Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908-1968

Citation preview

Surfacing Up

CORNELL STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY

A series edited lly

Sander L. Gilman George J. Makari A complete list of titles may be found at the end of the book.

Surfacing Up Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, I9o8-I968

Lynette A. Jackson

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright© 2005 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2005 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2005

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jackson, Lynette A. Surfacing up : psychiatry and social order in colonial Zimbabwe, 1go8-1g68 I Lynette A. Jackson. p. em.- (Cornell studies in the history of psychiatry) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8o14-431o-5 (cloth: alk. paper)ISBN o-8014-894o-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Psychiatry-Social aspects-Zimbabwe-History20th century. 2. Psychiatric hospital care-ZimbabweHistory-2oth century. 3· Ingutsheni Lunatic AsylumHistory 4· Ingutsheni Mental Hospital-History. 5· Social-control-Zimbabwe-History-2oth century. I. Title. II. Series. [DNLM: 1. Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum-Zimbabwe. 2. Ingutsheni Mental Hospital-Zimbabwe. 3· Mental Disorders-ethnology-Zimbabwe. 4· Mental Disordersetiology-Zimbabwe. 5· Socio-economic FactorsZimbabwe. 6. Hospitals, Psychiatric-historyZimbabwe. 7. Commitment of Mentally Ill- historyZimbabwe. 8. Social Control, Formal-Zimbabwe. g. History, 20th Century-Zimbabwe. WM 31]13s 2005] Rc45 1.Z5 5J3 3 2oo 5 362.2' 1'oog68g1-dc22

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Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printing 10 g 8 7 6 54 3 2 1

Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations

vn

Acknowledgments

IX

Colonial and Postcolonial Place-Names

xv

Introduction

1

"Lobengula's Wives Lived Here": The Colonization of Space and Meaning and the Birth of the Asylum in Southern Rhodesia

20

Bodies in Custody: Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum, 1908-1933

43

3· Black Men, White "Civilization," and Routes to Ingutsheni

68

4· Women Interrupted: Traveling Women, Anxious Men, and Ascriptions of Madness

99

5· Psychiatric Modernity in Black and White, 1933-1942

129

6. The Mricans Do Not Complain: The Monologue of Reason about Madness at Ingutsheni, 1942-1968

153

Epilogue

179

Index

223

1.

2.

Maps and Illustrations

F. I. Front of Ingutsheni Central Hospital

XIX

F.2. Map of Ingutsheni Mental Hospital and its Bulawayo surroundings from I936

XX

F.3. Map oflngutsheni Mental Hospital and its Bulawayo surroundings from 1964

XXI

I. I. Dr. Herbert Ushewokunze, the first minister of health

in independent Zimbabwe 1.2. Mr. Mark Nyathi 1.1.

Photograph from I899 of a group ofNdebele men described as "native chiefs and police"

3.1. Map of colonial Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia)

3

5 22

E. I. Mrs. Jane Chari and daughter

74 I86

E.2. Educational poster produced by Ingutsheni Central Hospital in 1996

192

E.3. Educational poster produced by Ingutsheni Central Hospital in 1996

I93

E.4. Educational poster produced by Ingutsheni Central Hospital in I996

I94

Acknowledgments

I received support, encouragement, inspiration, and advice from many people and institutions while I wrote this book and the dissertation upon · which it is based. On this list are professors such as Marcia Wright, my dissertation adviser, whom I called one day from the library of another university, in the days when I was studying for a masters in international relations, because I had decided that what I really wanted to study was southern African history. Marcia suggested that I take my "savings" and travel to London, where she arranged for me to work with the preeminent southern African historian, Shula Marks. The following fall I began studying African history with her at Columbia University. Throughout my many years of knowing her, she made sure that I met people "in the field" who shared their expertise and opened doors for me. I also thank Elizabeth Blackmar, another of my professors at Columbia, for her steady encouragement. Many other past and present Columbia professors contributed to my development as an Africanist, social historian, and historian of African medical discourse and practice, including Mohamed Mbodj, George Bond, Hollis Lynch, and Achille Mbembe. I benefited from the presence of the Institute of African Studies "family" at Columbia University, including a cohort of Africanist graduate students and postgraduate scholars, faculty, and administrators who were active in the instituterelated brown bag series, conferences, and seminars, and who were always available with suggestions and constructive comments. When people ask me how I first became interested in the history of mental health care in colonial Africa or why I became interested in the study of "madness," I usually respond with one of two episodes from my past: one from childhood and the other from graduate school. When I was a child my parents employed a woman to help them with the house and their kids. She spoke loudly to herself when she was by herself and,

X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

while perfectly harmless, generally behaved in a manner that our dominant culture defines as "crazy." From knowing this woman, whom I will call Mrs. Tanner in order to protect her privacy, I became interested in people whose words are discounted and dismissed because they are deemed crazy and without reason. I listened, and I learned a lot about the world and social justice issues from listening to her. Her insights were stored in my memory, resurfacing many years later. This leads to the second episode. One evening in 1990, I was walking down Broadway on the Upper West Side of New York City. I came across a street vendor selling David Rothman's The Birth of the Asylum: Order and Disorder in the New Republic and became intrigued by the question of the birth of the asylum and the importation of a European, biomedically oriented science of the mind into an Mrican society through colonial conquest. I wanted to understand the nature, implications, and impact of these phenomena, not only on those unfortunates designated insane but also on indigenous healing epistemologies, power, and knowledge. Thanks to Dhianaraj Chetty (who has, no doubt, forgotten his role in this), I found out about an early article by Megan Vaughan in which she briefly mentions the Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum in colonial Zimbabwe. The rest, as they say, is history. The bulk of the research for this book was funded by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council for Learned Societies through an International Doctoral Research Fellowship. In addition, Ireceived research and writing support from Dartmouth College by way of a Thurgood Marshall Fellowship. My first academic employer, Barnard College, supported the research and writing of this book in many ways, most significantly through a generous Gilder faculty research grant, summer travel funds, and sabbatical leave. I received a DANVIS (Danish Visitors) postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Development Studies, Roskilde University, Denmark, where, in addition to funding, I was given an office, administrative support, and a very collegial environment, complete with grazing cattle, in which to think and write. Most recently, the administration and faculty at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago have played a key role in the completion of this book, most notably through a semester of paid leave while I made the transition from New York to Chicago. My colleagues in the Gender and Women's Studies and Mrican American Studies programs, particularly Gayatri Reddy, Barbara Ransby,John D'Emilio, Peg Strobel, and Beth Richie, have been particularly supportive during the last year, aiding in my completion of this project in many ways.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XI

