Attempts to understand and control African trypanosomiasis are bound up in the longue durée of African development. It is a disease of cattle and people. The link between the tsetse fly and the cattle disease nagana was long known to Africans and their information was reported by European explorers in the early nineteenth century. David Bruce demonstrated the connection between the trypanosome parasite (which uses the tsetse as a vector) and nagana in 1895, while the connection between the same genus of parasites and the 'sleeping sickness' that affected humans was made by Bruce and others in 1903. The impacts of sleeping sickness were problematic for colonial powers and tropical medicine as a distinct discipline grew out of concerns regarding sleeping sickness. The historical scholarship on African trypanosomiasis has set the extension of Western science, medicine and power in Africa during the early colonial period amongst the changing theories of disease aetiology, control and treatment. This paper builds upon this work to examine the post-Second World War period, when increased funds for 'development' brought a renewed emphasis on disease prevention and control activities, including the expansion and reorganisation of research capacity. At this point, the emphasis on ecology, entomology and vector control as the main logic of prevention was reconsidered, and research was redirected at a suite of scientific, medical and veterinary problems with the emphasis switching to understanding the parasite itself. Over these years, Trypanosomiasis research and control has been approached from a multitude of different perspectives, including vaccine research, environmental management, vector control, human and veterinary medicine (i.e. prophylaxis or treatments) and insecticides. All of these approaches had political, economic and environmental dimensions to them that pertain in distinct, yet linked, ways from the late colonial period through independence. Scientific and medical research into the many facets of sleeping sickness continued through the political transitions while also witnessing changes to the institutional and funding regimes for vector-borne tropical diseases (and specifically zoonoses) more generally. This paper will transit the varied institutional structures of late-colonial Africa directed at the sleeping sickness problem with a view to describe a foundation upon which, or in spite of, later interdisciplinary research structures were formed.