Africa has emerged as a prime arena of global health interventions that focus on particular diseases and health emergencies. These are framed increasingly in terms of international concerns about security, human rights, and humanitarian crisis. This presents a stark contrast to the 1960s and ‘70s, when many newly independent African governments pursued the vision of public health “for all,” of comprehensive health care services directed by the state with support from foreign donors. These initiatives often failed, undermined by international politics, structural adjustment, and neoliberal policies, and by African states themselves. Yet their traces remain in contemporary expectations of and yearnings for a more robust public health.

This volume explores how medical professionals and patients, government officials, and ordinary citizens approach questions of public health as they navigate contemporary landscapes of NGOs and transnational projects, faltering state services, and expanding privatization. Its contributors analyze the relations between the public and the private providers of public health, from the state to new global biopolitical formations of political institutions, markets, human populations, and health. Tensions and ambiguities animate these complex relationships, suggesting that the question of what public health actually is in Africa cannot be taken for granted. Offering historical and ethnographic analyses, the volume develops an anthropology of public health in Africa.

Contributors:Hannah Brown, P. Wenzel Geissler, Murray Last, Rebecca Marsland, Lotte Meinert, Benson A. Mulemi, Ruth J. Prince, Noémi Tousignant, and Susan Reynolds Whyte

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  Situating Health and the Public in Africa
  Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
  Ruth J. Prince
• Part I
  Whose Public Health?
• One
  The Peculiarly Political Problem behind Nigeria’s Primary Health Care Provision
  Murray Last
• Two
  Who Are the “Public” in Public Health?
  Debating Crowds, Populations, and Publics in Tanzania
  Rebecca Marsland
• Three
  The Qualities of Citizenship
  Private Pharmacists and the State in Senegal after Independence and Alternance
  Noémi Tousignant
• Part II
  Regimes And Relations of Care
• Four
  Regimes of Homework in AIDS Care
  Questions of Responsibility and the Imagination of Lives in Uganda
  Lotte Meinert
• Five
  “Home-Based Care Is Not a New Thing”
  Legacies of Domestic Governmentality in Western Kenya
  Hannah Brown
• Six
  Technologies of Hope
  Managing Cancer in a Kenyan Hospital
  Benson A. Mulemi
• Part III
  Emerging Landscapes of Public Health
• Seven
  The Publics of the New Public Health
  Life Conditions and “Lifestyle Diseases” in Uganda
  Susan Reynolds Whyte
• Eight
  Navigating “Global Health” in an East African City
  Ruth J. Prince
• Nine
  The Archipelago of Public Health
  Comments on the Landscape of Medical Research in Twenty-First-Century Africa
  P. Wenzel Geissler
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index