Article ID: CBB611553003

Between colonial medicine and global health: protein malnutrition and UNICEF milk in the Belgian Congo (2021)

unapi

During the last decades of colonial rule, Belgian colonial authorities, health agencies and researchers intensely engaged with kwashiorkor, a severe syndrome that was deemed widespread among young children in some parts of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi and chiefly attributed to protein malnutrition. To fight kwashiorkor, the Belgian government, in the early 1950s, set up a joint milk distribution campaign with the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization, the first of its kind in colonial Africa. Placing this campaign in the context of mounting international and inter-imperial concern about kwashiorkor and other nutritional problems in Africa and across the globe, this article explores its rationales, mechanisms and consequences, and in particular, how the campaign was shaped and publicised by FORÉAMI, one of the main health providers on the ground. It not only contributes to the history of European colonial medicine and nutritional policies, but also opens new perspectives on international health collaboration during late colonialism. It argues that Belgian authorities were wary of international interference in colonial policies, but that especially FORÉAMI also viewed and used the campaign as an opportunity to display its ‘mastery’ in rural and infant healthcare and control the narrative on Belgium’s colonial medicine.

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Authors & Contributors
Tappan, Jennifer
Au, Sokhieng
Barona, Josep Lluís
Bont, Raf de
Borowy, Iris
Carter, Jimmy
Journals
Social History of Medicine
Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences
Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam
Environmental History
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
History and Anthropology
Publishers
Harvard University
Columbia University
Brepols
Johns Hopkins University Press
Ohio University Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Concepts
Public health
Colonialism
Nutrition
Belgium, colonies
International cooperation
Food and foods
People
Benedict, Francis Gano
Foege, William H.
McKeown, Thomas
Salk, Jonas Edward
McNamara, Robert Strange
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
20th century, early
21st century
19th century
Places
Congo
Africa
United States
Uganda
Great Britain
Belgium
Institutions
League of Nations
Rockefeller Foundation
Centers for Disease Control (U.S.)
United Nations
World Health Organization (WHO)
World Bank
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