Dr. Donna A. Patterson - Chair, Department of History at Delaware State University
/Three pieces of advice for young women who aspire to work in foreign policy:
Forge a two-way relationship with mentors. Make sure you let them know what works for you and what doesn’t. Remember they also have a lot to learn from you, especially if they are over a decade older than you.
As you rise in professional status, make sure to treat everyone as you want to be treated. Entry-level workers and support staff are critical for any organisation to thrive; the pandemic has shown us how essential staff are who do not have the privilege to work from home. Everybody is human so be polite and cordial where possible.
Cite sources and acknowledge people who contributed to and helped to write reports. As someone who transcends academia and policy roles, I see this a lot. I think it’s a shame because it inhibits a more symbiotic relationship between academia and government, as a result, I now censor myself in conversations, as I know it will probably end up in a White Paper without citation.
CV IN BRIEF
EDUCATION BA History, University of Houston; MA and PhD in History (Africa and Latin America) and African Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.
CAREER SO FAR Global Affairs Associate at Samuel Associates, History Research fellow at Princeton University, Assistant Professor of History and African World Studies at Dillard University, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, Carnegie Fellow and International Security Fellow at New America, Associate Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies and now Chair, Department of History, Political Science, and Philosophy, Delaware State University.
Author of the book Pharmacy in Senegal, Gender, Healing and Entrepreneurship.
LANGUAGES SPOKEN English, French, Spanish, Wolof, Amharic (beginner level).
DATE OF INTERVIEW 05.02.2021
AUTHOR Martha Bowler
Could you tell me a bit about your background and upbringing, such as your parents’ education and inspirations? And what is your current occupation?
I'm currently a professor and Chair of the Department of History, Political Science and Philosophy at Delaware State University. I grew up in Texas along the Gulf Coast. I obtained my undergraduate degree from the University of Houston, a state school. For graduate school, I went to Indiana University as it had a very strong African Studies programme, in which I completed my MA and PhD. In terms of inspirations, I didn’t aspire to be a professor when I was younger; I originally started in nursing school, pursuing STEM courses and then I moved to the social sciences. Now I’m somewhere in between both disciplines, with public health and global health.
This dynamic trajectory led to the publication of your book Pharmacy in Senegal: Gender, Healing and Entrepreneurship. What did you hope to achieve through this work?
I knew that I wanted to write about West African women entrepreneurs. I did some preliminary research, both in Senegal and Ghana – initially intending to write a comparative dissertation; however, I decided to focus on Senegal. In both countries I met women who owned all kinds of businesses; some of them were quite fascinating. For instance, in Ghana, the women of GAWE, the Ghanaian Association of Women Entrepreneurs, allowed me to attend many of their meetings,so I got to really see them in different contexts. I also visited their businesses, which was a diverse mix, for example one owned a manufacturing company for maxi pads and tampons, while others were into cosmetics or manufacturing foodstuffs.
How did you narrow down the focus?
I was persuaded by Senegal and my interest to research entrepreneurs in formal businesses. My focus on pharmacies started with anecdotes; I learnt that the majority of pharmacy owners in Senegal were women, but no one knew the real numbers or had written a full study. So, I went in, got the figures and calculated them. I ended up finding that women owned 65% of the pharmacies in Dakar and 48% in the country, which was remarkable. I wanted to debunk the assumptions that the women sold traditional herbal medicine; no, these women had biomedical degrees, and the pharmacies were similar to Western ones. At the time, a lot of the literature talks about African women as support staff or sex workers. I do think awareness has improved in the last couple of decades, so I wanted to contribute to this and show women in Africa engaging in many different professions.
Did you explore pharmacies in Ghana as well?
I didn’t have the time actually, because I started my research looking at women entrepreneurs broadly, so I don’t think any of them owned pharmacies. But I have since then done some work on it. I have an upcoming comparative paper looking at both formal and informal pharmaceutical markets in Ghana, Ethiopia and Senegal. It won’t only focus on the profession but rather the broader pharmaceutical industry.
Research plays such a key role in developing one's impact in their field, how did you carry out research for the book?
I would like to talk about the book a little bit more. I do highlight the women because my dissertation was focused on them; however, I also talk about men because I interviewed both. I look at the creation and expansion of biomedicine since Senegal was colonised by France and I contrast it with other places, primarily in Africa and Asia, Southeast Asia, in particular. I talk about a number of topics: education, professional associations, day-to-day practising and pharmaceutical trafficking.
