Samuël Coghe

• PhD History (European University Institute)
• Associate Professor of African and Global History at Ghent University

After the Second World War, colonial veterinary services, entrepreneurs, and African villagers in French Equatorial Africa (AEF) began to raise cattle in regions where this had been deemed impossible because of the threat of African animal trypanosomiasis. The opening of this new pastoral frontier in the humid savannas of Central Africa was not onl...

Population Politics in the Tropics explores colonial population policies in Angola between 1890 and 1945 from a transimperial perspective. Using a wide array of previously unused sources and multilingual archival research from Angola, Portugal and beyond, Samuël Coghe sheds new light on the history of colonial Angola, showing how population policie...

From the mid-1890s, an epidemic of sleeping sickness in the eastern hinterland of Luanda generated increasingly dramatic accounts. Observers reported staggering mortality rates and empty villages where agriculture and commerce had once thrived. The missionary pro-colonial journal Portugal em África wrote the following in 1896: ‘The majority of the...

In the 1920s, the colonial health services in Angola intensified the campaign against sleeping sickness. In 1923, two anti-sleeping sickness missions were sent to the Congo (1923–6) and Zaire (1923–4) districts.1 Most importantly, in 1926, the fight against this paradigmatic disease became part of a more comprehensive and well-funded scheme of Assi...

The establishment of the AMI services in 1926 not only changed colonial health paradigms in Angola: it also had a considerable impact on colonial knowledge and debates about the demography of Angola’s ‘native’ population. Driven by persistent fears of depopulation and profound dissatisfaction with existing demographic data, medical doctors used the...

From the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, colonial actors conceived and tried to implement a wide array of interventions aiming to improve the ‘quantity and quality’ of the ‘native’ population in Angola. These population politics were inextricably linked to the pervasive idea of a demographic crisis: virtually all colonial actors as...

In the historiography on post-Second World War demographic developments, it has often been argued that fears of de- and underpopulation regarding Africa subsided and gave way to a new discourse that problematised rapid population growth and imminent overpopulation instead. Karl Ittmann and Monica van Beusekom, for instance, have identified such cha...

Population Politics in the Tropics explores colonial population policies in Angola between 1890 and 1945 from a transimperial perspective. Using a wide array of previously unused sources and multilingual archival research from Angola, Portugal and beyond, Samuël Coghe sheds new light on the history of colonial Angola, showing how population policie...

In June 1931, approximately 200 delegates gathered in Geneva to attend the International Conference on the African Child. The first of its kind in Europe, the conference had been convened by the Save the Children International Union (SCIU), a philanthropic organisation with a strong Christian background. It brought together doctors, missionaries, s...

In the early twentieth century, the fight against sleeping sickness became the most important medical intervention and a crucial aspect of Portuguese population politics in Angola. Despite the vast and still growing historiography on this disease, however, the long history of sleeping sickness in Angola, and the Portuguese colonies in general, has...

In January 1947, Captain Henrique Galvão, one of three deputies representing Angola in the National Assembly in Lisbon, submitted a secret report on Portugal’s colonial rule in Africa to the Assembly’s Colonial Committee.1 The 58-page report was extremely critical of the ‘native’ policy Portugal had thus far pursued in its indigenato colonies Angol...

The word livestock itself suggests the reduction of animals as living things to animals as economic goods. Disaggregating the term into its component parts—live and stock—also suggest the difficulty of rendering things that are alive into things that are stocked, especially on large or predicable scales. The be alive is biological; living things br...

During the last decades of colonial rule, Belgian colonial authorities, health agencies and researchers intensely engaged with kwashiorkor, a severe syndrome that was deemed widespread among young children in some parts of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi and chiefly attributed to protein malnutrition. To fight kwashiorkor, the Belgian governmen...

in: Oxford Research Encyclopedia in African History

This article analyses two campaigns of mass chemoprophylaxis against sleeping sickness in Portuguese colonial Africa: preventive mass atoxylization (1926-1932), which was virtually confined to Angola, and pentamidinization campaigns in Angola and Guiné (1948-1970s), which were part of a broader international scheme. It argues that while the medical...

In the interwar period, Portuguese hygienists, agronomists and colonial administrators began to advocate the resettlement of Angola's rural native population into model villages as the ideal solution to many of the colony's hygienic, economic and societal problems. The plans for model villages in Angola were not exceptional in the interwar period....

Through the example of Portuguese Angola, this article examines why, how and to what effect colonial doctors in interwar tropical Africa engaged with studying the demography of ‘native’ populations. It shows that doctors‘ demographic endeavours were underwritten by widespread anxieties of population decline and intimately connected to innovations i...

In the 1920s, the Angolan health services eventually established a long-debated programme of African health care called Assistência Médica aos Indígenas (AMI). This article shows that, aside from economic and humanitarian considerations, the international critique of Portugal's colonial policies and ensuing anxieties that the country might lose its...

In the mid nineteenth century, the Anglo-Portuguese Mixed Commission in Luanda liberated 137 Africans from the slave trade. The liberated Africans then became apprentices for several years before they were granted complete freedom. This article argues that the in-between status of the liberated Africans was ambivalent and their very presence in a s...