Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal by Noémi Tousignant
In a work remarkable as much for the apparent bleakness of its subject matter as for the richness of its historical ethnography, Noémi Tousignant imaginatively [End Page 288] explores what it means to be a toxicologist in postcolonial Senegal. While acknowledging that the nature of toxicology is everywhere problematic, her discussion is centrally concerned with what the pursuit of an “impoverished science” means to struggling local practitioners in the Global South and the attempt to maintain a capacity for doing toxicology outside resource-rich environments like those of France or the United States. Photographs of defunct equipment, unutilized buildings, and vacant laboratories set the visual tone for a complex and subtle investigation not so much of toxic waste, environmental pollution, and contaminated food and drink—though there is abundant evidence of that for Senegal—as the frustrated careers and thwarted technical capacity of those who seek to make a career in toxicology. What does it mean to live and work among the “poisoned poor”? What does it mean to be the employee of a state that, despite high expectations created at the time of independence, and sustained by fitful local initiatives and short-lived international collaborations, fails to meet even the basic need to shelter its citizens from toxic harm? As Tousignant pointedly observes, “Toxicology . . . has not been a significant or sustained target for the Senegalese state or . . . for intergovernmental or nongovernmental organizations” (p. 13).
She examines three institutions in Dakar charged with responsibility for monitoring, regulating, and researching toxicity—a public university laboratory, an environmental toxicology center, and a national poisons control unit—as well as the role of local participants in an international ecotoxicology project designed to assess the environmental impact of locust control operations. For each of these she tries—with difficulty—to construct a coherent institutional record, to establish who paid for what, who ran or staffed the scheme, provided the training, funded the equipment. But the poverty of that fragmented archive, like the visual testimony of empty laboratories and broken apparatus, attests to the impoverishment of the science itself and the sense of loss at the inability to fulfil the earlier promise of Senegalization and a locally viable toxicological capacity. As the former colonial power, France has an almost spectral presence in this narrative. It continues into the early years of “la Coopération” and Senegalese independence to provide personnel, project funding, and professional training, even the testing of toxic samples. But the distance between Paris and Dakar grows institutionally ever greater just as the promise of scientific equality and fruitful cooperation steadily fades. The locust project, funded by FAO, revives some hope and underscores the potential value of local participation and ecological expertise until its promise, too, dribbles away into the Sahelian sands. Tousignant sees, by measured contrast, a more positive message in the lives and aspirations of the Senegalese toxicologists: she explores their memories of half-forgotten projects and abandoned apparatus, their expectations of what a possible future in science might have been, and she admires their determination to improvise and innovate to get the equipment they need or the training and funding they desperately require, thereby in effect mobilizing their own scant resources to keep their research alive and their institutions at least partially functioning.
Edges of Exposure addresses itself in multiple ways to the problem of the trace— how poisons themselves are traced in food, water, and the environment, what [End Page 289] traces toxicology as a profession leaves behind in the forlorn hopes and scattered recollections of those who pursue it, the continuing (if erratic) trace of colonial legacies and foreign commitment, the traces that the academic investigator has to follow, detective-like, to try to make sense of what at times appears to be inherent disorder. Tousignant brings these strands together to great analytical effect but also with passion, concern, and affect. Her book offers no easy answers, but it does present an informed, subject-sensitive case study in the historical anthropology of African science. She shows the immense value of seeing science not through the eyes of the state or the international community but through the experiences of those who, with an often remarkable degree of commitment and tenacity, themselves practice it.