Without the many people who provided me with community and opened their homes to me while I traveled abroad, the research for this book would not have been possible. For their warm hospitality, stimulating company and their social, political, and intellectual introductions, I thank Patricia and Joe Made, Margaret Waller, Gail Altman, Eleanor (Annie) Holmes, Kaori Izumi, Bernadette Moffat and Michael Giles, Amanda Hammar, Laiwan Chung, and Kitty Lethlaka-Rennert and Wolfgang Rennert. As for my institutional homes away from home, I benefited from the facilities, support, and stimulating company at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies, the Department of Economic History at the University of Zimbabwe, and the Center of Mrican Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Mrica. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the staff of the National Archives of Zimbabwe in Harare and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and the University of Zimbabwe's Medical School Library, and will always remember the professionalism and kindness of these men and women: particularly Nicholas Vimbunu, Sheila Ndlovu, Mark Ncube, Phyllis Si-banda, and Mr. Nyamagodo. Many healers and healing institutions, both Western and traditionally trained, assisted me in my research for this book. Thanks go especially to Mark Musara of the Zimbabwe Traditional Healers' Association (ZITHA), who introduced me to a broad spectrum of traditional health workers and tutored me in the history and current concerns of Zimbabwean traditional healers, and Gordon Chavunduka of the Department of Sociology at the University of Zimbabwe and cofounder (along with Herbert Ushewokunze) and chairperson of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association (ZINATHA), who sup-plied me with letters of introduction to numerous traditional healers. One of these traditional healers was Jane Chari, who is discussed in the book. Elizabeth Matare and other members of the Zimbabwe National Association of Mental Health (ZIMNAMH) helped me to place my research into contemporary perspective. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to know and work with the late Elizabeth Ncube, an extraordinarily talented sangoma (Ndebele spirit medium/healer), dancer, and praise poetess. Elizabeth assisted me in conducting interviews and perhaps most importantly, in engendering a relationship of mutuality with my research subjects. The superintendent of what is now called Ingutsheni Central Hospital, Dr. Juliet Dube-Ndebele, facilitated my research into the history of Ingutsheni in many ways, including providing me with supervised access to the hospital wards and allowing me to interview hospital employees during working hours. One of

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

those employees was a man named Mark Nyathi, a psychiatric nurse and inyanga (Ndebele traditional healer) at Ingutsheni, and a key informant of mine. Mr. Nyathi welcomed me into his home and shared his fascinating personal narrative, memories, and insights about colonial psychiatry with me. Thanks go to Paul Zeleza, Shula Marks, Terrence Ranger for their careful readings, timely and valuable feedback on this manuscript. I also thankJane Saks, Kevin Moses, Peg Strobel, John D'Emilio, Preben Karlshan, Timothy Scarnnichia, and Cynthia Blair for the time that they took to read and comment on various chapters of this book. When you work on a project for so long, you collect many debts of gratitude. Some of the people on my list have read my work, and some have not; but they all contributed to creating the mental and the emotional space that has sustained me over the years. Kevin Moses has been, for many years, one of my most earnest supporters. Not only has he seen me through many challenges, he has also been an abiding source of intellectual stimulation and challenge. Martha Biondi is a dear friend and an intellectual and political ally with whom I have experienced the full range of emotions that relocating to a new city, writing a book (and being up for tenure) can occasion, and from whom I have asked and received much support. Gayatri Reddy has been a tremendously supportive colleague and friend; truly she has accompanied me through the final stages of this project. Paul Zeleza helped me get through much of the early stages of writing and, through weekly Saturday morning phone conversations, kept me grounded and talked me through more than one of my writing blocks. Most of all, I am grateful to my family: particularly my parents Dorris and Rayford Jackson, who have given me boundless love and encouragement, and to my siblings, Leslie Thomas, Lorie Jackson, Jeffrey Jackson, and Lydia Jackson-Miller, and my nieces and nephews, Dana, Carmen, Patrick, and Matthew Thomas. I am very aware that thus none of my successes are mine alone; they are rather a product of the investments made by many others, current, past, and future. I thank my grandmothers. In the late 1930s, my paternal grandmother, Flora Jackson, and her sisterin-law, rented a small apartment in Columbus, Georgia, miles from home and the rest of their families, where they lived during the week so that their oldest children, my father and his cousin, could attend schoolas no school was available at the time for black children in their small town of Hatchechubbee, Alabama. My maternal grandmother, the late Gertrude Evelyn Bell, assiduously celebrated all of the individual and

AcKNOWLEDGMENTS

Xlll

collective milestones of her grandchildren, particularly those of an academic nature. She was reserved, but constant in her cheerleading and support for as long as she was able. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Jane Saks, who entered my life during the final stages of the book process. Her encouragement, her intellectual and emotional prowess and support, her ability to see new possibilities in my work, and our mutual adoration and love for one another have sustained me through the challenges of the final stages of this book. Finally, I would like to thank Teresa Jesionowski, Bernard Kendler, Catherine Rice,Jack Rummel, Nancy Ferguson, and everyone else at Cornell University Press who played a role in the publication and marketing of this book.

Chicago

LYNETTE

A. JACKSON

Colonial and Postcolonial Place-Names

Colonial

Postcolonial

Bechuanaland

Botswana

Fort Victoria

Masvingo

Gatooma

Kadoma

Gwelo

Gweru

Hartley

Chegutu

Que Que

Kwekwe

Marandellas

Marondera

Mazoe

Mazowe

Mtoko

Mutoko

Northern

Zambia

Rhodesia Nyasaland

Malawi

Portugese East

Mozambique

Africa Salisbury

Harare

Shabani

Zvishavane

Sinoia

Chinhoyi

Southern

Zimbabwe

Rhodesia Umtali

Mutare

Wankie

Hwange

Surfacing Up

Fig. F.l Front image oflngutsheni Central Hospital, Belmont, Zimbabwe . Photograph taken by author.

Fig. F.2 Map of Ingutsheni and the surrounding areas circa 1936. Courtesy of the National Archives of Zimbabwe.

Fig. F.3 Map of Ingutsheni and the surrounding areas circa 1964. Courtesy of the National Archives of Zimbabwe.

Introduction Colonial and Postcolonial Politics of Mental Health in Zimbabwe

The truth is that colonialism in its essence ... [is] a fertile purveyor for psychiatric hospitals. FRANTZ FANON,

The Wretched oftheEarth

The history of psychiatry in colonial Zimbabwe is interwoven with histories of struggle: struggles to impose and maintain colonial social order, struggles to keep the "natives" in their place; struggles to resist colonially imposed socio-spatial assignments; struggles for racial and gender justice, self-determination and national independence; struggles to silence, and struggles to be heard. By examining how discourses and practices pertaining to mental illness overlapped with those of power and authority, this book explores how the discipline of psychiatry and the place of the asylum were important sites of struggle and contestation over space (the body, the hospital, the territory or nation) and meaning (the nature of reason, healing, and recovering) in colonial Zimbabwe. I look at how different and disparate social orders-the colonized and the colonizinghave sought to define, contain, and repair disorders of the mind and the body (physical and social), and the implications of what was often a mutual incomprehension. I trace my interest in the issue of madness to my childhood, and my relationship with a woman named Mrs. Tanner, 1 who used to take care of our home, my sisters, my brother, and me, while our parents were at work. She was a tall, light-complexioned black woman in her mid fifties. She laughed, danced, and carried on lively conversations with herself. My