My research took considerable time as there was almost nothing written on women pharmacists in Senegal. I came across what is perhaps more introductory work on the topic, for example, Diane Barthel’s work on women in labour, mentioning the pharmaceutical industry and Didier Fassin who talked about pharmaceutical networks and a bit about pharmacists in part of a larger study on health, healing and consumer access to formal and informal healing systems in his book, Pouvoir et maladie, which is set in Pikine, Senegal. For the crux of my work, I had to start from scratch. I gathered information from the National Archives in Senegal, the French Overseas Archives in Aix-en-Provence, France, the National Order of Pharmacists in Senegal, some private collections, libraries and documents I received from citizens. I also got access to collections at the School of Medicine and Pharmacy at the University Cheikh Anta Diop. Gathering information took a lot of negotiating and collaboration, especially where in some cases,I was the first person to study them.
I started doing my interviews before the project started in order to secure funding – one of my early leads was Madame N'deye Dieynaba Mbodj Fall, who was president of the National Order of Pharmacists since 1979. During the project, I did several interviews with women and men, traditional healers, and consumers. in addition to pharmacists. One thing I can say is that I experienced the shift in technology first-hand when I later did follow-up interviews to transform my dissertation into a book. It was all very different 20 years ago when my first interviews were cassette-recorded, which means some got damaged and valuable research was lost. Digital recorders and other inventions have revolutionized some aspects of fieldwork.
How did it affect gender relations in Senegal?
I devote two chapters on negotiating professional and private lives and gender relations. You should also bear in mind that Senegal is 94% Muslim, which also affects social dynamics and women’s roles. So, women earning more than their male counterparts was very interesting in terms of gender roles in families and relationships. Female pharmaceutical entrepreneurs who remained married had to work out the dynamics of the intersection of their roles – the men either had their own profession, but they also supported their wives, in the pharmacies and at home.
Depending on the size of the pharmacy, they also had pharmacy assistants, or they would reach out to family members. The assumption that women put their personal lives was also debunked in some cases. I remember one woman who was adamant that her professional life took precedence; her husband ran errands for her, and they established a really good dynamic.
Did you see any cases of gender-based violence (GBV) incited by women taking power from patriarchal structures?
I think the status and money some women possessed gave them more power in familial relationships –with husbands and extended families for example their ability to pay for baptisms, marriages and international tuition gave them leverage. Anecdotally, there may have been some instances of GBV, but I didn't hear about them.
On the other hand, the improved status of women made them targets of other kinds of violence, like robberies, which were prevalent during the period of my research, owing to the pre-existing rivalries becoming violent. There was one case where a young unmarried pharmacist was killed at work, with robbery being an alleged motive. After another incidence of a pharmacist’s family member being killed, pharmacies closed in protest of the rising violence. I don’t want to generalise that they were all wealthy as some businesses were more lucrative than others, but the ones that were, definitely drew attention to themselves from outsiders.
You have been active during the COVID-19 pandemic, however before we get into details on your role, let us talk a bit about the broader theme of Global Health Security (GHS). GHS is a dominant theme in international relations. What is it? And how has this been a major implication during the COVID-19 pandemic?
I've been an ardent advocate on global health security for over a decade, so I’m very happy to see people talking about it now. I feel like people never quite got that public health and global health both influence each other, and I believe that that is why we have seen so many failures during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
I've long talked about health being interconnected; just because a disease is in another continent, it doesn't mean it won’t spread. I spoke about this in the Harvard Africa policy journal around 2010 and in my first talk at the Albright Institute at Wellesley College. People didn’t get that because when they think of Africa, Asia or Latin America, they see them as marginal to the West, and won’t impact them. Viruses, on the other hand, do not see borders, they spill out, and that’s why this notion of global health security is extremely important.
For instance, I knew the West Africa Ebola epidemic was going to spill into the region, locally and internationally once it hit those centres, like Freetown, Monrovia and Conakry. In the previous outbreaks, Ebola remained in remote areas so it would die out, once it hit multiple cities. We knew it would spread. So, I thought about how porous the borders were. In addition to circumstances like the virus not being airborne, I think we got very lucky. Ebola spread out to Senegal and Nigeria. Thanks to prompt responses, it got shut down quickly and we only got a few cases in Europe and the US. If Ebola had taken hold Lagos it would have become a pandemic and lasted well past 2016.
We saw it with Ebola, we saw it with Zika and SARS. Even if you don’t do public health, think about it for a few minutes – Influenza spreads around the world every year. When COVID-19 happened, the world wasn’t paying as much attention as it needed to.
How do illegal drug market markets threaten Global Health Security?
Illegal drug markets can be physical markets – two of the most prominent ones are in Senegal and Nigeria. They can also be an informal seller coming to a neighbourhood, whose impact is at the local level.
