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  • Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbawbe, 1908-1968
  • Jock McCulloch
Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbawbe, 1908-1968. By Lynette A. Jackson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)

Western psychiatry is the most ambiguous of medical specialisations. While psychiatrists offer care to vulnerable men and women, the profession has also played a prominent role in what Norbert Elias called the civilising process and in the creation of Foucault’s disciplinary regimes. Consequently, over the past three decades a number of social theorists have explored the relationship between the history of psychiatry and notions of citizenship and civil liberties.

In the colonial world, asylums and their physicians have provided fertile ground for historians: the past two decades has seen studies of Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Algeria. At its best, the literature offers a point of comparison between governance in imperial centres and their peripheries; it provides a window into the aspirations and fears of white settler societies and their ruling elites; it gives an insight into the construction and gendering of colonial states. For some historians, it has offered a marvellous vantage point from which to explore the invention of colonial racism.

Jackson has written the first full-length history of the Ingutsheni Asylum in Zimbabwe. The narrative is based in part on archival research (which is always hard won), and in part on the existing historiography. There is also some oral evidence covering the contemporary scene. Surfacing Up begins with the establishment of the asylum and with it “the colonization of space and meaning”. That is followed by an archival-based history of Ingutsheni from 1908 to 1933. The narrative is detailed and brings to light for the first time many of the intimacies of asylum life. Chapter three examines the paths to incarceration. These show obvious parallels with the histories of Mathari Asylum in Kenya and Blida in Algeria. Jackson then turns to the fate of women inmates. Again the material is hard won from case notes which, although scanty, provide valuable insights on the fate of particularly vulnerable women. The penultimate chapter is on the modernisation of Ingutsheni from 1933 to 1942, which saw the introduction of Cardiazol, ECT and pre-frontal leucotomies. Those innovations, which were used elsewhere in British Africa, caused a number of deaths. The resulting public inquiry provides a disturbing insight into the asylum’s operation and the role of its director, Dr. Kenneth Rogers. It is equally disturbing to acknowledge that in 1942 conditions were probably little better in the asylums of New York or Manchester. In the final chapter, Jackson reflects upon reason and madness, thereby drawing the narrative back to social theory.

Zimbabwe differs from South Africa, Algeria and Kenya in the absence of a local psychiatric literature. The superintendents of Ingutsheni, including Rogers, did not publish in medical journals, but we can assume with some confidence that their views about mental illness in Africans were orthodox. Some reference to the standard medical texts of the period such as Henderson & Gillespie or Mayer-Gross, Slater and Roth would have enabled Jackson to explore that question. Unfortunately those authorities are not cited nor are the disease categories they helped to normalise explored to any effect. However crude or inappropriate, those nosologies formed the basic of diagnosis and care at Ingutsheni, as they did at Mathari. Another avenue into that science is available through the clinical work of Franz Fanon, whose political writings Jackson often cites. Ignoring that work Surfacing Up is focused instead upon meta-historical processes beginning with the Enlightenment and leading inexorably via the gates of Ingutsheni to colonial hegemony. Hers is a story about social control and the construction of the colonial subject.

The central argument in Surfacing Up tends to be undermined both by the archival record and the banality of asylum life. The case material provides no evidence that Ingutsheni’s inmates were convinced of the superiority of western knowledge systems or its attendant sciences. We know from Blida (Algeria) and Mathari (Kenya) that any combination of violence, poverty, drink, with an organic brain disorder such as epilepsy or tertiary syphilis could lead to incarceration. Those mundane...

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