Colonial medicine prioritized European diseases over African ones

Evidence

Yet, even in this area, French ideology did not serve the needs of the African community as promised. As we have seen, it ranked health care considerably behind railroad construction in importance, as the tiny subsidies allotted les services sanitaires compared to public works indicate. And even those hygiene measures that were taken revealed several fundamental flaws. First, French health care officials subordinated individualized medical assistance available to all Africans to public health measures designed principally to eradicate the two diseases most threatening to Europeans: yellow fever and malaria. One consequence of this preoccupation was that Dakar failed to pay sufficient attention early on to one disease decimating the African populations: sleeping sickness. Unlike in the case of smallpox, a vaccination against sleeping sickness did not yet exist. Not until I9II, and then under international pressure, did Dakar take measures against sleeping sickness. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 235

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how ‘universalist’ humanitarian rhetoric (civilization, public hygiene) gets selectively redirected toward the colonizer’s own survival needs at the colonized’s expense — a pattern worth tracing in present-day global health aid.
• QUESTION: What exactly was the ‘international pressure’ that finally pushed Dakar in 1911 against sleeping sickness? Who applied it and why did it work where local need did not?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 235