The 1904 public health decree imposed French sanitary and vaccination rules on Africans.

Evidence

It also created a Comite Superieur d’Hygiene et de Salubrite Publiques in Dakar to advise the governor general. As in France, water examination services were created, and new buildings were to conform to sanitary specifications. Any case of infectious disease had to be declared, and smallpox vaccination was made mandatory for Africans and Europeans. The decree encouraged cities and towns to equip municipal sanitation services. One of the few additions to the 1902 law was that administrators were also to take the necessary precautions for destroying “the rats, mosquitoes and other insects dangerous for public salubrity.” Fines were to be levied for uncovered wells and any stagnant or standing water found on private premises. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 168

Categorization

• XREF: Mandatory smallpox vaccination and sanitation fines show the coercive enforcement behind French republican health ideals—concrete evidence for the reader’s thesis of republican ideas being forced onto West Africa.