The making of rural health care in colonial Zimbabwe : a history of the Ndanga Medical Unit, Fort Victoria, 1930-1960s

This thesis adopts a social history of medicine approach to explore the contradictions surrounding a specific attempt to develop a rural healthcare system in south-eastern colonial Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) from the 1930s to the 1960s. Influenced by a combination of healthcare discourses and models, in 1930, the colony’s new medical director formulated the first comprehensive rural healthcare delivery plan, premised on the idea of ‘medical units’ or outlying dispensaries networked around rural hospitals. The main argument of the thesis is that the Ndanga Medical Unit, as this pioneer medical unit was known, was a variant of a typical colonial project characterised by tensions between innovative endeavours to control disease on the one hand, and the need to fulfil broader colonial ambitions on the other.