- The colonial legacies of Malaria (Ikoku 2016)
Part of the European “civilizing mission” was to introduce “medical benevolence” to the colonies. However, this framing needs a critical investigation as, for the most part, the medical mission was to primarily serve the colonial officers and settlers, whose presence in the colonies was of utmost importance. To think that the imperial medical mission was to enhance the well-being of the colonized population is to miss out also on the role the “natives” played in the wealth-building enterprise of the home colony. A sick native meant less laborious production, less income, and thus less workforce. In my own research, I am to read specifically the works by Lea Kampe, Die Löwin von Kenia (2022), which is a pastiche of Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937). In this novel, malaria becomes an ideological disease, functioning secondarily to show the heights of European “medical benevolence” and framing the local populations as recipients of the “new radical & medical knowledge.”
2) Tropicality as Orientalism (Said, 1978 & Besser, 2009)
The Orient, as a postcolonial paradigm, scratched the surface on how the non-European was (racially) constructed. While this thought has gained traction in postcolonial studies and beyond, it does not address how specifically the Orient was and is being depicted. The colonial mission, specifically German colonialism, was a period loaded with notions of what it meant to be German, and geography played a big role. In this case, German East Africa, for example, became a space to try out the ideals of the Lebensraum. It immediately, however, became crucial to include a medical component to the colonial mission. As von Bülow is travelling to Zanzibar, she is advised to take quinine every day because “Zanzibar is a sad place… It has a churchyard feeling about it.” (Reisescizzen und Tagebuchblätter aus Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1889). How then did the other, or to use Said’s notion—the Orient, constructed in medical ways to extend the notion of European difference and exceptionalism?
3) Aesthetic choices in writing – Chromatism (Batchelor, 2000; Taussig, 2010)
If the color of the refined, the intellectually superior, and in this case the European is grey, Nietzsche’s Hyperborean, then the color of the primitive, the Hegelian lower spirit, and Kant’s dialectic of the sublime and beautiful is gaudy, bright, contaminating, and excess. Western civilization shuns color, as Batchelor would put it. Malaria has aesthetically come to be painted yellow, along with other tropical diseases too. The flag of a contaminated ship was yellow, warning others and the city to keep distance. The color of the medical passport is yellow. Quinine, in its solution form, is yellow. The colors described in von Bülow’s writings become gaudy, racialized, and embodied as she arrives in the colonies. The colors create a synesthetic appeal too, where the reader, possibly an uninformed relative or friend back in Europe, is encouraged to participate not only in the visual exercise of seeing color, but invited to taste the excess, stickiness, and brightness of the tropics.
Introduction 