Pharmaceuticals in Divergence: Chakachua (Fakes), Fugitive Science, and Postcolonial Critique in Tanzania

Abstract

Powerful pharmaceuticals are readily available for purchase throughout Tanzania and Western policy makers decry this situation as dangerous and disordered, as if no rules govern the use of drugs in Africa. In the prevailing Western understanding, ‘truth’ lies in the laboratory science that goes into the making and proper prescription of drugs, and such deviations as ‘overuse’ and ‘misuse’ result from the fact that locals misunderstand what these drugs are and how they should be used. My ethnographic research, however, reveals that much of Tanzanian practice is aimed at determining the ‘true’ nature of pharmaceuticals, at differentiating between types of drugs, and at establishing control over their variable capacities. In this paper, I explore the practices through which my interlocuters in Tanzania experiment with pharmaceuticals and I conceptualize these practices as a method of 'fugitive science' (Rusert 2017). Like my interlocuters, I seek to challenge the containment of science within spaces of global capital and the neoliberal university. Further, I argue that these practices constitute not only a form of embodied epistemology, but also that they enable political and moral claims to be expressed in and through the body. I read practices of identifying drugs’ embodied properties as methods of postcolonial critique that reveal and repudiate the duplicitous nature of relations between Africa and elsewhere. This fugitive science enables the creation of divergent pharmaceuticals, always under variation; it entails an ethos of experimentation, performed in the presence of a history not finished and a speculative opening towards worlds in-the-making.