Eugenics at the Margins: Medical Consumption, “White Peril,” and African Political Reasoning in Colonial Freetown

This paper traces the commercial and political reworking of eugenic discourse in early twentieth century Freetown, Sierra Leone. It explores public debates in the Sierra Leone Weekly News, through which African intellectuals—many of whom received medical training in England—used the idioms of eugenic science gleaned through transatlantic textual circulation to theorize local concerns surrounding infant mortality, marriage, prostitution, and interracial sex. Regularly citing the writings of American eugenicists such as John Harvey Kellogg and Amos Milton Musser, alongside a plethora of medical and scientific journals such as The Lancet and Good Health, Freetown’s newspaper cultures engendered a scientific reading public initially oriented toward medical advertising, pharmaceutical consumption, and domestic regulation. These debates echoed social deployments of eugenic science circulating elsewhere but were distinctly shaped by local, West African anxieties over “White Peril” and interracial intimacy. This print culture rendered eugenic discourse a means of diagnosing the perceived medical and moral dangers of white immigration and colonial intimacy as mediated through advertising and circular consumption.

Over the early twentieth century, these debates became increasingly politicized as newspaper editors simultaneously emerged as organizers and intellectual spokesmen for African-led nationalist institutions. Editors such as Cornelius May of the Weekly News began to translate eugenic reasoning into critiques of colonial governance and arguments for African political capacity. Eugenic literature functioned as a flexible classificatory idiom that he used to mobilize the so-called science of race invoked in scientific literature to claim African political legitimacy. He framed rising recorded rates of infant mortality among urban Africans as evidence of racial degeneration produced by Western sexual and domestic norms enforced in Freetown. In this way, May inverted imperial eugenic frameworks that cast African sexuality as irrational and creatively cited and reworked eugenic thought to criticize empire from within its own epistemic terms.