Autore
McDow, Thomas F.

Titolo
African AIDS before AIDS: Revisiting Bangui, 1985
Periodico
Quaderni storici
Anno: 2024 - Volume: 177 - Fascicolo: 3 - Pagina iniziale: 617 - Pagina finale: 663

The 1985, when AIDS was still incompletely understood as a virus and in the world, an important but rarely discussed meeting that took place in Bangui, Central African Republic. The delegates in Bangui defined African AIDS, creating a surveillance definition that enabled the enumeration of cases and created the opportunity for a more complete understanding of the disease in Africa. While many historians have overlooked Bangui, a careful analysis of the meeting’s origins, context and outcomes point to the vital importance of African researchers in defining AIDS, suggest a subtle turning point in the continent’s relationship with the disease and highlights the emergence of a new constellation of research networks that included Africans as important collaborators. This paper draws on archives and oral histories to reconsider the agency of African researchers in Zaire, Tanzania, and Uganda in the early elucidation of AIDS. Between 1983 and 1985, the clinical observations, scientific investigations, and public health experiences of African doctors and scientists shaped the foundational knowledge of AIDS in its African contexts and influenced broader understandings of its global manifestations. In research like Zaire’s Projet SIDA, African researchers worked with European and American experts, and, in the aftermath of Bangui, the WHO drew on their expertise to scale up an aggressive program to confront the disease worldwide.



SICI: 0301-6307(2024)177:3<617:AABARB>2.0.ZU;2-7
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1408/118959
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1408/118959

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