This thesis analyses missionary reactions to the sleeping sickness epidemic that haunted East and Central Africa in the early 20th century. Sleeping sickness was an inevitably fatal disease endemic...Show moreThis thesis analyses missionary reactions to the sleeping sickness epidemic that haunted East and Central Africa in the early 20th century. Sleeping sickness was an inevitably fatal disease endemic to Sub-Saharan Africa. In focusing on the German protestant Bethel Mission and the French catholic White Fathers mission, this thesis argues that missionaries had distinct approaches towards sleeping sickness and that the disease was less prevalent in the African Great Lakes Region than previously assumed. Past scholarship on sleeping sickness has relied almost exclusively on the Belgian, German, and British colonial states’ archives. Sleeping sickness threatened these states’ claim to power and consequently induced profound colonial anxieties. Missionaries, instead, were less anxious in light of sleeping sickness. Missionary medicine and missionary mobility regimes aided the Bethel Mission and the White Fathers to cope better with the epidemic. Their archives offer an alternative to colonial archives that does not conflate the disease, and also acknowledges that vast areas in the African Great Lakes Region were free of sleeping sickness. The disease was one among many diseases the missionaries and their communities faced. The missionary sources this thesis relies on suggest that scholarship on sleeping sickness reflects a colonial imaginary rather than the lived reality of non-colonial individuals in the African Great Lakes Region.Show less
