Health, Power and Politics in Windhoek, Namibia, 1915-1945 (review)

Too often, Namibia figures only in the general Africanist literature linked to sensational stories, whether on the sad fate of the so-called Hottentot Venus, Sarah Bartman, the genocide of the Herero, or Nazi sympathies among German settlers. Marion Wallace's valuable study of urbanism, public health, and disease and healing in the small colonial capital town of Windhoek is a welcome corrective. Unusually, she successfully examines the role of both biomedical and indigenous healers, a task made more difficult because she cannot rely on any previous histories of urbanism or of public health to back her up.

As a reader might suspect, the documentation on biomedicine is much richer, and Wallace leaves no archive, no matter how scattered, unturned. Her understandably shorter treatment of indigenous medicine is based on a series of interviews among Herero and Damara informants. She is able to demonstrate that healing offered possibilities for indigenous urban dwellers to build identities that did not depend on the approval of the colonial state.

Wallace is also careful to show how Windhoek differed from South African cities and towns more familiar in the literature. In Windhoek, the ratio of women to men was far more evenly balanced. Not an industrial center but the administrative capital of large territory, Windhoek was the scene of competition between whites sharing the ideology of their counterparts in South Africa—but with even fewer liberal voices, and more overtly Nazi ones—and blacks reinventing themselves as permanent urban workers, mainly in the service sector. One illustration of difference is the extent to which harsh and intrusive controls on gender were imposed in the name of public health. In the 1930s, the colonial state required compulsory venereal disease controls and examinations of all black women except for a small minority married under colonial law. As part of the complex gender wars waged throughout colonial Africa, Herero men in Windhoek chose to support these controls. Similar legislation in South Africa was considered too likely to provoke deep resistance at this time.

Two other examples show more nuanced differences. Maynard Swanson's famous "sanitation syndrome," whereby white interests in South Africa's cities used medical rationales as excuses to impose residential segregation, was not as powerful in Namibia because the demands of commercial interests overruled racial ideology in a peripheral region like Namibia. Similarly, Namibia, like virtually every other region in the world, suffered terrible morbidity and mortality from the world influenza pandemic of 1918. But because the territory lacked autonomy, the 1918 flu did not give rise to the reforms of the public health service seen elsewhere.

This book is an almost identical reproduction of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of London in 1997 under the direction of Shula Marks, who also writes a laudatory introduction. Newly minted Ph.D.s often fail to see why theses are not books. This is a fine dissertation, but in its unrevised state it has shortcomings. Wallace is widely read and remarkably sure-footed (the only small error I detected was her rendering of the author of a major bilharzia study as "Nigel" rather than "John" Farley), but she includes in too much detail every paradigm postulated over the last twenty-five years in the fields of social and medical history of disease and public health. Second, while her Basel publishers have done much to advance Namibia studies—of which this is the seventh book published—they have not served Wallace well. The perfunctory index offers only names and places, while all the tables and graphs are gathered in an appendix far removed from the analysis in the text. Common in too many dissertations is the frequent and often repetitive drawing of conclusions scattered throughout the text but leaving little to be said at end of the book for readers to carry away with them. That said, this is a worthwhile read, especially for those seeking evidence that...