Malnutrition in a Modernising Economy: The Changing Aetiology and Epidemiology of Malnutrition in an African Kingdom, Buganda c.1940–73

Abstract

Abstract:The ecological fecundity of the northern shore of Lake Victoria was vital to Buganda's dominance of the interlacustrine region during the pre-colonial period. Despite this, protein-energy malnutrition was notoriously common throughout the twentieth century. This paper charts changes in nutritional illness in a relatively wealthy, food-secure area of Africa during a time of vast social, economic and medical change. In Buganda at least, it appears that both the causation and epidemiology of malnutrition moved away from the endemic societal causes described by early colonial doctors and became instead more defined by individual position within a rapidly modernising economy.

Health as growth

“…; see also Committee on Nutrition in the Colonial Empire 1936, 14). It was initially in the context of a general interest in protein and energy in malnutrition (Nott 2016;Tappan 2017) that Wrigley (1959, 8-9) found nutrition to be deficient in Uganda's banana-growing regions. However, an earlier colonial report identified the lack of 'African standards' for health as a key problem, which turned statements about malnutrition in Uganda into 'purely a matter of opinion' (UPNC 1945, n.p.).…”

“How Little Progress”? A Political Economy of Postcolonial Nutrition

“…Plumpy'nut has also endured because it perfectly complements the political economy of Africa's Structural Adjustment era. Like MUAC bands and CMAM protocols, the efficacy of Plumpy'nut-which aims to bring children to their target weight in six to ten weeks-has caused its deification among humanitarian organizations at the same time as it undermines the state by suggesting that technology and the free market can better fill its space (Scott-Smith 2013, 2016. Hospital treatments for malnutrition had been lacking in any case but, established in response to the diminished capacity of the state to provide even these services, CMAM and Plumpy'nut have begun to make state-run nutrition programs seem like an irrelevancy.…”

“…Foucauldian histories have explained the discovery of individual nutrients and the definition of individual deficiencies as “biopolitical” tools to be understood in the context of “biopower,” the shift from repressive rule to paternalistic authority over the body of the individual and the collective bodies of the wider populace (Foucault , 135–145; Smith ). In Africa, this emerged as a particular concentration on protein, something which was both heavily informed by the culture and politics of imperialism and which largely ignored the often adverse relationship between colonization and economic, domestic, and dietary change (Moore and Vaughan ; Nott ).…”

“…Beginning in the 1950s, the feminization and Africanization of medical services had contributed to a discourse that gave greater consideration to the social and economic causes of nutritional illness, many of which were understood to be tied to the growing burden of motherhood in the region (Iliffe ). Doctors across the continent began to consider the interaction between malnutrition and poverty and the ways that urbanization and economic modernization were interrupting the social and demographic mechanisms that had previously prevented malnutrition (see, for instance, Sai ; Welbourn ; Nott ). Influenced by increasingly social‐ and gender‐conscious perspectives, contraception was understood by many in Africa as a vital tool to combat malnutrition in a modernizing economy.…”

Tackling child malnutrition in Jamaica, 1962–2020

“…Only more recently have scholars (e.g. Nott, 2016 , 2018 ; Pernet and Forclaz, 2018 ; Redfield, 2012 ; Scott-Smith, 2013 , 2014a , 2014b , 2015 ; Tappan, 2017 ) begun to examine approaches taken by post-independence governments and aid agencies to nutrition, focussing particularly on child malnutrition.…”