Madness and Marginality: The lives of Kenya’s White insane by Will Jackson (review)

Will Jackson’s guiding ambition in writing Madness and Marginality was to find and investigate the subjective experiences of the marginalized White men and women of empire. He intended to contribute to the small number of publications that have explored beyond the memoirs analyzed in postcolonial studies. These latter studies shredded the myths of imperial uplift, but reached the limits of originality to dwell either on the discourses of colonial subjugation, or on documenting the defiance or conditional cooperation of subject peoples (9–12). Jackson’s selection of Kenya as a locale for his bold step past these critical readings of accessible texts has particular impact because of the well-developed history of several phases in this pseudo-settlement colony. The escapades of the Happy Valley set and the crimes of counter-insurgents during the Mau Mau uprising have become so embedded in accounts of the late Empire that it is arresting to read about the poor White males and abandoned women who transgressed the maintenance of White prestige in less spectacular or heinous ways (38–40). Nightmares extended into the lower depths of colonial living; thus, in addition to the discomfort, health risks and patchy employment prospects facing marginal Whites Jackson adds alcoholism and mental health crises. In some instances, the precipitating or aggravating shocks behind these afflictions developed or became more acute on account of the colonial burden of setting examples without possessing material means or emotional support.

Poor Whites were an unwanted welfare and cultural liability; the authorities barred or deported a few indigents. Charitable agencies coped with a number as well (67–73; 81–82). After drawing as much pertinent information as he could from these sources Jackson, as a resourceful scholar, turns his attention to a discussion of the case files of White patients at Mathuri Mental Hospital. From an estimated one thousand European patients (1939–59), 248 case files survived. Noting the incompleteness of the collection and recognizing that the biographical fragments do not originate from voluntary or purely first-hand sources, he acknowledges that a lot remains unknown. The profiles typically lack a conclusion; patients are discharged and vanish (84–90). Nevertheless, there are advantages to working with these sources. The patients who spoke and the doctors who recorded had no idea that the words would endure; that is a refreshing departure from the crafted memoirs of colonial life. Moreover, the gleanings convey haphazardness, mobility without discernable purpose or domestic life in disarray. The individuals who arrived in Kenya without a design, metropolitan backing or secure relationship but who simply ended up there were unlike the authors of stylish memoirs. This distinction exposes limitations to studies of colonial life that rely on published accounts, “the conceit of discrete, self-contained, and coherent colonial lives” (91).

By choosing to connect mental health records with the idea that colonization afflicts the colonizers as well as the colonized, an important contention in his pursuit of the subjective reality of colonialism, Jackson sets himself a major challenge. To do more than quarry for details that remind us of the colonial locale, he must connect the plight of patients and the responses of medical personal to the colonial condition. Ideally, he has to explain how the patients’ symptoms presented features specifically African-colonial. The records suggest a blend of the universal and the particular colonial situations. Thus, he notes the exposure of some married women everywhere to disappointment, estrangement, and abuse; however, it was intensified or at least inflected in Kenya by the absence of relatives and distance from “neighbours.” There was acute loneliness and the anxiety of conspicuous difference (105–13). Men too experienced bewilderment and failure: “As women were let down by men on whom they staked dependence, men suffered the weighty expectation that they could flourish on their own” (118). Sexual transgression also had colonial elements that appear in the files. Interracial origins and sexual relations in a racially defined society were part of the burden carried by a few...