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siblings and I thought she was odd and understood that she was abnormal by society's standards, perhaps even "crazy" to use the terminology of a less critical time. But we did not fear her and as she seemed to be happy, we did not pity her either. I remember one day after school, going into the kitchen for a snack. Mrs. Tanner, while standing in front of the kitchen window, chanted, danced, and stared up into the sky.. When I asked her what she was looking at, she responded: "Child, I'm looking at the Africans in the sky." These Africans, I was told, were calling for us, both of us, "to come home." For some time, I looked up into the sky with her, as ifl too could see these Africans; then I turned and walked away. I believe it was this time that I first began to wonder about the people whom society considered mentally unsound and what they had to say. Episodes like the one in the kitchen with Mrs. Tanner were the initial sparks of my interests in the officially inarticulate and my desire to hear the subaltern voices of people like those who inhabited mental hospitals, or who were perceived to be mildly insane, but harmless; who, like Mrs. Tanner, gracefully managed to coexist within two different psychic worlds. If one defines the insane as those who are out of touch with reality, my experiences with Mrs. Tanner force the question: Whose reality? And, if the insane are defined as persons without reason, I ask: But what about their reasons? The ways in which power eclipses and occludes the reasons of those who are disempowered through stereotypes, or other methods of displacing communication, is at the crux of this project. Indeed, the study of "madness" is, for me, the study of barriers to understanding. The study of "colonial madness" is the study of such barriers magnified by the race-, economic-, and culture-based resistance to communicating with and understanding the colonized Other. Herbert Ushewokunze, one of the leaders of the struggle to liberate Zimbabwe, who became independent Zimbabwe's first minister of health in 1g8o, was acutely aware of the psychic violence of colonialism. Indeed, at the forefront of the new nation's struggle to reconstruct itself, was the struggle to reform the treatment and management of the insane. In this quest, spaces such as Ingutsheni became like memory boards for the wrongs of the past and provided points of demarcation between the past and the present, between them and us, and between colonialism and nationhood. The actions of the first black minister of health at the moment of independence illustrate these points vividly; indeed, they illustrate the ways in which postcolonial mental health care reforms were resonant of postcolonial expectations. For Dr. Herbert Ushewokunze, the state of

INTRODUCTION

3

Fig. 1.1 Photograph of Dr. Herbert Ushewokunze, first minister of health in the independent nation of Zimbabwe. Courtesy of the National Archives of Zimbabwe.

mental health care was a powerful signifier, one that reminded him of the mistreatment that Zimbabwe's black majority had borne for all those years of British colonial rule. Having spent years as the overall commander of the Army Medical Corps for the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) at its base in Mozambique, h e had firsthand knowledge of the mental and emotional consequences of prolonged, violent conflict and, no doubt, imagined similar, though perhaps muted, consequences of the ninety-year history of colonial rule at home. In his view, a !uta continua (the struggle continues) beyond the winning of independence when it came to mental h ealth care. During his less than two years in office, before he ran afoul of then-prime-minister Robert Mugabe and was switched to another ministry, 2 Dr. Ushewokunze surveyed the country's hospitals and clinics and expelled the holdovers, the residuum of the recent colonial past. There is an often recounted story illustrating the commitment and unorthodox tactics Dr. Ushewokunze enlisted toward health care system reform. It is said that, on at least one occasion, he disguised himself as one of the countless poor of the country and went into the waiting room of a government hospital. As he expected, he was mistreated, neglected, and demeaned, just like any other needy and vulnerable Zimbabwean. After waiting a period of time, herevealed himself, proclaiming, "It is I, Comrade H erbert Ushewokunze !"3 While Ushewokunze's complaints about the neglect of African patients in the country's health care facilities were numerous, his strongest condemnation was for Ingutsheni Mental Hospital, originally Ingutsheni

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Lunatic Asylum, founded in 1 go8 on the outskirts of Bulawayo in the western portion of the country known as Matabeleland. On a visit to this oldest and largest psychiatric treatment facility in the region, he found numerous signs of gross abuses and a blatant inequality in the living conditions and the manner of treatment received by black and white patients, and was appalled. Indeed, from the first batch of patients marched to Ingutsheni from holding cells at the Bulawayo prison in June 1 go8, there had always been both black and white patients at Ingutsheni, and they were always treated unequally. When Ushewokunze visited in tg8o, he saw the segregated and unequal state of affairs at the institution firsthand. The rooms in the European wards had bed frames and mattresses, freshly painted walls with pictures on them and windows with curtains. The Mrican wards could not have been more different. They were dark, dank, and grossly overcrowded. Mrican male and female patients alike slept, barracks-style, on felt mats instead of beds, directly on top of cold cement floors. The walls were picture-less; the windows-small, dark, and screened slits located near the ceilings, which prevented patients' having views of the outsidewere curtain-less. While care was taken to keep European patients in normal civilian attire, and while the European women were provided a beauty parlor called Fair Lady Salon, 4 Mrican men and women wore khaki-colored pajamas day and night, and their heads were shaved. 5 Ushewokunze declared war on what he saw at Ingutsheni-also known by the local Mrican community as Twenty-third Avenue, as in: "If you don't watch out, you'll be sent to Twenty-Third Avenue." He purged the hospital staff of those whom he considered unrepentant and unreformed settler types, and he put an end to race-based segregation on the wards. 6 One man who witnessed the minister as he stormed through the wards at Ingutsheni was a psychiatric nurse named Mark Nyathi. The first Mrican psychiatric nurse in what was then called Rhodesia, 7 Mr. Nyathi began working at Ingutsheni in 1 g68 and was still working there at the time of my last visit to the hospital in 2001. According to Mr. Nyathi, on one of his visits to the hospital, Dr. Ushewokunze went into the kitchen where the Mrican patients' lunch was being prepared. He opened the lid to a large pot simmering on the stove that he had been told contained fish stew. Mter inspecting the contents, he asked the man in charge what had happened to the fish, as all he saw were their meatless heads floating in broth. Upon seeing this, he demanded that the hospital superintendent combine the Mrican and European kitchens and then had fish soup eliminated from the menu altogether.

INTRODUCTION

5

Fig. 1.2 Photograph of Mr. Mark Nyathi taken on the premises oflngutsheni Central Hospital. Photograph taken by author.

