Gender, Colonialism, and the Archive: A Spanish Female Doctor among a Fang Community in 1940s Río Muni

Abstract: Medical interventions played a pivotal role in the colonization of Africa, including in the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea, where they served as instruments for colonial expansion, control, repression, and institutionalized racism. Erasures in the dynamics of medical and scientific practices—including gendered erasures—are commonplace in colonial archiving. The Spanish female doctor Avemaría Vila Coro served nine years as a pediatrician and maternal health care doctor at the Catholic mission of Nkue-Fulán, in the Río Muni region, among Fang communities. She was responsible for the mission’s dispensary, hospital, and orphanage from 1944 to 1953. From outside the state-run colonial health system, she resisted mainstream medical approaches to colonial health; and as the author of numerous scientific essays on prenatal, maternal, and childcare medicine, she engaged with Fang pharmacology and medical knowledge. Activating a gender perspective on colonial health experiences and interpretations, this article attempts to resituate the participatory role of Spanish women in colonial health sciences in Africa. It is also intended as an archival supplement to the dominant male narrative of colonial science. It finally strives to stimulate a reflection on what lies at the intersection of gender, medical sciences, colonialism, and the archive.