Public Health at the Zimbabwean Border: Medicalizing Migrants and Contesting Colonial Institutions, 1890-1960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As colonial powers in Africa consolidated their authority, borders became significant areas of focus for nascent colonial administrations. Border monitoring and regulation sought to control the cross-border movements of people, animals, and goods for varied reasons, including public health. In Zimbabwe, colonial public health measures at the border comprised the "medicalization" of African migrants, perceived by colonial authorities as diseased. These measures involved medical inspections or examinations, diagnosis, treatment, vaccinations or immunizations, and detention and quarantine, relating to diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, plague, tuberculosis, smallpox, and syphilis. Yet, while colonial authorities in Zimbabwe advanced these explanations for regulating borders, some African migrants crossing the Zimbabwean border from neighboring countries often had their own understandings of the medical encounter and imperial boundaries. They questioned colonial governments' motives, contesting both public health measures and the border itself, both of which they considered oppressive and discriminatory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".