Signs of the separate and unequal treatment received by black and white patients at the hospital were numerous, angering Ushewokunze at every turn. When he was shown the hospital farm, only black patients were working in the fields. Throughout the history of Ingutsheni, the Mrican patients, organized into labor squads, worked the farm. In fact, farm labor had been the staple of Mrican occupational therapy at the hospital. The administrators had always differentiated between the Mrican and European patient, and since forms of manual labor were considered "kaffir work" and demeaning to Europeans, white patients at Ingutsheni were generally confined to recreational labor such as ornamental gardening, fancy needlework, tennis, and lawn bowling. Herbert Ushewokunze put an end to this racial division of occupational and recreational labor, and to unpaid patient farm work altogether. 8 Members of the black staff such as Head Matron Mrs. Msimanga, who first arrived at Ingutsheni in 197 4, and Nurses' Aide Winnie Mutasa, who first arrived in 1957, recounted many painful truths to the minister when he visited. They told him that black patients, unlike their white counterparts, received "straight ECT"-electric convulsant therapy without

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general anesthesia. As a consequence, according to Matron Msimanga, at least two strong men had to hold the patients down to prevent them from flying toward the ceiling with each jolt of electricity applied to their temples. 9 The segregated wards and the other colonial leftovers that were obvious to his eyes, ended following Ushewokunze's visits. Moreover, he elevated the stature of mental health care in general by establishing a department of psychiatry at the ministry of health. Because of his fervent and conspicuous support of the cause of the mentally ill, members of the Zimbabwe National Association of Mental Health (ZIMNAMH), first established in 1981, viewed Ushewokunze as their patron saint. In 1983, Minister of Health Psarayi, following his predecessor's lead, established an annual "open day" at Ingutsheni as if to say that the hospital no longer had anything to hide. Doctor Psarayi, Zimbabwe's third minister of health in as many years, described the significance of this day stating, "Ingutsheni was built in 1908, and additions within the grounds ofthe hospital were added over the years. However, the hospital itself remained a mystery to the people of this country, and what took place within the hospi. tal was not explained to the community as such. We have come a long way since then." 10 Progress was indeed real, but limited. During the early years of independence in Zimbabwe, memories of the colonial treatment of those designated insane came to the fore, as did an awareness of the harmful nature of many "traditional" African healing practices. Both were slated for reform under the government of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). A split between the old ways and the new national aspirations was demarcated in the arena of health in general and mental health in particular. Historians such as Steven Feierman have added significantly to our understanding of the central role that healing methodologies played in contests over political and social control in African history. 11 One can certainly make this case for Zimbabwean history. From the arrival of the London Missionary Society (LMS) to Matabeleland and their establishment ofthe Inyati Mission in 185g, agents of European culture and conquest sought to disassemble existing medico-religious and philosophical traditions, classified by them as witchcraft and idol worship. The Scottish missionary Robert Moffat was given land by the founder of the Ndebele nation, Mzilikazi, and allowed to establish mission stations in Matabeleland. But, while Mzilikazi is said to have thought of Moffat as his friend, Moffat clearly thought ofMzilikazi and his people as heathens who needed to be converted. In his journals he described his "friend's" people as liv-

INTRODUCTION

7

ing in a "mental darkness, black as an Egyptian night." 12 He had come to liberate them from their darkness and their "witch doctors." From the beginning of the European presence, missionaries confronted the power base of the indigenous herbalists and diviners, called nanga by the Shona and inyanga and sangoma by Ndebele-speaking inhabitants of the land, and witch doctors by the incoming Europeans, who also attacked the various ritual and healing societies as cults. One missionary by the name of Father Beihler, a Jesuit at Empandeni Mission in Matabeleland, is said to have gone after the elderly female participants in the Shumba ritual with a sjambok (whip) for persisting in their nonChristian beliefs. 13 Five years after Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company marched onto the Zimbabwe Plateau in 18go and inaugurated the history of colonial Southern Rhodesia, colonial authorities began promulgating witchcraft regulations. In 18gg, the Witchcraft Suppression Ordinance was passed. 14 This ordinance made witchcraft accusations illegal and any nanga or sangoma who divined witchcraft as the cause of sickness or misfortune into criminals. This law, like other anti-witchcraft ordinances in British Central Africa (Southern and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland) was ostensibly directed at the vigilante violence, against women primarily, that sometimes followed accusations of witchcraft; but it effectively criminalized anyone who purveyed "medicine and skill in witchcraft and witch-finding. "15 Such people were subjected to fines, floggings, and even imprisonment. What had been an important, albeit abused, explanatory framework that provided local communities with a sense of security, was transposed under colonialism into a prohibited behavior. 16 Perhaps more than anything else, Europeans cited African beliefs in the existence of witchcraft to symbolize the "old order" and to solidify the superiority and righteousness of the "new order" that they sought to establish through force when necessary. The anthropologist David HammondTooke argues that the specter of the "witch doctor" was central to the colonizing imaginary of binary oppositions, "where the intrepid District Commissioner, representing civilization and the forces of light, is opposed by the sinister figure of the witch doctor, the epitome of evil, primeval cunning and the dark forces of barbarism. "17 According to this worldview, the sangoma was a social, psychic, and spiritual malignancy. Hammond-Tooke argues, however, that "this image represents a crass distortion of how 'witch-doctors' are regarded in traditional African society," who view many of these men and women as indispensable members of society "whose activities are closely linked to the benevolent ancestors and

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whose role is quite specifically that of combating the forces of evil that constantly threaten the lives and well-being of his patients." 18 What followed the 18gg Ordinance were years of both covert and overt battles over the legitimacy of methods of healing, which, as pointed out by anthropologist Leith Mullings in her book on change and psychotherapy in urban Ghana, demonstrate how "the ability to manipulate healing can be used to reinforce selected social relations, classes and ideologies. "19 In other words, in addition to the land, the British also wanted to control the conception and production of healing. Although many scholars of the medical and therapeutic history of Mrica would accept that, certainly by the twentieth century, Western biomedicine surpassed indigenous Mrican medicines in their efficacy in treating numerous physical ailments and most infectious diseases, the jury is still out on psychotherapeutics. In fact, since the 1g6os, with the exposure of the abuses of psychotherapy and psychiatric medicine in the West, combined with the rise of social justice and anticolonial struggles around the world and a growing openness within transnational bodies like the World Health Organization to consider traditional psychotherapeutic methodologies, Western psychiatry became increasingly associated with the repressive power of states and with dominant social groups. As Michel Foucault points out, institutions of social control and regulation are interwoven into psychiatric discourse. 20 And, since the antipsychiatric movement of the 1g6os and 1970s, 21 many people in the West have come to associate psychiatric institutionalization with terrifying abuses like Nazi racial hygiene, 22 British uses of the Mental Health Act to certify and institutionalize unwed mothers, 23 psychiatric torture as found in the story of the strong-willed American movie actress Frances Farmer, 24 and depicted in films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 25 In a groundbreaking study on the interactions between psychiatric medicine and ethnic minorities in Britain, Roland Littlewood and Maurice Lipsedge illustrate how, "when looking at another group there is always a tendency to relate psychological difficulties to our own criteria of normality. "26 Psychiatry polices the limits of normality and abnormality within a given social order. When those limits are politicized, when they are racialized and gendered, or when they are contested, not just by individual transgressors, but by an entire community or cultural context, abuses occur. One wonders, as a result, what psychiatry looked like in a colonial Mrican context of state racism and ethnocentrism by the few against the many? Whose limits were being imposed and policed? Where did they

