How empire made kwashiorkor a protein story
Nott argues that kwashiorkor was invented as a continental protein deficit, distancing colonial science from politically dangerous hunger.
Source
"No one may starve in the British Empire": Kwashiorkor, Protein and the Politics of Nutrition Between Britain and Africa
What they did
The article reads Gold Coast cookery manuals, Cicely Williams’s Accra papers, MRC tropical nutrition work in Uganda, WHO protein-gap reports, and later critiques, placing African protein deficiency in an earlier British history of nutrition and imperial administration.
What they found
Kwashiorkor, named from Accra Ga usage, became the emblem of African protein lack. Research clustered in atypical rainforest economies (Gold Coast, southern Uganda) and was exported as a continental pattern. Given the claim that no one may starve in the British Empire, oedema-and-pigment kwashiorkor was politically safer than famine. The 1975 reversal called the protein gap a myth.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This is not a new nutrition trial. Kampala bottle-feeding percentages are cited from earlier surveys. It does not measure today’s SAM incidence or prove every colonial doctor shared the protein story.
Key terms
- Kwashiorkor
- Ga-named infantile illness with oedema and pigment change, read in the 1930s as protein deficiency.
- Nutritionism
- Reductive focus on single nutrients that made protein the colonial answer to African ill-health.
- Kwashiorkor belt
- Unrepresentative rainforest research locales whose findings were generalised across Africa.
- Protein gap
- UN-era claim of North–South protein shortage later called a myth covering a food-and-energy gap.
Flashcards
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
Williams published on kwashiorkor while working in?
Common questions
Who named the illness kwashiorkor in print?
Cicely Williams, using the Accra Ga name while working in the Gold Coast Medical Service.
Why was it politically useful?
It generalised African deficiency without admitting imperial starvation or land alienation.
What did Nature say in 1975?
The protein gap is a myth; the problem is quantity of food and energy.
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