Containment and Flow

Containment and Flow: Traces of leprosy control and care along the Rufiji River is sited in Kindwitwi, a small farming village in southern Tanzania founded in the 1950s as a government-run leprosy isolation camp. It asks: how do people creatively inhabit — and remake — landscapes built for the enclosure of people, resources, and disease?

After independence, when the Tanzanian state could no longer fund the upkeep of leprosy camps, a mostly-forgotten community of leprosy patients near Utete, in the Rufiji region, was taken over by retired Anglican missionary, Father Robin Lamburn. Fr. Lamburn cared for the leprosy patients and their families through a network of international donors, providing aid in the form of weekly food distribution, education, medical care, and agricultural land. Now, Kindwitwi's residents are the original leprosy patients along with their children and grandchildren. They have inherited an infrastructure built for disease containment across decades of colonial administration, missionary care, and international aid. But now that global leprosy funding has largely waned, Kindwitwi's residents are engineering a post-aid local economy even as they contend with intensifying environmental change, capitalist land grabs, and urban expansion along the Rufiji River. 

Containment and Flow is a multimodal ethnography I am conducting in collaboration with Anitha Tingira (University of Dar es Salaam) and Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe (freelance visual artist, Dar es Salaam), as part of the Epidemic Traces research team, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and hosted by the University of Oslo. The project is also supported by a Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-PhD grant, and runs from 2023–2027.

Central to the project is what we are calling "temporalities of containment": the ways structures of disease, population, and resource control become layered in a landscape, reactivated and repurposed across colonial and postcolonial time.