INTRODUCTION

9

fall? How did different people within colonial society experience these limits differently? What was it about psychiatry in colonial Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) that made it resonate so negatively at the moment of independence? Herbert Ushewokunze was not the only one to associate institutional psychiatry with colonial oppression. In the early 1g6os, Martinican psychiatrist and anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, who had himself practiced psychiatry in Algeria, described colonial societies as, in their essence, "fertile purveyor(s) for psychiatric hospitals." In other words, he argued that the psychic oppression inherent in the colonial social order led to psychiatric institutionalization. Mind you, Fanon did not say that colonialism invented madness among the colonized, or that European colonialism gave rise to the phenomena of madness among Mricans. It is certain that the major Mrican populations of the Zimbabwe Plateau, the Shona and the Ndebele people, were familiar with madness: penga and ubuhlanya respectively, and had developed etiologies and healing methodologies in response, long before the arrival of the Europeans. What Fanon is alluding to is the relationship between colonial oppression with an emphasis on psychic violence, and psychiatric institutionalization. He saw colonial psychiatric hospitals as repositories for "indocile nature," for those who failed to fit into "the social background of the colonial type. "27 In this book, I explore this claim and the extent to which it applied to Southern Rhodesia. I argue that this relationship, between colonialism and psychiatric institutionalization, had three central components: ( 1) the colonizer's power to control space and assign place; (2) the colonizer's power to define normality and what constituted abnormality; and (3) the paradox of colonial madness and resistance: if you did resist, you might be certified as insane, and if you didn't resist, you might be driven insane. The title of my book, Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, is derived from a conversation that I had in 1998 with Mark Nyathi, the psychiatric nurse who witnessed Ushewokunze's fiery brand of health care reform discussed above. Mter he had trained in general nursing in Perthshire and psychiatric nursing in Dumfreishire, Scotland, and after he had gained a diploma in tropical nursing in Liverpool, England, Mr. Nyathi returned to Rhodesia to work at Ingutsheni Mental Hospital in Bulawayo. The year was 1968. He fell ill shortly afterward, suffering from what the Ndebele call ukuthwasa, an illness defined as "coming out" or "emergence"28 and associated with having been "called" by

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the spirits to become a sangoma. At first Nyathi resisted the call, as did many people, particularly those who were, like Nyathi, urban, educated, and regularly attending Christian churches. His resistance may have been particularly strong because he feared that a vocation in traditional healing would conflict with the biomedical track that he had set for himself. But it was hard to resist the healing spirit of an ancestor that was often accompanied by illness and even insanity. 29 When Nyathi's symptoms persisted and even escalated, he eventually made peace with the idea of becoming a sangoma. While passed out on the floor one evening (his wife, thinking him dead, called his sister for help), he dreamed of the place where he must go to be trained. The experience of near death, the dream state of receiving a visit from an ancestor who calls for one to visit the home of a healer, is a common feature of ukuthwasa. 30 Nyathi's symptoms were severe back pains and bouts of unconsciousness and even paralysis. Other common symptoms of ukuthwasa are stomachaches, nervousness, hysteria, and uncontrollable hiccups.31 When Nyathi woke up, he and his family made arrangements for him to travel to a remote location on the southeastern border with Mozambique that he had learned about in the dream. For six months, Nyathi trained as a traditional healer with five others, each one from a different part of southern Mrica, and each one having learned of the place in a dream. Mr. Nyathi returned to Ingutsheni and has been functioning betwixt and between two competing medical epistemologies, Western and Ndebele, ever since. 32 Many black Zimbabweans, perhaps the majority, lived a reality of therapeutic diversity, choosing between different therapeutic options in the midst of a colonial regime that was aggressively imposing Christianity, rational individualism, and biopower-the biological regulation of the social body that Michel Foucault associates with the late eighteenth century and positivism, the belief in what can be observed, of the Enlightenment era of European history. 33 The colonial environment was a hostile environment for Mrican healers who were represented as the epitome of evil, chaos, and unreason. Christian missionaries declared war against these healers, whom they called witches, because as Steven Feierman and anthropologist John Janzen insightfully point out, "missionaries treated Mrican choices of therapy as choices of theology. "34 Colonial legislators viewed them as menaces and charlatans and passed ordinances against them. But, as sociologist and founding president of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association (ZINATHA), Gordon Chavunduka, has argued, the vast majority of Shona speakers continued to believe in the

INTRODUCTION

ll

efficacy of the nanga to treat their ailments, particularly the mental and emotional ones, throughout the colonial period and beyond. 35 When people visited the psychiatric clinic and the nanga, they did so for very different reasons. According to Francis Chinemana, who spent years in Zimbabwe working as a nurse and health care consultant, patients visited the psychiatric clinics for the tranquilizers-the sufferers went there, or were sent there by their therapy managers, to be calmed down, not to be diagnosed or cured. For this, they returned to the nanga, who was expected to divine what or who had caused the illness, why the sufferer has been so inflicted, and the best way of rectifYing the situation. 36 Within such an environment, one must wonder what factors contributed to the admissions of black men and women at Ingutsheni. If Frantz Fan on was right, that there was something fundamental to the nature of colonial society that fueled admissions to the psychiatric hospital, the question becomes, what, how, and why? According to Mark Nyathi, the process of "surfacing up" is what brought the African prepatient into the view and conscious awareness of an agent of colonial order and was subsequently circumscribed by the limits of the colonizer's understanding and institutional framework. Rather than focusing on trying to establish that which cannot be established, the actual incidence or reality of African mental illness in Southern Rhodesia, whether mental illness increased under colonialism or not, I focus on how "surfacing up"-the interactions between different forms of consciousness and agency resulting in one person being perceived as a problem by another-led to the admission of Africans as psychiatric patients to Ingutsheni. I direct my attention to the process by which black people became disturbing to the colonial order of things and were perceived to be mad within the framework of colonial biopower. The notion of "surfacing up," when applied to the question of black admissions at Ingutsheni, distills and extends the ideas of several scholars who have explored issues relating to the making of mental patients and others classified as disordered, deviant, and/ or disabled. Michel Foucault's theory of the formation of objects of discourse, for instance, identifies "surfaces of their emergence," and explains how a suspect of disorder is seen on a "grid of specification" and ascribed as mad or something else by the "authorities of delimitation" such as doctors, policemen, or school teachers. 37 Surfacing Up emphasizes both the place and location at which an individual was perceived as abnormal and perhaps dangerous, and the agency and reasoning of the individual who moved into sight. The ideas articu-

