‘Tubab’ technologies and ‘African’ ways of knowing: nationalist techno‐politics in Senegal

Abstract

This article explores the social experience of radiology in contemporary Senegal. To understand that experience, the paper traces the social history of radiology's professionalization in the context of rising nationalism and suggests that, through a variety of colonial and independence‐era development projects, culturalist discourses about African ‘mentalities’ were interwoven into technical‐medical practice. The paper then provides an ethnography of contemporary radiological practice in an urban state‐run hospital in order to demonstrate the formative role that culturalist discourses play in participants' own understandings of their work. I argue that the intertwining of culturalist discourses into technical practice makes it possible for radiological technology to be seen as ‘mysterious’ and ‘powerful’ in the postcolonial context. The paper ultimately aims to provide additional insight into the kinds of relationships between technology and transparency that can obtain in postcolonial contexts.

Keywords:

• Africa
• technology
• colonial history
• postcolonialism
• techno‐politics
• transparency
• petty corruption

Notes

1. Fassin, Pouvoir et Maladie.

2. Ibid., 12.

3. Ibid., 121–2.

4. Marx, The Machine in the Garden; Hughes, American Genesis.

5. Bijker and Law, Shaping Technology/Building Society; Jasanoff, States of Knowledge; Hecht, The Radiance of France.

6. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump; Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Porter, Trust in Numbers.

7. Ezrahi, ‘Technology and Civil Epistemology,’ 160–1.

8. Curtin, Death by Migration; Headrick, Tools of Empire; Headrick, Tentacles of Progress; Inkster, Science and Technology in History; Pacey, Technology in World Civilization; Arnold, Colonizing the Body.

9. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men.

10. McClintock, Imperial Leather; Hecht, The Radiance of France; Anderson, Imagined Communities; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt; Vaughan, Curing Their Ills; Arnold, Colonizing the Body; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution; Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon.

11. Ferguson, The Anti‐Politics Machine; Rist, The History of Development; Scott, Seeing Like a State.

12. Mbembe, On the Postcolony; Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa.

13. Stocking, The Ethnographer's Magic; Pels and Salemink, Colonial Subjects; Wilder, ‘Colonial Ethnology.’

14. Lévy‐Bruhl, Primitive Mentality.

15. Several studies of l'Afrique Occidentale Francaise (AOF), the French colonial federation in West Africa, have pointed out that high‐placed French colonial officials could even be described as ‘ethnographer‐administrators,’ the most well‐known example being Maurice Delafosse, an ethnologist who began his career as a colonial administrator in the Cote d'Ivoire. Other colonial officials, including several Governors General and some directors of the colonial ministries, were avid ‘armchair ethnologists’ who seemed to make policy choices on behalf of widely distributed assessments and descriptions of African ‘mentalities.’ See for example, Wilder, ‘Colonial Ethnology.’

16. For Negritude and the role of anthropological writings in that artistic movement, see Kesteloot, Black Writers in French and Jules‐Rosette, Black Paris. For Senghor and Negritude, see Markovitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor. See also Diop, Precolonial Black Africa and Jules‐Rosette, Black Paris.

17. Prakash, Another Reason; Mrázck, Engineers of Happy Land; Moon, ‘Constructing “Native Development”’; Hecht, ‘Rapture Talk.’

18. Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.

19. Blundo and Olivier de Sardan, Everyday Corruption, 4.

20. Bayart, The Politics of the Belly; Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft; Apter, ‘IBB = 419’; White, Speaking with Vampires; Comaroff and Comaroff, Modernity and its Malcontents; Cruise O'Brien, Symbolic Confrontations. As Daniel Jordan Smith puts it, it is in the diversity of meanings that are ascribed to socio‐technical practice, ‘be it ideals of development and democracy, kinship‐based expectations of reciprocity, notions of the occult and supernatural justice, or promises of divine intervention,’ that the complexity of the relationship between experiences of power and the postcolonial state reveals itself. Smith, A Culture of Corruption, 15.

21. ‘Ils sont des centaines d'infirmiers … ,’ Bingo, 72 (January 1959): 12–13.

