Qua Iboe by motorcycle and launch: brokering public health coverage in 1960s Southeastern Nigeria

Long an expatriate-run concern, leprosy control was subsumed as a key component of rural public health in the years following Nigerian Independence in 1960 by the enlisting of a cadre of African inspectors, deployed across an existing institutional landscape by a newly Nigerianized medical bureaucracy. The performative norms of leprosy control, once thoroughly colonial and suffused with the ripe vocabulary of a long-entrenched missionary diaspora, were renovated at the heart of a new concern with rural public health more broadly, as the needs, expectations and hierarchies encoded in relations between patient, court, bureaucrat and medical worker shifted and settled in accordance with new political horizons. For health workers, issues of patient and worker mobility, drug delivery, patient and community expectation, and their own physical and financial security were dramatized in a series of commentaries, complaints and reports denoting deeply felt anxieties over the viability of careers in the service of Nigerian health. This article outlines struggles surrounding leprosy control and rural public health work in the Qua Iboe Mission catchment, administered by the newly created Ikot Ekpene Medical Field Unit. It documents a shift in medical work from European missionary to national and technocratic, the foregrounding of concerns with African (worker and patient) welfare and mobility, and the emergence of novel post-colonial forms of public health advocacy and politics along the highways and byways of Ibibio- and Annang-speaking areas of southeastern Nigeria in the 1960s.