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lated by geographer Michel de Certeau in his Practices ofEveryday Life have also been important in my conceptualizations of space for this book. While de Certeau does not focus on the relationship between movement and ascriptions of madness as I do, he does provide a useful way of conceiving and, further, of retrieving the voices of the historically inarticulate and subaltern, such as the suspected and/ or certified insane, through what he calls their acts of "spatial reappropriation. "38 These acts signal the agency of those otherwise perceived to be merely the targets of state policing strategies. Through concepts like "the rhetoric of walking" and the "spaces of enunciation"39 he helps us incorporate the suspect into his or her own story as agent, as a person who has traveled from someplace and is on his or her way to someplace else-a person with both motive and agency, who, by-walking, is telling a story. Indeed, within the context of colonial Zimbabwe, the visibility of the behavior that would not only be construed as madness, but treated within the framework of psychiatry, was, in large part, contingent on the African individual moving outside of the African-oriented social and cultural milieu of the rural reserve, outside the domain ofwhatJohnJanzen calls his or her "therapy management group,"40 and into the gaze and interpretive framework of the colonizer and his biomedical logic which held that the ailment was localized within the sufferer's body. If the person had remained in the rural reserves set aside for African habitation and beneath the radar of colonial order, he or she would have most likely been treated by a nanga or sangoma using a traditional African healing methodology. In other words, place mattered. Where and who a person was, how they were mapped into the colonial social and spatial order in terms of their "proper places," was key to the process of ascribing the madness, the unreason, that led to Ingutsheni. While this book will discuss some traditional healing methodologies at points, (what the nanga or sangomamight have done or said in this or that instance), the focus is on what happened to make Africans "surface up," be labeled as "mad," and sent to Ingutsheni. Thus from Nyathi's focus on the process by which the African patient came into view and under the medical gaze comes the basic framework for this book: an examination of the relationship between the social layout and the politics of colonial space, a gender-, class-, and race-defined space, organized to create and reinforce white, male, capitalist supremacy; the beliefs, actions, and choices that individuals made, for example, to be one place rather than their "proper place," to leave, to run, to attack, to scream; and the com-

INTRODUCTION

bination of these two things as the route to the colonial mental hospital. Throughout the period under review, between the founding of Ingutsheni in 1908 and the return of Nyathi from his training in Scotland in 1968, the process of detecting and suspecting, detaining, treating, and releasing persons as "mad" or "recovered," was premised on his or her "surfacing up." Nyathi' s return, significantly enough, closely followed the establishment of the white supremacist Rhodesia Front government of Ian Smith, their Unilateral Declaration oflndependence from Britain in 1965, the banning of the Mrican liberation parties (the Zimbabwe Mrican National Union and the Zimbabwe Mrican Patriotic Union) in 1966, the militarization of these movements that same year, and the beginning of the anticolonial guerrilla struggle. His return also coincided with the birth of the antipsychiatry movement discussed above. In the pages that follow, I will analyze the relationship between the changing economic, social, and environmental conditions, options, and trajectories in the lives of colonial subjects; the changing needs of the white settler citizenry; changing boundaries around communities; and changing contours and confrontations at the surface of those spaces under the gaze of colonial authority. This book relates stories about how people navigated the geographies of daily colonial life and the different discourses that were mobilized when one was caught transgressing one of the numerous boundaries proscribing where they should go and what they should think and say out loud. In other words, Surfacing Up explores social strategies and social conflicts on and beneath the surface of colonial order and how these conflicts and missed understandings defined who became inmates at Ingutsheni, and their experience once committed. Surfacing Up is concerned with how race and ethnicity influence the way that mental illness is constructed as well as the social distribution of diagnoses and treatment. In the spirit of Frantz Fanon's work, this book addresses the distinct ways in which colonization was imbedded in every aspect of colonial psychiatric discourse and practice. Writing during the era of decolonization in Africa, Fanon began to look at the European colonizer's institutions in Mrica, critiquing the various apparatuses that he believed reproduced a white supremacist social order, like the mental hospital. Like Dr. Ushewokunze, Fanon believed that the deeply racist and ethnocentric character of hospital cultures was antithetical to healing, that nothing inherently colonial could heal the wounded psyches of native people, and that colonized minds should not be a part ofliberated societies. 41 While this book's focus is on the colo-

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nial and not the postcolonial period in Zimbabwe, these references to postcolonial theorists are central to understanding and framing the function of the psychiatric hospital. African historian Megan Vaughan's brilliant work on colonial medicine and, specifically, Western biopower in Africa, explores the applicability of theorists like Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault to the colonial African context. With reference to colonial psychiatry and the process of ascribing madness to Africans, Vaughan argues that the colonizers did not need madness to scapegoat Africans. Rather, the main targets of this particular arm of the colonial state's repressive power apparatus were those considered to be "insufficiently other." She argues that ascriptions of madness among colonial subjects signified "de-culturation and [the] breaking of barriers of difference and silence." 42 Another African historian who has written on the topic of colonial psychiatry, Jock McCulloch, argues that psychiatric admissions in Kenyan, Southern Rhodesian, and South African asylums were, at their core, a reaction to African nationalist stirrings in the colonies. According to McCulloch, "Ethnopsychiatry was the settler's most eloquent response to the challenge of African nationalism and the ethnopsychiatric discourses on the moral and intellectual failings of Africans were merely veiled criticisms of African nationalism. "4 3 While often profound, insightful and theoretically sophisticated, studies on psychiatry in Africa have focused on analyzing discourse and deconstructing the thoughts and preoccupations of colonial doctors rather than on patient case studies and the review of institutional practice. Even in McCulloch's study, which incorporates material from various mental hospitals in Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and Kenya over a period of time, actual patient case records, the only adequate source on the subjective experience of the colonial mental hospital, are unexamined. In fact, McCulloch states that such sources were not available for Southern Rhodesia, that, "a review of district commissioners' records for the period provides the only evidence we have of the circumstances that brought psychotic Africans to the asylum gates. "44 While this is certainly accurate for many places, it is not accurate for Southern Rhodesia, as the current work is based on patient case records. Surfacing Up not only incorporates evidence from psychiatric case files in Southern Rhodesia, a total of four hundred in all, it is grounded in their analysis and contextualization. Other authors whose analyses are built on a balance between patient case files, institutional practice, and psychiatric discourse are Jonathan Sadowsky in his book on the history of

INTRODUCTION

the Yaba and Aro asylums in colonial Nigeria, 45 Sally Swartz in her work on the Valkenberg Asylum in colonial Cape Town, 46 and Leonard Bell in his book on the history of the Kissy Asylum in Sierra Leone. 47 Other innovative works rooted in the reconstructed prepatient and patient narratives of colonial Mrica that discuss gender explicitly include Shula Marks's discussion of Lily Moya, a young Transkei schoolgirl whose experiences of alienation, pieced together through a series of correspondences between three South Mrican women, Lily Moya, Sibusisiwe Makhanya, and Mabel Palmer, seem to have led to her admission into South Mrican mental hospitals. 48 More recently, Robert Edgar and Hilary Sapire have written on Nontentha Nkwenkwe, a Xhosa prophetess whose claims of divine inspiration, among other perceived transgressions of social order, led to her admission to South Mrican mental hospitals. 49 Surfacing Up adds to this growing conversation about colonialism and ascriptions of madness, emphasizing the intersections between gender, race, and space: spatial relations, spatial transgressions, and spatial reappropriations, in the history of psychiatry in Southern Rhodesia. This book is first and foremost a social and cultural history of colonialism in Zimbabwe explored through the prism of the Ingutsheni Mental Hospital and the reconstruction of many of its patients' narratives. It is also a comparative and interdisciplinary study, drawing on theoretical and conceptual models from fields such as anthropology, sociology, religion, and psychiatry, and on psychiatric hospital studies from other regions in the world. It is one of the few Mrican-based studies exploring broad questions relating to the colonial experience of different social groups, using for its base of empirical data a large number of psychiatric patients' files. The first chapter of Surfacing Up examines the conditions under which Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum was born, and the significance of this birth occurring on the outskirts of Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, in 1908. Chapter 1 lays the foundation for the broader discussion that will follow, of the asylum as a site of colonial appropriation and the reorganization of Mrican space and meaning, the transposition in the meaning of the name "Ingutsheni" being a case in point. The title of this chapter, "Lobengula's Wives Lived Here," springs from the belief of many Ndebele people living in and around Bulawayo that the grounds oflngutsheni are the site where the last independent Ndebele king Lobengula Khumalo's wives lived, protected by one of his military regiments, the Ingubo (blanket) regiment. Ingutsheni ( ingubo + eni) literally means "the place of the blanket" or "home of the blanket." Its reassignment to a colonial mental

