The Experiment Must Continue. Melissa Graboyes

      PREFACE

       Gonja, Take One

      It was sometime in the 1970s. Or the 1950s. Or maybe even the 1960s. In any case, it happened years ago. “It” happened in the town of Gonja, in the Pare area of northern Tanzania, and started with angry residents who were unhappy with researchers working in their village. The rabble-rousers were either a group of wholesome, yet angry, residents, or a group of unruly, pot-smoking youth who had recently returned from the war with Uganda. Their anger was directed at a set of researchers who were working in the village at night, either collecting mosquitoes or blood samples. Maybe the researchers were mumiani (bloodsuckers) and murderers, maybe not. In any case, they had made the bad decision to drive home that night rather than sleeping in the village. Their car was forced to a stop on a blocked road. Villagers appeared and began hurling stones. The car was damaged; the researchers sat inside, afraid. Flames appeared: the car was on fire. The researchers fled, and it was only due to the appearance of the police that no one was killed.

      The story of Gonja was the first account I heard when I asked people about the history of medical research in East Africa. Researchers remembered some version of the story, local people in the region knew about it, and, depending on the teller, the story was used to emphasize any number of points. When told by current medical researchers, it was a morality tale of what happened when well-intentioned scientists encountered uneducated villagers. Among a certain group of researchers, the only lesson to be learned from Gonja was that African rural residents were uneducated, unpredictable, and had yet to learn the benefits of biomedicine and scientific investigations. In some of the narratives, the teller continued into the present, explaining how the bad behavior of the Gonja residents resulted in the building of one of the largest police stations in the district. It also meant that there was almost no research done in Gonja for decades, and it wasn’t until 1993 that a research team was sent in to “check people’s feelings.” Only at that point—twenty, thirty, or forty years after the initial conflict—had villagers finally learned their lesson and begged for the researchers to return, to help reduce malaria and bring drugs, like in years past.

      Although I was happy that people shared their recollections of Gonja with me, I was perplexed by how many competing versions of the story I heard in just a matter of days. It was a story that continued to be told, but it seemed none of the tellers were preoccupied with fine details. The

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