25 Health Inequality In Africa, Interview With Melissa Graboyes

Speaking of Race

In today’s episode, we travel to East Africa with Dr. Melissa Graboyes, a historian of medicine. Melissa talks with us about medical experimentation in East Africa during the colonial period, race-based health inequality in those parts of the world today, and how it was that prisoners in Zanzibar subverted racial categories through food! Some resources for this episode: ​Melissa’s professional website Johanna Crane, Scrambling for Africa: AIDS, Expertise, and the Rise of American Global Health Science Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Melissa’s book, The Experiment Must Continue: Medical Research and Ethics in East Africa, 1940–2014 Melissa’s articles, Chappati Complaints and Biriani Cravings: The Aesthetics of Food in Colonial Zanzibari Institutions, Journal of Eastern African Studies, May 2011: 313-328 “Searching for a Well Fed Swahili: Diet Creation in Colonial Zanzibari Institutions, 1935,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. Forthcoming.