Discipline and Punish: Soviet–African Public Health Encounters in Guinea-Conakry

In October 1958, when Guinea became independent from French West Africa, there were only a dozen fully trained medical doctors in the country. Very few Guineans were able to study medicine during the colonial era, and most French doctors, who traditionally staffed Guinea’s hospitals and clinics, abandoned the new nation immediately after independence. Facing severe shortages of qualified personnel virtually everywhere, the new Guinean government turned to the Soviet Union and other socialist states for help. From 1959, Soviet doctors, dentists, nurses and obstetricians began to fill the posts previously occupied by French medical professionals across Guinea. The encounter of Soviet practitioners with both patients and medical notions from Guinea created a complex and often tense matrix of interactions. This paper explores the shared Soviet-Guinean clinic by examining the clash between two different conceptions of discipline in the workspace. Doctors from the USSR brought with them to Guinea a distinctly Soviet understanding of how medical facilities should operate. They believed in the strict compartmentalization of tasks and in the “scientific” assessment of performance based on quantitative metrics. In contrast, Guinean hospitals tended to follow the disciplinarian practices of the French colonial administration, which emphasized the importance of “morality” in evaluating the work of medical professionals. The paper focuses on the tension between the hybridization of Soviet work culture with vernacular practices and the establishment of hierarchical relations in a shared workspace. The goal is reflecting on the extent to which these hierarchies formed the basis of an imperial system in the Soviet-Guinean clinic.