Globally, there are enormous distribution networks that move drugs, often transnationally, so it’s alarming. Whether they are pharmaceuticals or counterfeit, they are always trafficked illegally. Most of them are counterfeit, so in terms of global health security, it’s a major issue. The impact of illegal drug markets is often seen more in the Global South because they have been more prevalent, but they do also affect the Global North, for example there are elaborate networks in the US, Canada and Europe; there was a scandal a while back where toxic counterfeit toothpaste was being sold in the US.
The impact can manifest at the level of the individual. So, in terms of consequences, death is definitely one of them. For example, if you buy insulin through an informal network or if a pharmacist is inadvertently selling a product that doesn’t contain the active ingredient, or isn’t stored at the right temperatures, this could be lethal.
Another consequence is drug resistance for example, antimalarials. I argue that trafficking contributes to antibiotic resistance. This is not only a Global South problem; it is present everywhere. It is online, and the consequences are global; antibiotic resistance does not have borders.
Part of your work involves ‘writing for lay people’. Do you consider yourself a pioneer in bridging the gap between academia and the general public? And how do you think this can be improved in academia?
Bridging the gap between policy and academia is one of my core goals; my book is very interdisciplinary, combining history of medicine, public health, medical anthropology and elements of sociology. My goal is to bring different groups of people in conversation in my public and academic work.
I wouldn’t say a pioneer per se as there are academics who have been doing it since the 90s. Some people say I’m a public intellectual, but I don’t know if I would agree with that statement. Most public writing in the US focuses on national issues, like race in the context of US politics. In that way, I'm different from who people commonly describe as public intellectuals, like Cornel West, bell hooks or others. When I started writing, only a few other people focused primarily on Africa, and global health. Even when I was writing and being interviewed about Ebola, a lot of people who were in African Studies weren’t writing about it publicly. More and more people are doing it now, even some of my colleagues, so I think that’s very good.
I also think I have a different background compared to a lot of academics, in that I've done corporate work, public policy/government while at the US Embassy in Senegal and I still maintain ties with government officials in DC. I’ve engaged with think tanks and different policy institutions. If I had only experienced the academic world, the way I navigate the field would likely be very different. This interdisciplinary experience largely informs my work and the way I choose to produce and communicate knowledge.
What has been your role in COVID-19?
I was involved in COVID-19 response and planning for safety at home but also in terms of teaching. I led a seminar in spring 2020 ,the theme of which was Health, Medicine, and Healing in the African Diaspora. The course was revised to include aspects about the pandemic which was only emerging at the time. On a university level, I spoke to my peers, stocked up on antimicrobials for the office and became more vigilant. To the amusement of my colleague, I started putting up health messaging around the University to advocate on protection measures. More formally, I was on a committee of the university’s Pandemic Task Force, where I provided leadership in organising PPE, testing, and ways to educate and reinforce best practices. In a separate group, we spoke to the Provost and laid the groundwork for early university policies for contact tracing, quarantine and testing.
I also had meetings with Delaware health professionals and officials from the US government. I still regularly speak to journalists from US and international media, be it for newspapers, magazines, radio or TV.
Finally, I do research! I wrote an entire article during the pandemic: “Small State, Big Impact: Delaware’s Covid-19 Response”. I'm working on other projects and have applied for respective funding. It has been challenging to manage all these outcomes, however, I am well equipped.
Your career changed through corporate, and policy think tanks. As a woman and precisely a Black woman, what were some of the challenges you faced in your career path? How did you deal with them? And did you see some differences between the fields?
As a Black woman, I've had to navigate professional pitfalls related to gender and race in academia. When I've worked in other sectors – maybe because I've been in academia longer – the race element didn’t impact me as much as gender. A lot of that came from my interactions with people outside the company, particularly men being more dismissive of me. Perhaps some of it could have also been an age issue, as I was younger than my male colleagues.
I didn’t have any extreme harassment in corporate and government services; however, I did face some untenable situations while doing my dissertation research. A European pharmacist in Senegal was nonchalantly flipping pages of a porn magazine during my interview with him – I stress that he was European because all the Senegalese men treated me very respectfully. I tried to ignore it but It was very uncomfortable, as he had no acknowledgement that the situation may be inappropriate.
Day to day, I definitely experience harassment, not so much sexual harassment, but definitely other types. In one job, I experienced extreme harassment due to my gender, for years. Navigating that situation was very challenging but I learned a lot from it. In terms of my primary place of employment now, I think it is similar in many historically black colleges and universities; the race component does come out as not everyone who is employed there is a person of colour. Again, I see the gender component more than race in my external interactions, however, having a more supervisory role helps to buffer some of it. I also have more confidence now in what I deal with and how quickly I shut things down.
Listen to Martha’s interview with Dr. Patterson on the Women in Foreign Policy Podcast here!
