This dissertation critically examines the intersections of local, colonial and international health in Nigeria across the twentieth century. It uses “contested collaboration” as an analytical framework to explore how engagements with emerging health internationalism involved cooperation, negotiation, adaptation, and resistance. It Focuses on interactions among colonial and postcolonial health officials, international organizations, academic institutions, and ordinary people —men, women, musicians and the society at large—, to trace how these dynamics shaped health issues from the colonial through postcolonial Nigeria, situating them within changing national and international health policies and broader forces such as the Cold War. While existing scholarship has identified French colonial opposition to postwar multinational health organizations, this dissertation argues that resistance to health internationalism predated the creation of postwar UN agencies, at least in the British colonial context, and persisted beyond decolonization. Based on primary research in Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria, complemented by twenty oral interviews, it argues that Nigeria’s public health landscape was shaped not by any single institutional or political development but by its sustained entanglement with colonial, international, and global health. Within this entanglement, collaboration was neither straightforward nor unidirectional: actors variously negotiated, appropriated, resisted, and reshaped international health initiatives, producing relationships and outcomes that often defied conventional distinctions between local and international, or colonial and postcolonial actors.
