Will Jackson

Madness and marginality : the lives of Kenya's white insane

General Editors introduction Introduction 1. Approaching madness: deviant psychology in Kenya Colony 2. No ordinary chaps: class, gender and the licensing of transgression 3. The lives of Kenyas white insane 4. Battered wives and broken homes: the colonial family 5. Stigma, shame and scandal: sex and mental illness 6. States of emergency: psychosis and transgression Conclusion Appendices Bibliography Index

White man's country: Kenya Colony and the making of a myth.

Abstract This article explains the cultural construction of Kenya Colony. It does so by combining two related histories – those of international tourism and of colonial rule – and two key explanatory themes – those of crisis and of commodity. The cultural construction of the colony, the article argues, emerged from two decisive moments: the “Indian crisis” of the early 1920s and the Mau Mau Emergency of the 1950s. Its content, meanwhile, was determined by its creation as a product, to be constituted, marketed, purchased and consumed. Colonial decline coincided with the emergence of Kenya Colony as global brand. Whilst the political project to maintain white mans country failed, the commercial project – to market white mans country as a commodity – succeeded emphatically. Attending to political crisis and cultural construction together, moreover, illustrates the function of the Kenya myth. The myth of Kenya Colony, the article argues, operated through recursive tropes of the picturesque, the transcendent and the primeval that are manifest not only in the writings of colonials themselves but also in accounts of Kenya produced in the period after independence. By examining the post-colonial period alongside the formative years of colonial rule, the extent to which ideas about Kenya circulating in the world today should be thought of in neo-colonial terms becomes apparent.

Introduction: Thinking with Deviance

Colonialism was invested in the performance of power — from the pomp and ceremony of the imperial durbars to the everyday interactions of performed superiorities. The basic legitimating idea behind empire was the notion that the colonisers were superior to the colonised, whether that be in the form of unique access to the means of production, supposedly democratic systems of governance or those racial and cultural registers of difference that justified rule and interlaced it with high-minded ideals of imperial benevolence. These were not de facto truths, but synthetic, constructed ideologies. Imperialism was invested in its own performance of pre-eminence and colonial powers believed themselves uniquely capable of harnessing their ascendancy for the benefit of themselves and others.

Unsettled States: Madness and Migration in Cape Town, c. 1920

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, as many as half a million people sailed from the British Isles to southern Africa, a significant proportion of them with at least some idea in mind of permanent migration. Almost all of these travellers spent time in Cape Town, the principal entry point to the subcontinent not only for migrants but also for assorted soldiers, speculators, missionaries and colonial officials and a miscellany of transients for whom Cape Town represented just one episode within much wider itinerations across Africa, the southern hemisphere and the, so-called, ‘British world’. This chapter takes Cape Town in the early twentieth century as its setting to investigate the confluence of migration and mental health through an integrated analysis of psychiatric and non-psychiatric archival sources. By looking at the case files of mental patients alongside case files relating to other kinds of distressed British migrants, its aim is to place mental health—and its failing—in a wider social and historical context than an exclusive focus on mental illness can allow.

The Settler’s Demise: Decolonization and Mental Breakdown in 1950s Kenya

Existing scholarship on colonial anxieties works on the idea that certain kinds of ill-ease, discomfort and distress accompanied ‘the colonial situation’. But little of this work considers how different colonial situations engendered different kinds of anxiety for different kinds of people. This chapter populates the world of colonial anxieties with mental patients in one settler colony: Kenya in the 1950s. Their anxieties only vaguely resemble the kinds of anxieties that historians have described as characteristically colonial. More revealing is the biographical context in which anxieties were embedded. At a moment when the colonial order was on the cusp of disappearing, the lives of the settler insane give a novel counter-narrative to Britain and its empire in the twentieth century. They also place in new perspective the more overt forms of mental breakdown that the settler community in Kenya performed in response to the violence of Mau Mau.