Abstract

The hospital in Gharyan, Libya, operated by Romanian staff from 1975 until the late 1980s was a space of entangled medical governance: it relied on an expat community that adapted socialist public health to postcolonial conditions, and it was a centre of postcolonial sovereignty and agency that tested Romanian modernity and challenged the personnel's constructions of the self (professional, civilisational, ethnic, etc.). This article employs the concept of governmentality to explore public health as a really existing phenomenon produced by people manifesting personal, local, national, and global ideas about government. The hospital in Gharyan was a site of multilayered contestation. The institution constituted a terrain of continuous wrangling between socialist and postcolonial state policies fuelled by development priorities and shifting global health paradigms. The Romanian staff produced a distinctive form of whiteness premised on representations of the local population as ‘backward’ in relation to socialist codes of rationality, pathology, and emancipation. Simultaneously, Libyan agency challenged Romanian raced representations. Socialist medicine transplanted into the postcolonial context proved a transactional reality adapting to evolving constructions of knowledge, subjectivity, and politics.