This paper will explore the complex interplay between emerging debates about the nature of addiction and the treatment of addictions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the struggles over the definition of racial difference in the era of decolonization. Focusing on alcohol abuse, the paper will explore the broad context of efforts across late colonial Africa to apply evolving ideas about addiction from the vantage point of a case study of addiction pathology and treatment in late colonial and early post-colonial Zambia.
Disease model definitions of alcoholism and addiction, rooted in assumptions of individual susceptibility, spread into Northern Rhodesia in the late 1940s and 1950s and a national organization was established to combat and treat alcohol abuse. These efforts focused, however, entirely on the white settler population, and the treatment facility that was built served an exclusively white clientele. At the same time, experts tended to define the issue of excessive drinking among Africans in collective terms, either as the product of racial disposition or social stresses. The rapid transition to majority rule after 1960 made racialized treatment regimes untenable. A newly constituted national association dedicated to combating alcohol abuse directed most of its attention to the majority African population and advocated public health approaches to the problem. The treatment facility was closed rather than admit African patients. Not only was the idea of racial mixing in such a charged environment deemed inappropriate but the authorities saw the AA treatment model as inappropriate to Africans. The convergence of these issues illuminate both discussions of the nature of addiction and evolving definitions of race. The paper is drawn from the files of the Zambian national association of alcohol abuse, the WHO study of alcohol use in Zambia, and other materials.