Kindwitwi was originally started as a leprosy isolation camp from the 1950s through the early 2000s. Three generations later, it’s no longer a quarantine site, but still houses the original people with leprosy and several generations of their descendants. As global aid for leprosy has slowed to a halt, the town has had to transition from its quarantine origins to a farming town dependent on sesame and cashew crops for export. The town borders a colonial-era forest preserve, an old German fort, and is downstream from one of the world’s largest hydroelectric dams. As such, the researchers understand this as a landscape of multiple and competing forms of containment. Together with Anitha Tingira (University of Dar es Salaam) and Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe (a Tanzanian visual artist), they are trying to understand two questions: (1) how have these multiple forms of disease and environmental resource containment “mapped onto” one another in and around Kindwitwi? And (2) how do people create new forms of habitability through farming practices in the post-quarantine present? This seminar talk will especially introduce the project thus far through the crops themselves, and how we might tell this complicated history from the perspective of cashew trees and sesame fields in the forest preserve around Kindwitwi.
Please bring your own lunch, coffee will be served.
Rebekah Ciribassi is a medical anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at UiO. She is a member of the Epidemic Traces research team, which focuses on the afterlives and remains of disease control measures in Africa. Rebekah is also working on her first book, Diffracting Genes, which examines practices of inheritance in Tanzania through the lens of the recently expanding national attention to sickle cell disease.