Categorizing colonial patients: segregated medical care, space and decolonization in a Congolese city, 1931–62

This article deals with the Belgian colonial authorities’ obsession with classification and categorization, and explores how this obsession affected medical care in the city of Coquilhatville. Whereas the authorities aspired a medical care that was strictly segregated along ‘racial’ lines, providing separate hospitals for Europeans and for Africans, in reality such rigorous segregation was unsustainable. As I will argue, it was the authorities’ inclination to categorize that eventually blurred the lines. Indeed, the article shows how the administrators got stuck in their own taxonomic zeal, when members of the upper class, the so-called évolués, demanded to be medically treated differently than other Congolese, in a way that befitted their status. Next, patients of these upper class insisted to be differentiated among themselves too. Responding to ever more claims to be discerned from yet another ‘lower’ évolué, and trying to translate social space into physical space, the authorities – unwillingly – gradually opened up the doors for évolués to be received in the hospital reserved for Europeans exclusively.