"Native Habits are Difficult to Change": British Medics and the Dilemmas of Biomedical Discourses and Practice in Early Colonial Northern Nigeria

Introduction:

The colonial conquest and subsequent administration of Northern Nigeria, like that of other colonial possessions, was facilitated by and in turn facilitated developments in Western medical science. The savvy deployment of Western medical practice and of less formal, spontaneous medical measures underwrote efforts to medically stabilize the colony.² Colonial medical officers in the colony were not purely scientific personnel who happened to be serving in the tropics; they were self-consciously involved in the pursuit of the goals of Empire. British medical personnel came to Northern Nigeria first as colonial agents, saddled with the medical challenges of “the White Man’s Burden.” ³ As a result, whatever individual agency they possessed or exhibited in the course of their practice in the colony was subsumed under the larger colonial objective of promoting the “viability of colonial rule” by reducing the threat posed by so-called tropical diseases to the survival of Europeans in the Protectorate.⁴ The struggle of the medics against this regime of political conformity and administrative control over medical and scientific inquiry and reportage tasked their professional idealism. It caused many to reconsider their conflicted roles as ambitious medics concerned with scientific integrity and as agents of British colonialism.

Colonial medicine was about keeping British colonial personnel healthy. Where northern Nigerians wittingly or unwittingly became the subjects of colonial Western medicine, the underlying motive was seldom altruistic and reflected medical anxieties of British personnel than it did their desire for extending medical salvation to Northern Nigeria. The anxieties bordered on concerns about contagion, about “native habits”, and about the tropics as a supposedly disease-prone clime. Gains for Western medicine in colonial Northern Nigeria were harnessed discursively toward the promotion of British interests and such gains congealed ultimately into the larger interest of Empire. The objective of bolstering the empire undergirded, in large measure, colonial medical practice in the Protectorate as well as the discourses that were produced to document it.

This paper is a critical reading of the discourses produced and reproduced by British medical officers in the course of their medical practice in early colonial Northern Nigeria—discourses crafted by the medics to describe their operational environment, its peoples’ attitudes, and their medical work—all in relation to the larger regime of colonial self-description embodied in the annual reports. Occasionally, I consider these textual representations in the same analytic frame as actual practices and circumstances, and the unwritten contexts that underwrote the medics’ accounts and actions. A subordinate and largely speculative preoccupation of this paper is the location of the British colonial medics at the problematic intersection between scientific neutrality/integrity and what I call colonial correctness. Here, I tease out from circumstantial evidentiary fragments and curious silences the dilemmas that British medics encountered as colonial demands on their expertise and the unwritten rules of British discursive conventions collided with their professional ambitions and scientific interests. Implicit in this problematizing of the colonial bureaucracy is the speculation, supported by reasonable inference, that young, idealistic and ambitious British medics in Northern Nigeria expressed their disillusionment with colonial medical practice and its vicarious implication in the unfolding colonial encounter through desertion and malingering. This aspect of the paper raises questions about the ideological unity (or lack thereof) of the British colonial bureaucracy in Northern Nigeria—something that is usually taken for granted.⁵

The Setting

Northern Nigeria became a British protectorate on January 1st 1900 when Frederick Lugard, who had been assigned or, as some argue, assigned himself the task of bringing Northern Nigeria under British rule, declared it so. The military campaign which followed the declaration was economically costly, its toll on the British combat troops heavy. It was in this situation of grave danger to the lives of British troops that colonial medical practice in Northern Nigeria emerged. Wounded and sick soldiers needed medical attention, and the medical arm of the West African Frontier Force (WAFF), Lugard’s army of conquest, provided this. ⁶ But this was largely an ad hoc medical practice established to aid the conquest and...