Power Through The Panopticon in The African Context

Historically, power was used to separate and physically divide populations. The implementation of power was visible, for example, public executions during medieval times were visible to the public. However, Foucault has argued that modern power resembles the Panopticon. The Panopticon is characterised without visible banishment and punishment. Instead power is exerted through a system where individuals are visible to through the observation tower and they are monitored. However, power is not in plain sight, unlike the medieval times. People are watched and coerced to follow rules without any explicit and visible action. Furthermore, sovereign power by nature is visible and can be resisted, unlike disciplinary micro-power which is non-tangible. As a result, disciplinary micro-power manipulates, through panopticon mechanisms, manipulates the ability to resist power due to a lack of an identifiable central node of power.

Power through the panopticon mechanism is deployed in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Medicine in a colonial and post-colonial context is one manifestation of disciplinary micro-power, where power is employed through objectification of the human body, surveillance and enforcement of civilization of a population. Medicine was restructured along the same timeline as colonization. Africans in the context of colonialism were objectified by their colonizers through the field of medicine. The medical gaze was used to reproduce the “African patient as quite literally a lump of flesh”. According to Megan Vaughn, these colonial medical sites served as medical labs to photograph and document their patients in order to serve economic and political motives.

The colonial medical gaze researched and divided the African body in comparison to the European body. Observing and reducing the body to “flesh” allowed for European settlers to scrutinize and justify the development of racial hierarchies. Racial hierarchies grounded by medical observations fueled the power imbalance and inequalities observed during the colonialism. By placing the African body at the bottom of the chain through observation and objectification, European colonizers also used information derived from the colonial medical gaze to justify their action. For example, the British used research from British colonial medical clinics to justify their slave trades. Their studies concluded that the African body is different from the European body and is better suited to tropical environments. Thus, the reduction of the African body justified slave trades to exploit Africans for labour in tropical climates.

The objectification of the African body also facilitated the exploitation of humans to serve colonial economic interests. Medicine was used in a colonial context to ensure a more productive work force rather than serving humanitarian health care. Whereas brute force was used in previous times, disciplinary micro-power normalized health as a commodity to ensure a productive work force. Furthermore, power was strategically employed through medicine to dismantle notions of resistance. Emerging medicine practices incorporated indigenous African healing traditions to circumvent and “undermine the African’s mistrust of the European medicine”. The accommodation of African traditions was not to develop positive relations with the community to promote health outcomes. Rather, it served to encourage the trust of African communities to reduce resistance and re-establish power relations so colonizers re-gain control of human bodies. The false guise of trust and transparency diminished the realization of resistance.

Exemplified by Foucault’s statement “Where there is power, there is resistance, but never outside the power system. While may be resist power and disrupt a little bit “everyday resistance” but never dismantle it. ” Colonizers controlled the sociological aspects of the African society and human body through medicine and manipulated populations to believe it was in their best interest.