22. Faculté de Médecine, de Pharmacie et D'Odonto‐Stomatologie, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, ‘Ecole Africaine de Médecine et de Pharmacie, Jules Carde, 1918–1953,’ http://www.ucad.sn/medecine/interst.htm (accessed June 1, 2001).

23. Interview with Dr Mbaye Ndoye, Centre Soweto, Dakar, Senegal, October 4, 2002.

24. Sankale, Diop, and Frament, ‘Les Motivations des étudiants,’ 2365.

25. Interview with Dr Mbaye Ndoye, Centre Soweto, Dakar, Senegal, October 4, 2002.

26. Ibid.

27. Archives Nationales du Sénégal (ANS) bi III 4‐488, Marc Sankale, ‘Souveraineté Nationale et Probèmes Sanitaires Internationaux,’ Paper presented at Centre Culturel Daniel Brottier de Dakar, February 24, 1960, 5.

28. Sankale, ‘Souvérnaité,’ 5.

29. Interview with Dr Mbaye Ndoye, Centre Soweto, Dakar, Senegal, October 4, 2002.

30. Ibid., October 8, 2002.

31. Ibid.

32. Using medical technologies to inspire awe was a common technique throughout the colonial period (Grimaud, ‘Les Médecins africains en AOF’). These practices effectively worked to enroll patients into the colonial state's medical regime through mystification and obfuscation.

33. Interview with Dr Mbaye Ndoye, Centre Soweto, Dakar, Senegal, October 8, 2002.

34. ANS Bi III 4‐1490. Pierre Fougeyrollas, La Télévision et L'Education Sociale des Femmes, Premier rapport sur le Projet pilote UNESCO – Sénégal à Dakar. Paris, UNESCO, 1967, 26. Although later broadcasts (especially those intended for audiences of migrant male laborers) included programming on ‘Senegalese cultural arts,’ more than 40 initial broadcasts focused on health related themes. Greenough, ‘Un projet pilote au Sénégal,’ 80; Fougeyrollas, La Télévision.

35. Fougeyrollas, La Télévision, 26.

36. ANS bi III 4‐3164. M. Bourgeois, Radio–télévision éducative – Sénégal: Janvier 1966–Juin 1973, UNESCO 3032/RMO.RD/COM, Paris, April 1974. Throughout the 1960s, this supposed potential to practically hypnotize television audiences was frequently cited as a rationale for using television in mass adult education campaigns not only in Africa but other parts of the formerly colonized world as well.

37. ANS bi III 4‐3164. Owen Leeming, Les Dakaroises à l'Ecole du Petit Ecran, Interstages (February 15, 1968): 8–13, 10.

38. ANS Bi III 4‐1490. Fougeyrollas, La Télévision, 26 and ANS Bi I 4‐883. Pierre Fougeyrollas, Téléclubs Feminins dans l'Agglomeration Dakaroise, Deuxième rapport sur le Projet UNESCO – Sénégal, 1969.

39. Gellar, Senegal, 1995.

40. For example, Julius Nyerere's Tanzania also based its development schemes on concepts of African socialism (Markovitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor). In Senegal, the most ambitious aspect of this new political platform was a program called Animation rurale (rural animation), in which rural farmers were to be organized into agricultural cooperatives. However, when Prime Minister Mamadou Dia pushed for the centralization of the cooperative movement, he antagonized a number of powerful interests in Senegalese agribusiness, many of whom were allies of President Leopold Senghor, for example French, Lebanese and Syrian traders and lenders, as well as the powerful leaders of the Muslim brotherhoods who owned many communal farming plots. The power‐sharing arrangement between Prime Minister Dia and President Senghor broke apart in 1963 when Dia attempted to wrest greater ministerial control over Animation and was sent to jail on charges of attempting a coup. Senghor consolidated government power and in the process narrowed the frame of rural development away from the more radical changes advocated by Dia.

41. Senghor, ‘African‐Negro Aesthetics.’

42. Later printed in Senghor, ‘Negritude and African Socialism.’

43. Senghor, ‘Negritude and African Socialism,’ 16.

44. To dissuade would‐be promoters of literacy in Wolof, by the mid 1960s the language spoken by more than half of Senegal's population (but incidentally not Senghor's native tongue), Senghor passed a law imposing heavy fines and up to three months in jail for writers and publishers of orthographic transliterations of Wolof (Cruise O'Brien, ‘The Shadow Politics,’ 1998) and Interview with Isa Touré, Division de l'Alphabétisation, Ministère de l'Enseignement Technique, Formation Professionel, Alphabetisation et Promotion de Langues Nationales. Dakar, August 27, 2002.

