From Colonial Health to the WHO: The Limits of Internationalised Social Welfare in Postwar Africa

This paper will consider the clash between colonial public health programs and new international health programs in Africa south of the Sahara after 1945. By focusing on the tensions between the colonial health administrations in Africa and the World Health Organization (WHO) in the 1940s and 1950s, this paper explores the limits of new forms of internationalised social welfare in the late colonial period. Drawing on archives from France, the United Kingdom, Dakar, and Geneva, it argues that rising anticolonialism in the United Nations had the unexpected result of limiting health cooperation on the African continent, where colonial health officials feared the possibility of international “interference” in their health programs on the continent. This paper will also consider the unravelling of colonial health programs during the decolonisation moment and will explore the impact of decolonisation on the WHO Regional Office for Africa in the years that immediately followed political independence. It argues that while colonial officials had joined forces to stave off unwanted international involvement in their colonial territories prior to 1960, in the postcolonial world the WHO quickly became a battleground between former colonial powers, who instead partnered with delegates from newly independent African states to draw new battle lines along linguistic divides, drawing up a francophone and an anglophone camp within the organization.