dépopulation forcée, les évacuations stratégiques et les plans de repeuplement dans des projects de contrôle de la maladie du sommeil au sud de l'Ouganda, ont mit en marche un cycle à long terme d'aliénation de la terre de 1906 jusqu'à 1962 qui a réflété les rapports particuliers entre la science Britannique, l'intervention environnementale, et la colonisation.

Type
Controlling the colony
Information
Africa , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , January 1997 , pp. 86 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1997

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