45. Cruise O'Brien, ‘The Shadow Politics.’

46. Silla, ‘Religion Traditionelle.’

47. Ibid., 17.

48. ANS bi III No 2372. Vincent Dan, Négritude et Médecine, Congrès Extraordinaire, SUCSEL‐CNTS; Dakar, May 27–28, 1972, 22 and 24.

49. Ibid., 22.

50. Ibid., 22.

51. A selection of some of these articles include Yambo Ouologuem, ‘Ces plantes qui guérissent,’ Bingo (November 1977): 34–5 and Yambo Ouologuem, ‘Ces plantes qui guérissent,’ Bingo (February 1978): 31–2; and Yambo Ouologuem, ‘Les secrets africains qui guérissent,’ Bingo (January 1978): 34–6; Philippe Essomba, ‘Guérisseurs ou Charlatans,’ Bingo (June 1977): 30–1 and 34–5; ‘Médecin du rêve,’ Bingo (September 1980): 14–15; and Jackson Packebo Sango, ‘La médecine traditionnelle face aux maladies mentales,’ Bingo (January 1978): 32–4 and Saliou Bineta Dieng, ‘Il faut essayer de concilier les médecines modernes et traditionelles,’ Le Soleil, September 17, 1974.

52. Cruise O'Brien, ‘The Shadow Politics.’

53. ‘Quand “seytane” s'en mêle,’ Sud Quotidien, August 31, 1994.

54. ‘Les guérisseurs: La faute aux ≪djinns≫,’ Le Soleil, June 25, 1986.

55. Gellar, Senegal, 62–4.

56. Sankale, ‘Senghor et la Médecine,’ 161.

57. Hecht, ‘Rapture Talk.’

58. Interview with X‐ray technician at a public hospital in Dakar, May 28, 2002.

59. According to one estimate, by the 1990s foreign‐trained health professionals made up almost a quarter of the medical workforce of Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA. Liese, Blanchet, and Dussault, ‘Background Paper,’ 9.

60. Liese, Blanchet, and Dussault, ‘Background Paper,’ 3 and 26.

61. Blume, Insight and Industry. Blume is one of many good histories that make this case.

62. Interview with radiologist at public hospital in Dakar, Dakar, June 4, 2002.

63. ‘Le Debat sur la santé,’ Takusaan, May 17, 1983.

64. Names of interviewees and information about the hospital have been changed in order to protect research subjects.

65. Interview with Dr Diop, October 22, 2002, Dakar.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid.

68. Names have been altered to protect research subjects.

69. Interview with Babacar Ndiaye, August 20, 2002.

70. Interview with Dr Diop, August 23, 2002, Dakar.

71. Names have been altered to protect research subjects.

72. Interview with Dr Diop, October 22, 2002, Dakar.

73. Lynch and Bogen, The Spectacle of History.

74. Ibid., 246.

75. Ibid., 246.

76. Blundo and Olivier de Sardan, Everyday Corruption, 9. They call for a ‘sociology of rumor.’

77. West and Sanders, Transparency and Conspiracy.

78. In the Senegalese case, for example, the term radioscopie is often used in the French‐language press to mean ‘exposé, as in a ‘Radioscopie’ of election results or, as President Abdoulaye Wade has used the term, to mean ‘a systematic method for getting to the bottom of a situation,’ for example, a ‘Radioscopie’ of Senegalese public debt. ‘Radioscopie du groupe parlementaire ld 88% des élus pour la première fois à l'assemblée nationale,’ Sud Quotidien, June 27, 2002 and African Union, ‘Experts’ Preparatory Meeting for The Conference of African Ministers of Economy and Finance CAMEF),’ May 4–5, 2005, Dakar, Senegal. Available on the web at http://www.africa-union.org/Economic%20Affairs/Confernce%20Dakar/DAKAMINRPTFinal%20final.doc (accessed May 15, 2010).

79. West and Sanders, Transparency and Conspiracy, 16.