Colonial medicine
How empire made kwashiorkor a protein story
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Nott argues that kwashiorkor was invented as a continental protein deficit, distancing colonial science from politically dangerous hunger.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Kwashiorkor was invented as a continental protein deficit, distancing colonial science from politically dangerous hunger.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Discoveries this paper informs or conflicts with
- A continental nutrition crisis was generalised from two unusual places
This paper informs this development.
Inspect source passages
How empire made kwashiorkor a protein story
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
Around Kampala, supplementary bottle-feeds before 6 months rose from 14 per cent in 1950–52 to 42 per cent ten years later.
In the area around Kampala, for instance, the proportion of children receiving supplementary bottle-feeds before 6 months of age increased from 14 per cent in 1950–52 to 42 per cent only 10 years later
The UN Protein Advisory Group was created in 1955 to fight to close the protein gap.
Taking up this mantel, the UN’s Protein Advisory Group, created in 1955 to ‘fight to close the protein gap’ between Global North and South, continued to promote modernist, technical and technocratic solutions to an imagined protein crisis until long after the end of empire
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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