This thesis investigates how the processes of colonization and decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa shaped malaria control strategies. It examines how medicine, international politics and colonial policies intersected to shape and shift malaria control paradigms in Mozambique from 1930 until its independence from Portugal in 1975. Tracing the history of the institutionalization of malaria control in Mozambique sheds light on the Africanization of western medicine. Four main actors participated in the processes of institutionalizing and Africanizing the control of malaria: Portuguese colonial doctors, the World Health Organization, the Portuguese government, and African sanitary technicians. Malaria control and later eradication, offered these groups a vehicle through which to gain socio-political legitimacy. By exploring the subtle power dynamics that existed between and within these groups over the policy and practise of malaria control, the complexity of the colonial apparatus is further revealed.