Nancy Rose Hunt

A colonial lexicon of birth ritual, medicalization, and mobility in the Congo

A Colonial Lexicon is the first historical investigation of how childbirth became medicalized in Africa. Rejecting the “colonial encounter” paradigm pervasive in current studies, Nancy Rose Hunt elegantly weaves together stories about autopsies and bicycles, obstetric surgery and male initiation, to reveal how concerns about strange new objects and procedures fashioned the hybrid social world of colonialism and its aftermath in Mobutu’s Zaire. Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, the hyper-hygienic, pronatalist Belgian Congo, and Mobutu’s Zaire. After exploring the roots of social reproduction in rituals of manhood, she shows how the arrival of the fast and modern ushered in novel productions of gender, seen equally in the forced labor of road construction and the medicalization of childbirth. Hunt focuses on a specifically interwar modernity, where the speed of airplanes and bicycles correlated with a new, mobile medicine aimed at curbing epidemics and enumerating colonial subjects. Fascinating stories about imperial masculinities, Christmas rituals, evangelical humor, colonial terror, and European cannibalism demonstrate that everyday life in the mission, on plantations, and under a strongly Catholic colonial state was never quite what it seemed. In a world where everyone was living in translation, privileged access to new objects and technologies allowed a class of “colonial middle figures”—particularly teachers, nurses, and midwives—to mediate the evolving hybridity of Congolese society. Successfully blurring conventional distinctions between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial situations, Hunt moves on to discuss the unexpected presence of colonial fragments in the vibrant world of today’s postcolonial Africa. With its close attention to semiotics as well as sociology, A Colonial Lexicon will interest specialists in anthropology, African history, obstetrics and gynecology, medical history, religion, and women’s and cultural studies.

'Le Bebe en Brousse': European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo

Gouttes de lait or infant consultation opened up in Belgium particularly in industrial areas among working class populations in the early twentieth century. The Ligue Nationale pour la Protection de lEnfance du Premier Age was founded in 1903. Infant mortality in Belgium was associated with the decline or in some cases absence of breast feeding especially among mothers working in the industrial or agricultural sectors. Although most gouttes de lait seem to have favored breast feeding their provision of sterile breast milk substitutes also permitted mothers not to nurse under medical supervision. In Belgium - and elsewhere - the infant welfare movement had distinct class dimensions. It was frequently a private philanthropic activity. A paternalistic tone concerned to reduce maternal and working class ignorance was common. This tone resurfaced in the colonial context with distinct racial dimensions. We turn now to the colonial scene the novelties it contained for Europeans and the ways puericulture and gouttes de lait were and recast within colonial settings. (excerpt)

NEW ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES FOR HISTORIANS

Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Edited by M ICHAEL L AMBEK and A NDREW S TRATHERN . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv+298. £45 ( ISBN 0-521-62194-1); £15.95 paperback ( ISBN 0-521-62737-0).