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asylum is discussed in this chapter as part of the process of colonial domestication. Chapter 2 examines daily life at the Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum during the first twenty-five years of its existence, when it was largely a custodial institution. The title of this chapter, "Bodies in Custody," emphasizes the fact that the colonial authorities made little pretence that the colonial asylum was a modern or curative institution. The colonial administrators had such low expectations for this institution at the time, therapeutically and otherwise, that they did not deem it a suitable place to send European women and instead kept the certified insane among them in prisons until they could be transferred to more appropriate asylums in South Africa. However, as the numbers of patients grew along with the costs associated with keeping them elsewhere, the colonial state gradually accepted Ingutsheni as a place for the care and control of all the colony's insane as well as those brought in from neighboring colonies of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. Any expansion of asylum facilities was always reluctantly undertaken, inadequate, segregated, and unequal. The African wards at the asylum were chronically overcrowded. Chapter 2 explores the links between the asylum's spatial and political economy, and that of the colony at large, and looks at the relationship between rates of incorporation into the economy and admissions onto the psychiatric wards. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with the making of African mental patients, with the routes that black men and women traveled to Ingutsheni. Chapter 3, "Black Men, White 'Civilization,' and Routes to Ingutsheni," explores the gendered nature of black men's arrival at the asylum, which related directly to the colonial political economy and configurations of space and power. These relationships are explored through the close analysis of the detection and detention narratives of black male patients. Several were migrant laborers, and of this group, some were muchona, or lost men, from the perspective of their families and communities who never saw them again. One of these patients was a murderer who was ultimately judged guilty but insane in the murder of his little daughter, and another was a mildly famous religious radical and founder of an independent African church. Each narrative is of a black man ensconced in at least one of the major constituents of the colonizers' power and "civilization": labor migrancy, law and order, and mission Christianity. By exploring the route to the asylum traveled by these and other African men, one begins to develop an outline of the black man's experience in colonial Southern Rhodesia.

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 4 illustrates how the black woman's experience of colonial social order differed from that of the black man. While men's routes to the psychiatric hospital were tied to their incorporation into the colonial order and the political economy, largely as waged laborers, women's routes were tied to their lack of incorporation into that order. Thus they were most often seen in the first place as out of place, as stray women. Their remoteness from the colonizers' experience, combined with the policies of indirect rule that located them as the subordinates and dependents of Mrican men, meant that when they were seen, they were rarely attributed with social agency. The title of this chapter, "Women Interrupted: Traveling Women, Anxious Men, and Ascriptions of Madness," alerts the reader to the fact that the author takes a totally different view of these women. Chapter 4 begins with the description of an Mrican woman, Matombi, on a journey. To where and for what reason is not known. What is known is that her journey was interrupted when she was seen by those who either formally or informally represented colonial authority. There were many women like Matombi. In fact, the majority of Mrican women admitted to Ingutsheni and whose files are reviewed here were constructed as "stray women," women "found" in the wrong place. By reconstructing and interpreting Mrican women's narratives of detection as suspected "lunatics" and of their detention at Ingutsheni, this chapter explores the contours of Mrican women's experiences within the colonial British central Mrican economy of Southern Rhodesia, the ways in which their station was, from almost everyone's perspective, the lowest, and how that social mapping factored into their "surfacing up" as potentially mad women. Chapter 5 looks at a specific process, the 1942 Commission of Inquiry into the Organization and Management of Ingutsheni Mental Hospital. The report of this commission becomes a backdrop for two key concerns of the settler colony: modernization, which was sometimes, although not always, approached from the standpoint of keeping up appearances and the protection of white identity and prestige. In many ways, the 1942 commission report was a report card on Ingutsheni as a colonial institution, with the grade range based on how effectively the institution reproduced internally the external order of things. With the appointment of Dr. Kenneth M. Rodger from England as the colony's first psychiatrist, the systematization of clinical note taking and patient-record-keeping, and the introduction and widespread use ofECT, Ingutsheni moved into a new era of modernity. Nonetheless, in 1942, numerous scandals surfaced and the commissioners were told of deaths, torture, and unspeak-

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able filth at lngutsheni. The text of the report, however, makes clear that the commissioners were primarily interested with questions of racial segregation and policing the boundaries of whiteness. The rumor that Mrican workers could see chronic European women undressing in their "airing courts" exercised the commissioners far more than reports of the reckless endangerment of patients' lives by doctors. By exploring the 1942 report, and the rise and fall of Dr. Kenneth Rodger as the architect of Ingutsheni's modernity, chapter 5 shows how this moment was significant in the histories both of psychiatric hospitalization and of colonial whiteness. Chapter 6 explores daily life and daily drama at lngutsheni following the 1942 Commission of Inquiry, and under Dr. Rodger's successor, British and South Mrican trained Dr. Charles Dawson. The title of the chapter, "The Mricans Don't Complain," comes from a statement made by Dr. Dawson about the Mrican response to the biomedical regime of psychotropic drugs, insulin treatment, ECT, and prefrontalleucotomies, as well as the prisonlike environment on the Mrican patient wards. All one needs to do is to read the patient case files and occasional utterances that were allowed to slip into the examining doctor's clinical notes to know that the patients did complain. The problem was that their complaints were never disaggregated; but were part of the ambient noise on the Mrican wards. This chapter travels back and forth between the dominant stance of the colonial psychiatrist and the muted acts of resistance by inmates-a sad dance in the monologue of reason about madness. Even though what British prime minister Harold Macmillan described as the "winds of change" were blowing over much of Mrica in the early 196os, little changed at Ingutsheni. Little changed, but change was coming, and in 1968 lngutsheni hired its first black psychiatric nurse, Mark Nyathi, who would expose the hospital to the media and, most importantly, to the black community at a time of rising nationalist consCiousness. The Epilogue brings this book back to the beginning. In April 1980, in the very month that Zimbabwe gained its independence and Bob Marley sang "Every man has the right to decide his own destiny" at Rufaro Stadium in Harare (previously Salisbury), a man named News Hurufu was literally freed from his chains after ten years of confinement at the hands of his own family. ZANU, the recently elected ruling party, came to the rescue. They contacted the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association, who located a Shona healer named Jane Chari, a specialist in mental healing. Mrs. Chari healed Hurufu and was then sent a

INTRODUCTION

19

group of returning ex-combatants who needed help and in whom the new nation took a great interest. Beginning with the end of colonialism in Zimbabwe, this section explores how the moment of independence was marked psychiatrically and thus returns us to the point from which we began: the first utterances in the postcolonial narrative of mental health.

