Overcoming Whiteness? Romanian Humanitarianism in Sub-Saharan Africa During the 1960s

In Romania, as throughout state socialist Europe, medical assistance showcased anti-colonial solidarity with newly independent African peoples. The humanism of experts, illuminated through bilateral relations or in campaigns coordinated by international organizations, supposedly revealed their status as better Whites: anti-racist Europeans, considerate of the needs of local populations, and altruistically supportive of their freedom and progress. Yet, socialist humanitarianism struggled to overcome whiteness, understood here as an unmarked category that structured the world and was based on hierarchies of civilization premised upon European superiority. Using the case of Romanian medical missions to Sub-Saharan Africa during the 1960s, I show how socialist commitments to emancipation intertwined with the racialization of the ‘tropics’. I situate Romanian agency in relation to pushback from African actors, while comparing it to other socialist humanitarianisms. This case study exemplifies the White gaze of Eastern European medicine: developmental and clinical evaluations about African peoples both promised modernization and found them regressive and inexorably diseased.