The transfer of European social policy concepts to tropical Africa, 1900–50: the example of maternal and child welfare

Concerns about a sinking birth rate and possible ‘national degeneration’ led to the implementation of various measures in maternal and child welfare across Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century. Infant health was strongly connected with the idea of population as both a national and imperial resource. In the colonies of the imperial powers, similar issues started to be addressed later, mostly after the First World War, when colonial administrations, who until then had predominantly worried about the health of the white European colonizers, started to take an interest in the health of the indigenous population. This article investigates the transfer of maternal and infant health policies from Britain and Germany to their tropical African colonies and protectorates. It argues that colonial health policy developed in a complex interplay between imperial strategies and preconceptions as well as local reactions and demands, mostly reifying racial demarcation lines in colonial societies. It focuses on examples from German East Africa, which became the British Tanganyika mandate after the First World War, and from the British sub-Saharan colonies Kenya and Nigeria.