Thèse de doctorat
| Résumé : | “At least the Belgians built hospitals!” - is perhaps the most often heard sentence within current-day public debates on Belgian colonial history. This PhD aims to question and complicate this tenacious myth of Belgian colonial medical infrastructure, by tracing a genealogy of Congo’s hospital architecture that looks beyond the conventional discourse of colonial propaganda in which this persistent platitude remains rooted. Although the colonial government consistently portrayed its medical architecture as modern, spotlessly clean, and neatly segregated facilities that followed the latest Western best practices of hospital design, reality was rather different. Not only did these complexes rarely live up to these steep ambitions, the urban location of these hospitals also often undermined strict colonial binary divisions, and the agency of African staff and patients in the architecture and everyday healthcare activities in these institutions were furthermore much more crucial than was and is recognized. Analysed at the scale of the colonial territory, the planning of the colonial network of medical infrastructure also reveals how, even though Belgian Congo’s government has been widely described as a ‘Bula Matari’ – a well-oiled, omnipotent top-down state apparatus, colonial ‘governmentality’ closely relied on improvisation, local agency and know-how, and exchange that often went against the conventional chain of command. As such, this PhD not only provides contributions to current-day debates that aim to decolonize colonial history, but also deploys Belgian Congo’s medical infrastructure as a lens to contribute to the wider, academic discussions regarding the country’s complicated history. |
