Pour une introduction à l’histoire sanitaire au Cameroun français

1845-1938

Abstract

The poor cousin of Cameroonian historiography, the history of health today deserves much greater recognition among the wider public for its contributions to understandings of human environmental transformations that seek a more viable future for humankind. This health history has both political and geopolitical dimensions, in the sense that Cameroon’s political and administrative history results from the colonial partition that divided the country in two. The sanitary penetration of Cameroon under French rule was part of a three-fold colonial moment, which we reconstruct by tracing sanitary politics and ideologies. The strategic colonial position of actors, as well as the structural transformation of this period’s resulting sanitary environment, enables insight into this stratified historical process. This contribution proposes different elements that permit comprehension of this part of our social history, from the arrival of the first missionary on Cameroonian soil, to the moment in which the French administration institutionally and structurally consolidated its administrative system.