The political ecology of diamonds: HIV/AIDS and the unexpected legacies of colonial extraction

Résumé

The first study on the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Angola revealed a surprising finding: 14.2% in the city of Dundo, Lunda Norte – the former administrative centre of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang) –, well above the national average of 2%. This puzzling result is the starting point for questioning the assumptions underpinning biomedical narratives about the origins of HIV-1. Explanations focused on large urban centres, commercial sex, motorised transport, and co-infections with sexually transmitted diseases are insufficient to account for both the scale and the peripheral, rural location of this outbreak. The research adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining biological, epidemiological, and socio-historical data. The socio-historical analysis reveals the absence of key factors in dominant narratives: major urban hubs, male-dominated populations, sex work, and epidemics of venereal disease. The company promoted the recruitment of families and the labour participation of African women, challenging colonial stereotypes that associated them with commercial sex. This study offers a new perspective on the spread of HIV-1, highlighting the role of biomedicine within the extractive industry, and contributes to a more complex and historically grounded understanding of epidemics.