Posted by C3W Admin on July 9 2025
Held in Prague from 25–28 June, the biannual ECAS event was a fantastic conference, which ran smoothly and efficiently, and hosted a huge range of interdisciplinary panels, keynotes, book launches and roundtables, as well as a panoply of artistic and cultural programming. This short report will focus on the panel most pertinent to the Connecting Three Worlds research agenda, as well as highlighting a few other relevant papers and panels.
Organised by Alila Brossard Antonielli (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) and Jelena Đureinović (University of Vienna), the panel Medical Socialist Entanglements: Health Connections between Eastern Europe and Africa in the Global Cold War consisted of five papers over two sessions, allowing plenty of time for discussion and debate. Sadly, Bidemi Oladayo Balogun (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva) was unable to attend to discuss his research on the politics of public health at the University of Ibadan in the 1950s to 1970s.
Credit: Sarah Howard
The panel started with my presentation, ‘Childcare as healthcare in Ethiopia and Eastern Europe’. Building on my previous work drawn from archival research in Addis Ababa and London, my paper linked the ‘inherently radical’ (Kirschenbaum 2001) institution of the kindergarten with the ‘Health for All’ agenda, and traced how the transformative potential of childcare in the student movement and during the Derg era in Ethiopia was articulated within an internationalist perspective, in which influence, exchange and networks with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were prominent.
The second paper, ‘Soviet Red Cross and Decolonization: Moscow’s Assistance to Algeria, Ethiopia, Congo, and Somalia During the Long 1960s’ by Severyan Dyakonov (Carleton University, Ottawa) focused on the experiences of Soviet doctors and other medical personnel in Africa after the Soviet Red Cross became influential in the structure of the International Red Cross movement and sought to advance a socialist approach to humanitarianism. Missions faced poor conditions, political pushback and issues around gender sensitivity and access with local translators and mediators, but legacies of medical solidarity remain both in public opinion and, in Ethiopia, in the only extant Russian Red Cross hospital, Balcha. Incidentally, another paper at ECAS, by Rumi Okazaki (Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo), Nikolay Steblin-Kamensky (Independent, Russian Federation/ Ethiopia) and Tadesse Girmay (Addis Ababa University) reconstructed the design of the former Russian Red Cross Hospital, now Menelik II Hospital, in Addis Ababa.
The second panel started with Alila Brossard Antonielli’s paper, ‘Socialist medical aid to Angola and Mozambique: essential but invisible?’. She traced how the newly independent nations’ sought and received support from the socialist bloc and from sympathetic leftist organisations and individuals across the world: two representatives of the latter group from the US were in the audience and were able to share their direct experience of living and working in a hospital under the newly-formed Frelimo government in the early 1980s (including, connected to my own paper, sending their daughter to a local kindergarten. These support networks were truly international, with one foreign doctor calling hospitals Babel towers of language: Russian, Cuban Spanish, Bulgarian, Korean, and many others. However, despite its scale and reach, this socialist aid has become largely invisible in the historiography of health in Africa.
Credit: Sarah Howard
With ‘The Battles for the Wounded: Yugoslav Involvement in Military Medicine and Disability Care in Algeria (1958-1963)’, Jelena Đureinović focused on care for the wounded and disabled fighters and veterans as central to Yugoslavia’s medical assistance to Front de libération nationale (FLN) during and after the Algerian War of Independence. She discussed how this assistance was directly related to the recent nature of Yugoslavia’s national experience of rehabilitation, and the ways in which Yugoslavs saw themselves as close to decolonial fighters; the emphasis on the physical rehabilitation of male bodies, with no consideration of mental health issues; and the shift from solidarity to technical cooperation following independence. Overall military medicine and disability care focused on combatants and this medical assistance was seen as an aspect of military internationalism, rather than humanitarianism.
Credit: Sarah Howard
Finally, Elijah-Matteo Ferrante (Columbia) presented ‘Solidarity, Medical Humanitarianism and “Foreign Patients” within the Healthcare System of the GDR, 1961–1991’. He looked at cases of orthopaedic and psychiatric patients transferred to East Germany for treatment from across Africa and Asia, including Namibia, Sudan and Afghanistan. He argued that patients were integrated into a pre-conceived hierarchy of disability, intersected with gender and race, and complicated by language and material conditions; for example, some Afghans received psychiatric care in asylums, but this was short-lived due to language barriers in treatment, while a case from South Africa showed the tragic consequences of negative narratives about African motherhood. Medical treatment was also contingent on circumstances, with doctors envisioning the return of patients to their own countries, and prioritising cheap and simple treatments that could be continued once patients were sent home.
Other papers I attended that touched on histories of socialism and health, care and cooperation included Carla Bertin (CEI-Iscte University Institute of Lisbon) in the panel: Vital Ecologies of Care and Repair: Human and Nonhuman Worldmaking in Uncertain Times. Her paper discussed the site of a colonial agro-industrial mega-project that later became the country’s largest socialist farm, and its afterlife as a neglected space that is nevertheless the site of practices of care and repair by local inhabitants, as well as being constructed by non-human actors. In the panel Transnational Afrofeminist Movement-Building Across the Diaspora, Céline Barry’s (Technische Universität Berlin) paper on Black women’s activism in Germany, from the Afro-Deutsch movement to Black Border feminism, and Pamela Ohene-Nyako (Laboratoire Les Afriques dans le monde/ Fonds National Suisse) on the Europeanisation of Black women’s activism, inspired discussion of the legacies of differences in women’s movements between East and West Europe, the role of Cold War alliances in global women’s forums, and the importance of combining visibility and representation in migrant activism with practical support such as childcare and collective kitchens.
