I. Surveillance: Coloniality and Complicity The History of the African AIDS Epidemic Routine monitoring and sample collection by Western-based corporations identified novel viral signatures in blood but concealed these findings from workers and public health authorities. The lack of surveillance technology to identify it didn’t mean HIV wasn’t spreading,; it meant systems of power failed to look further, fund research, or listen to affected communities. Their silence was an act of violence and serves as evidence of the power that health surveillance technologies have in forecasting and deciding the future. Evidence from Kinshasa, once a Belgian colonial outpost, reveals HIV in archived blood specimens dating back to the 1950s and 60s. The virus moved slowly along colonial trade routes here, incubating in silence, before reaching urban centers where it eventually drew institutional attention. Yet even then, the signs were ignored. For nearly two decades, as...
Writings in Anthropology & Public Health