The notion of inherently unhygienic races is gleaned from reports and correspondence among European colonial officials in Kenya regarding Indians and Africans. It refers to the assumption that there are some races, ethnicities and classes whose habits, customs and mannerisms predispose them to perpetual insanitary and unhygienic conditions of living. This assumption focuses on the habits of groups of people and draws generalizations on the overall effect on hygiene and sanitation of certain “indexed features” of their character traits. It then identifies these traits and those bearing them as the source of diseases. Deriving its origins from Victorian assumption that “epidemic disease was primarily the product of dirt and decomposing matter; [that] it was concentrated in towns and especially in their least sanitary district,” this argument was reinforced in colonial times by racial and related stereotypes about Indians and Africans. In nineteenth-century Western Europe, “images of cleanliness, appearance, and beauty . . . defined social hierarchy and difference.” It defined cleanliness as a central component of Englishness (of being English) and contrasted this with the “image of disease and pathology” associated with black bodies. Africans were imagined as “filthy, depraved, and ugly.”

But to what extent were racialized ideas about sanitation rooted in concrete realities and understandings of the socio-economic circumstances of Africans in a colonial setting? Studies of medical history show that biomedicine and colonial sanitary policies formed a structure of power that had the capacity to construct epidemics and impose their vision on the knowledge of disease. This capacity distorted the line between the medical facts of a disease and their construction for expedient motives. Thus, there is no clear line between an epidemic as medical fact and its social construction.