On 18 February 1946 the residents of the Mikomeseng leprosy settlement in Spanish Guinea (present-day Equatorial Guinea) rose up in protest against the brutal conditions they were forced to live under. The Mikomeseng leprosy settlement in Spanish Guinea (present-day Equatorial Guinea) was widely promoted during the 1940s and 1950s as the embodiment of the Francoist 'civilizing mission' in Africa. More generally, they complained that many patients had been in Mikomeseng for years, hearing constant promises that they would be cured but without their situation improving in any way. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust-funded project, ‘Reluctant Internationalists: A History of Public Health and International Organisations, Movements and Experts in Twentieth Century Europe’ (PI Jessica Reinisch, grant reference 097779/Z/11/Z) at Birkbeck, University of London. This site needs JavaScript to work properly. Finally, it will show how Mikomeseng, the fight against leprosy and colonial health policy more generally were used to re-establish Spain’s status within the international scientific community following its period of post-war isolation. In many ways Mikomeseng thus represented a miniature version of the Francoist state which had been developing on the Iberian Peninsula since 1939. Although the regime's determination to punish Republicans for ‘military rebellion’ inevitably led to the initiation of tens of thousands of post-war military investigations, only a minority of cases ended in execution. eCollection 2019. Authoritarianism and punitive eugenics: racial hygiene and national Catholicism during Francoism, 1936-1945. Soc Hist Med. The language of empire had been central to the discourse of Spanish nationalist and right-wing movements since the ‘Disaster’ of 1898, when Spain had lost its remaining Latin American and Asian colonies.8 Spain had laid claim to territories in equatorial Africa since the late 1700s, but did not establish full control over Spanish Guinea—the island of Fernando Po (present-day Bioko) and the small mainland region of Rio Muni—until the early twentieth century. Using new material from the Spanish colonial archives alongside contemporary films, books and press reports, this article shows how the image of Mikomeseng as the embodiment of benevolent colonial rule was constructed by Francoist experts and officials around a brutally repressive institution, one which encapsulated the violence of Spanish colonial rule in West Africa and of the Franco regime as a whole. '����@Z����+�����7^PG�20մi-!���L�'�B �� ���4 The disease’s religious symbolism meant that it enjoyed a high profile among the profoundly Catholic Francoist administration. For an insightful discussion of the film and its significance within early Francoism, see Martínez Antonio, ‘Imperio enfermizo’. View Francoist repression in postwar Spain Research Papers on Academia.edu for free. Global health emergencies such as the post-war polio epidemic provided opportunities for the Franco regime to establish itself within the international system, with Spanish experts helping to legitimise the regime by attending international conferences and working with international organisations.94 As the advent of the Cold War began to ameliorate criticism of the Franco regime, the World Health Organization was one of the first international organisations to accept Spanish membership in 1951.95, In this context, leprosy’s religious and cultural associations allowed the regime to present itself as both scientifically advanced and socially progressive, while also reminding the international community of Spain’s ‘glorious’ imperial past. The mass protest of leprosy sufferers in 1946, however, revealed a very different side to life in the settlement. ‘Sanitaria internacional’, Ser, 1948, 71, 27–8. �4�B, !��H�-���[ f�T1p ���V��Av|M�f`J�Ҧ@l�.^�>�^����M��oE�a>�d�%��&Mjb�Sjf�!�p�����;����,�"�� �0�)2��3��bhb���p���I����z�3^ ��"z~0$f7! Particularly during the period of international isolation which followed the end of the Second World War, Spanish officials and experts adopted the language of humanitarianism and development deployed by the British and French empires to position Franco’s Spain as a respectable and progressive colonial power.5 Mikomeseng, leprosy control and colonial health policy more generally, thus played an important part in efforts to overcome Spain’s post-war isolation.6 The prominent role of Francoist experts in international leprosy organisations reflected the wider success of Franco’s Spain in exploiting the idea of its ‘civilizing mission’ in Africa to establish international legitimacy. Published online by Cambridge University Press: URL: /core/journals/contemporary-european-history. ‘We, civilized men with a colonizing duty,’ the Director argued, ‘are allowing human beings to begin life without hope, and before their first smile are condemning them to a world of affliction.’37 As a result of these worries, one of the key features of the redesigned settlement at Mikomeseng was a care home just outside the settlement walls where the children of leprosy patients could be removed to prevent infection.38 There they would be cared for and educated by missionary nuns, saved from their pathologised African origins and raised as healthy Catholic citizens of the Francoist colonial state. Riley, Dylan But, as in Mikomeseng, the settlement’s authorities struggled to retain control over a distrusted and resentful patient population. On the history of modern segregationist approaches to leprosy, see Shubhada S. Pandya, ‘The First International Leprosy Conference, Berlin, 1897: The Politics of Segregation’, Historia, Ciencias, Saude—Manguinhos, 2003, 10, 161–77. Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (London: HarperPress, 2012). In the same way that medicine and public health in Spain were used to strengthen the regime’s legitimacy despite the repressive realities of Francoist biopolitics, so Mikomeseng and the treatment of leprosy helped to boost Spain’s international status regardless of the brutality of life both in the settlement itself, and in Spanish Guinea as a whole. Among them was Victor Domínguez Martínez, who despite the brutality of the regime he had presided over in Mikomeseng, went on to work with the WHO Leprosy Unit and sit on the WHO expert committee on leprosy during the 1950s and 1960s.109 His professional success reflected the significance of colonial health to the legitimacy of the Franco regime. A documentary film produced in the same year as the protest and commissioned by Spain’s colonial service presented it as a model institution, providing medical and spiritual care, education and security for its residents, while protecting both new-born children and the wider population from the dangers of infection.2 Numerous other articles, books and films promoted Spain’s successful treatment of leprosy in the settlement, aimed both at domestic and international audiences. At the same time, the 1977 Amnesty Law not only freed political prisoners from jails but also gave immunity to those who had participated in Francoist repression. Botti, ‘Cielo y dinero’; Suárez Blanco, ‘Las colonias españolas en África’. A key part of this humanitarian mission was the aim of preventing the spread of infection from leprosy patients to their new-born children. Il report seguente simula gli indicatori relativi alla propria produzione scientifica in relazione alle soglie ASN 2018-2020 del proprio SC/SSD. This paper highlights the still visible repercussions that the Civil War and the Francoist repression have left in Spanish society. After the repression, the Franco regime created networks of complicity in which thousands of people were involved or were accomplices, in all possible ways, of the bloodshed inflicted, of the persecutions carried out, of the lives of hundreds of thousands people in prisons, concentration camps or Battalions workers. Epub 2017 Nov 3. Most seriously, he alleged that the process of identifying leprosy patients within the population and transferring them to Mikomeseng had been carried out in a brutal fashion, with individuals dying from hunger and mistreatment on the journey, or abandoned to die by the roadside when they could not walk any further.70. Gobernador General de Guinea to Víctor Martínez Domínguez, 30 March 1946, ‘Incidente en la Leprosería de Mikomeseng’, 15(18) 81/08109, AGA. As Martínez-Domínguez declared, Spain’s hope was that its subjects would ‘come of age healthy, vigorous and free from scars [lacras]’, and that, after an undefined period, ‘another nation born of Spain prays to God in Spanish for the peace of its mother country’.62 These young men transformed from disfigured sickness to unblemished good health thus represented the journey which Spanish Guinea would (eventually) make from indigenous backwardness to vigorous, grateful independence. Gonzalo Alvarez Chillida and Eloy Martín Corrales, ‘Haciendo patria en Africa: España en Marruecos y en el Golfo de Guinea’, in Xavier Moreno Juliá and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, eds, Ser españoles: imaginarios nacionalistas en el siglo XX (Barcelona: RBA, 2013), 399–432. Josep Bernabeu-Mestre and Enrique Perdiguero-Gil, ‘At the Service of Spain and Spanish Children: Mother-and-Child Healthcare in Spain During the First Two Decades of Franco’s Regime (1939–1963)’, in Iris Lowry and John Krige, eds, Images of Disease: Science, Public Policy and Health in Post-War Europe (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Union, 2001), 167–86. This data will be updated every 24 hours. The combination of authoritarian control, racist disdain for patients, and a conviction of the humanitarian value of leprosy campaigns underpinned another disturbing underside to life in Mikomeseng: the separation of new born infants from their parents.82 As we have seen, the need to protect children from infection had been one of the chief motivations behind the original expansion of the Mikomeseng, and the process of removing new born infants from their mothers and taking them to be raised in the missionary-run children’s home had featured prominently in propaganda about the settlement. See, for example, Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 159; Vicent Comes Iglesia, ed., Cuidados y consuelos. Campos Serrano, ‘El régimen colonial franquista’. For nine months the new front along the banks of these two rivers held. Full text views reflects the number of PDF downloads, PDFs sent to Google Drive, Dropbox and Kindle and HTML full text views. The Interior Minister, Blas Pérez González, told delegates that the care of lepers was an integral part of Spanish history, highlighting the humanitarian efforts of historical figures from El Cid to the Reyes Católicos.102 This proud history, he argued, was reflected in the expertise of contemporary Spanish leprosy experts and in the advanced state of leprosy treatment under the Franco regime, following its neglect under the Second Republic. ‘Reglamento del régimen interno de la leprosería central’, Boletín Oficial de los Territorios del Golfo de Guinea (15 April 1945). As the colonial regime’s own testimonies and reports showed, leprosy sufferers from across Spanish Guinea had been transported to Mikomeseng against their will under brutal conditions, often resulting in death. This special currency featured heavily in publicity material about Mikomeseng. J Postgrad Med. Rosa María Medina Domenech and Jorge Molero Mesa, ‘La ley sanitaria colonial: marco legislativo para el análisis de la medicina colonial española en África’, in Alejandro Diez Torre, ed., Ciencia y memoria de África: Actas de las III Jornadas sobre ‘Expediciones científicas y africanismo español, 1898–1998’ (Alcalá de Henares: Ateneo de Madrid, 2002), 391–400; Rosa María Medina Domenech, ‘Scientific Technologies of National Identity as Colonial Legacies: Extracting the Spanish Nation from Equatorial Guinea’, Social Studies of Science, 2009, 39, 81–112; Vizcaya, ‘La economía política’.

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