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MEDICAL MISSIONARIES AND MODERNIZING EMIRS IN COLONIAL HAUSALAND: LEPROSY CONTROL AND NATIVE AUTHORITY IN THE 1930S

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2007

SHOBANA SHANKAR
SHOBANA SHANKAR
Affiliation:
Lafayette College
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Abstract

This article argues that emirs modernized and enhanced their authority through cooperation with Christian missions in the anti-leprosy campaign in colonial Hausaland in the 1930s. New documentary and oral sources detail how Native Administrations and Sudan Interior Mission workers together established leprosaria that were important beyond religious interaction. Emirs translated Islamic ideals of charity into governmental responsibility for medical welfare. The leprosy scheme brought together the elite and non-elite in ways that would previously have been unimaginable and took emirs' power to new reaches in an era of expanding native authority in Nigeria and throughout much of British Africa.

Keywords

NigeriaChristianityIslammedicinepolitics
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 45 - 68
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I dedicate this paper to the memory of Phil Shea, whose contributions to and support for Northern Nigerian history told from Nigerian perspectives are beyond measure. I thank Bob Arnold at the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) Archives in North Carolina, and, in Nigeria, Dr. Kiru, Ayuba Usman, Halima Wayi, staff at Ya da Kunya and the Katsina State Health Services Management Board for their assistance with this research. The following readers generously gave comments on early drafts of this paper: Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia, Mary Dillard, Karen Flint, Marcus Green, David Hardiman, Murray Last, Julie Livingston, John Manton, Michael McGovern and Brian Peterson. I am grateful to the Journal's anonymous readers for their insightful suggestions for elaborating key ideas. This research was supported by Fulbright/IIE; Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, UCLA; and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Barnard College-Columbia University.