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The struggle for capacity: a historical ethnography of toxicology in Senegal 

 
NOÉMI TOUSIGNANT. 2018. Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the problem of capacity in 
postcolonial Senegal. Durham, London: Duke University Press, pp. 224, ISBN: 978-0-8223-
7124-3 
 
Keywords: medical anthropology; STS; toxicity; West Africa; temporality. 
 
Exposure to toxic pollution and contamination in Africa has loomed large on the global 

imagination of the continent since the 1990s adoption of the Basel, Bamako and Abidjan 

conventions on hazardous waste and environmental pollution. More recently, renewed attention to 

the afterlives of Western industrial capitalism through the circulation of wide-audience (and at 

times sensationalist) documentaries on hazardous waste and toxic poisons have reinforced a vision 

of toxicity in Africa as one of exploitation or “toxic colonialism” abetted by a lack of capacity and 

regulation. In Edges of Exposure, Tousignant turns to the challenges of building and maintaining 

scientific capacity for poison protection and control in postcolonial Senegal. An important 

contribution to studies of toxicity, science and public health infrastructure in West Africa, the book 

offers a painstaking account of local toxicologists’ frustrated yet creative efforts at establishing a 

routine regulatory science – a work fraught by dwindling public investment, deteriorating 

equipments and facilities, and dependence on foreign assistance.  

 

The book departs from a typical focus on the unequal geographies of waste and the consistent 

exposure of African bodies and lands to “poisonous global capital” (p. 2). Instead, it documents 

the struggle for capacity and scientific diligence of Senegalese toxicologists in conditions of 

chronic underfunding and material scarcity. Against the postcolonial legacies of disinvestment and 

differential exposure, Tousignant’s book pays homage to the “persistence, energy, and hopefulness 

of toxicologists’ pursuit” (p. 6) that attest to “the possibility of and the legitimacy of claims to a 

protective biopolitics of poison in Africa” (p. 10). Rather than situated from the perspective of 



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vulnerable communities exposed or at risk of exposure, Tousignant writes from a different “edge” 

of exposure: scientists’ mundane and often-thwarted attempts to “do their job,” exercise expertise, 

and establish a lasting presence in Senegal’s public health system. 

Tousignant’s historical ethnography takes us through the fragmented chronology of Senegalese 

toxicological science: from the establishment of Dakar’s university lab in the immediate post-

independence period, and its subsequent deterioration under structural adjustment in the aftermath 

of the 1970s economic crisis; to the partially successful attempts at constructing a national poison 

control center in a neoliberal period of privatized healthcare and entrepreneurial science. The 

chapters are set in three different labs and institutions (a university teaching lab; an environmental 

chemistry lab; and a national poison control center) and follow scientists’ careers alongside the 

archives of the labs’ and center’s projects and contracts.  

 

The visions of an ill-equipped science exposed in the book’s photographs and descriptions – of a 

lab in disrepair, in need of renewed supplies, maintenance, and equipments (Chapters 1 and 3), of 

centers partially built and projects suspended (Chapter 5) – will be familiar to anyone with 

experience of public institutions and infrastructure in urban West Africa. Yet in tracing how 

capacity is “made, kept, and lost” (p. 146), Tousignant applies a temporal lens to the problem of 

capacity, interrogating what it means to have, plan for, aspire to, preserve or indeed do without 

capacity. To what extent, she asks, does “capacity” translate into a functional and protective 

science? How does it come to define both the possibilities of and limits to “good science” – who 

makes or undoes it, and for whom? (p. 27). Going beyond an understanding of capacity as 

contained by technical and material provision, she situates it instead “within moral economies and 

imaginations” (p. 57), in scientists’ aspirations for a protective science and professional excellence 

in a context of scarcity and dependence. 

 

In some ways, this is a story that, similarly to the toxins that it treats, is difficult to track – 

unfinished, uneven, partly invisible, often undetected and disregarded. Influenced by studies of 

infrastructure and postcolonial critique, Chapter 1 probes the gaps and absences that fill the lab’s 

fragmented archives across periods of investment and abandonment. Machines in disrepair 

awaiting maintenance or calibration, expired chemicals, dusty glassware and kept samples and 

documents point to past periods of activity, as well as to hopes for future re-engagement (Chapter 



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3). Chapter 3 describes the longstanding effects of the 1980s structural adjustment programs’ 

funding cuts to public health on the working of the lab, increasingly dependent on short-lived 

projects and temporary foreign funding. Subject to irregular funding, routine testing and continuity 

cannot be maintained, especially as scientific instruments, Tousignant reminds us, require constant 

calibration and repair and rely on the continuous supply of chemicals and consumables to work 

effectively. In the absence of reliable provisioning, the possibility of a “protective science” in 

Senegal appears more and more as a fiction (102), challenging what it means to be a scientist in a 

context of chronic under-funding.  

 

Chapter 4 describes the case-study of a pilot project (Project Locustox) for ecotoxicological 

analysis of pesticide spraying for locust and grasshopper control. While the project was granted 

repeated funding and eventually established a fully-operating environmental chemistry lab, it also 

exposes the fragility of the public good in the increasing dependence on commercial contracts for 

its viability (p. 119). Scientists are caught in this tension; striving to provide a public service – that 

of environmental protection and regulation – they are increasingly forced to turn into 

“entrepreneurs of public service” (p. 136), seeking commercial contracts and foreign funding 

(Chapter 4) or using their own personal expenses and networks to transport samples to better-

equipped labs in France and elsewhere for analysis or storage (pp. 48-49).  

 

Throughout the book, Tousignant justifies her focus on toxicologists’ careers as a way of charting 

more global histories of science and the unequal process of knowledge production and regulatory 

capacity in postcolonial locales of the Global South. Occupying positions of “partial privilege” 

rather than acute poverty (p. 148), Senegalese toxicologists and their professional trajectories 

(Chapter 2) give us a glimpse into the difficulties of establishing and keeping running a “science 

of protection” against unequal global geographies of risk and exposure to toxic harm.  

But the case could also be made for the neglect and relative privilege of toxicology itself – an 

implication that is only briefly mentioned at the end of the book and could have been considered 

throughout. This shifts the question from a problem of capacity to one of concern – or lack thereof. 

In a revealing vignette from Diagne, the financial manager of the Anti-Poison Centre, toxicology 

is described as a “luxury” compared to the more pressing public health issues of malaria or AIDS. 

Capacity is undoubtedly an immense financial and material challenge facing public health 



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infrastructure in the Global South. But paired with a lack of concern (or, indeed, an inability to 

care, and be concerned), the challenge of establishing an African science of toxicology appears 

unlikely to be met by simply ‘building capacity’ – raising different sets of questions for the 

viability of toxicology as a public good.  

 

 
Pauline Destrée is a Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology and a member 
of the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of St Andrews. Her work engages with resource 
extraction, infrastructure, climate change and postcolonial politics in West Africa. She is 
currently working on a book manuscript on offshore oil extraction and carbon justice in Ghana. 
Her previous research looked at energy infrastructure, urban politics and popular culture in 
Accra.  
 
 

 

 

© 2021 Pauline Destrée 


