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| Title: | 'Veni, VD, Vici'? Reassessing the Ila Syphilis Epidemic |
| Author: | Callahan, Bryan |
| Year: | 1997 |
| Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
| Volume: | 23 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Period: | September |
| Pages: | 421-440 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Zambia |
| Subjects: | Ila sexually transmitted diseases colonialism History and Exploration Health and Nutrition |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637509 |
| Abstract: | This essay reexamines the historical origins of a well-known syphilis epidemic among the Ila-speaking peoples of Northern Rhodesia's Namwala District. The epidemic raised the anxieties of British officials, who launched a large-scale venereal disease (VD) treatment campaign in 1946 to save the Ila from 'extinction'. At the campaign's conclusion in 1958 Namwala District Commissioner K.M. Chittenden needed only three words to summarize the history of health and medicine among the Ila: 'Veni, VD, Vici'. The present author argues that the Ila venereal disease problem was largely a fiction, manufactured out of European preconceptions and reinforced by the confusing epidemiology of treponemal disease in colonial Zambia. He also argues that the colonial authorities, in their efforts to account for the apparent decline in Ila population, downplayed the significance of other factors such as labour migration and changing patterns of intrarural settlement. They had already convinced themselves that VD provided the necessary and sufficient explanation. Finally, the author accounts for the popular support of the campaign among the Ila themselves by arguing that local social and economic transformations may have made the campaign an appealing strategy for increasing family size, reasserting chiefly authority, and contesting marital dynamics. Ref., sum. |