1.

"Lobengula's Wives Lived Here"

The Colonization of Space and Meaning and the Birth of the Asylum in Southern Rhodesia

In June 1966, nearly sixty years after the British opened Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum on the outskirts of Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, Dr. Arthur Peter Baker, who had recently been promoted to Medical Superintendent of what was then known as the Ingutsheni Mental Hospital, interviewed an Mrican woman named ''Winnie"-a long-term psychiatric patient who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia three decades earlier. 1 From her psychiatric case file, one finds that she was unresponsive to treatment, which, in her case, included numerous rounds of electric convulsant therapy (ECT) and multiple doses of Largactil, a British trade name for the anti-psychotic drug Chlorpromazine, introduced into Ingutsheni in the mid-1gsos. The U.S. trade name for this drug was Thorazine. As a "chronic" patient, Winnie was only visited by a staff psychiatrist once every five years as mandated by the Southern Rhodesian Mental Disorders Act of 1936. For Winnie, like other chronic patients who were viewed as unrecoverable, Ingutsheni was little more than a warehousing facility-one that dispensed drugs. During the encounter described above, Doctor Baker asked Winnie the standard questions for a psychiatric interview at that time, questions that were aimed at determining whether or not the patient's thoughts were consistent with reality-a Western, rational individualist view of reality, that is. He asked her to tell him where she was and why she was there. Her responses included: "I am at Enhlanyeni, but my grandfather is not here." "I am at baas's house."

"LoBENGULA's WIVES LIVED HERE"

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"I followed my grandfather and my brother-in-law because the grandfather had no gramophone and wanted some beer." "I came to see the head nurse."

According to Baker, these answers were incorrect and evinced an absence of insight. The patient should have said that she was at Ingutsheni Mental Hospital because she was mad. 2 Encounters like this one between Dr. Baker and Winnie were frequent within this colonial context and exemplify what Michel Foucault described as "the monologue of reason about madness," 3 a phenomenon that he traced back to eighteenth-century Europe, to what he called the "Classical Age," when madness was separated from reason both literally and figuratively. 4 For the history of psychiatry, the era of modernity was inaugurated by French physician Philippe Pinel's unchaining of the insane at the Bicetre public hospital in Paris. 5 This act of separating the insane from the criminals, prostitutes, and aged derelicts who were also confined in the hospital, represented, according to Foucault, the separation of the innocence of unreason from the guilt of crime; it was when madness moved into the purview of science. 6 Psychiatry and psychiatric discourse emerged from this philosophical, cultural, and intellectual moment, and from the ways of knowing associated with European Enlightenment-materialism, rational individualism, and biopower. In this chapter, I explore the birth of the asylum in Southern Rhodesia, the introduction of a monologue of a Western framed reason about madness into Mrica. I argue that the asylum's introduction into Southern Rhodesia in tgo8 was a product and expression of the process of moving beyond an economy of power based on conquest to one based on domestication and its component reorganization of space and meaning. These phenomena are explored through a discussion of the appropriation and transliteration of the name Ingutsheni from its precolonial to its colonial meaning, a transliteration that could at least partially explain the lack of communication between Dr. Baker and Winnie.

On Domestication Since domestication is such a key concept in this chapter and in this book, it needs further elaboration. In its most basic sense, domestication refers to the initial stages of human mastery over plants and animals, to the cultivation of plants and animals according to the needs and interests ofhu-

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Fig. 1.1 Photograph from 18gg of a group ofNdebele men described in the archival record as "native chiefs and police." Courtesy of the National Archives of Zimbabwe.

man beings. In this same sense, it can describe the process whereby the energies of groups and individuals are reoriented to pursue the interests of others: grooms in the case of brides, masters in the case of slaves, and conquerors or colonizers in the case of "natives." Theorists like V. Y Mudimbe, Frantz Fanon, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe have shed further light on this concept. V. Y Mudimbe refers to the "domestication of native minds," along with the conquest of space and the incorporation of indigenous economies into a Western perspective, as the "colonizing structure" in Mrica. 7 Domestication is pursued as a way of ensuring the continuation of conquest and colonization. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe refer to domestication within the context of social order, which they argue, is, like hegemony, never finally and completely accomplished, constantly contested, and as a result, constituted by perpe tual attempts at "domesticating the fields of difference,"8 where difference represents that which threatens the interests or perceived interests of the dominant. Along these same lines, Frantz Fanon refers to the ways in which European colonizers battled to tame Mrica's "indocile nature"-an undomesticatedMrica that did not "blend into the social background of the colonial type."9 This chapter explores how the opening of Ingutsheni Asylum signaled this process of domesti-

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cation in Southern Rhodesia, whereby the British South Africa Company (BSAC) government conquered and reorganized African spaces and meanings, and then gradually developed infrastructure for detecting, defining, and confining African madness.

The Birth of the Asylum in Mrica While a component of the domestication of a conquered space and its inhabitants, the colonial asylum was also a component of the domestication of the process of conquest. Indeed, opening asylums was one of the European colonizers' earliest social reforms-like a glove on the iron hand of conquest. The very first European "lunatic asylum" in Africa was established as part of the general infirmary at Robben Island in the Cape Colony in 1846. 10 Prior to that time, the island was a convict station and a farm. It served as a repository for common criminals as well as political prisoners from the Dutch East Indies, and Xhosa prophets and chiefs who tried to repel the British from their lands and who, like Nxele, Makana, chief Maqoma, and paramount chief Sandile, were captured and humiliated by the British and exiled to the island. 11 Robben Island was also a repository for the chronic sick and lepers from the mainland. In 1846, a "lunatic asylum" was added. Like most asylums, the one at Robben Island was considered an advance over the earlier practice of keeping the unruly insane either with the infirmed in places like Somerset Hospital in Cape Town, 12 or with criminals in prisons and in chains. Following the establishment of Robben Island asylum, the British opened Kissy Lunatic Asylum in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1847. The placard embedded in the stone archway at its entrance was indicative of how the British associated this institutional development with progress: "Royal Hospital and Asylum for Africans Rescued from Slavery by British Valm and Philanthropy. "13 Forty years later, in 1887, the Gold Coast, also a British colony, established an asylum in Accra, and in 1907 the British established the Yaba Asylum in Abeokuta, Nigeria. 14 On june 16, 1908, the British opened a "lunatic asylum" on the outskirts of Bulawayo town in the Matabeleland region of Southern Rhodesia. They named the asylum, the first to be built in British Central Africa (Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland), Ingutsheni. And, even after a small asylum was built in Zomba, Nyasaland, in 191 o, 15 Ingutsheni remained the region's main repository for those labeled in-

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sane until 1964, when the Chainama Hills Hospital was opened in Northern Rhodesia. When Ingutsheni was opened, Bulawayo was the center of Southern Rhodesia's mining and cattle industries, and a hub for the Rhodesian Railways. The fact that the colonial authorities situated the asylum on a 750-acre tract ofland, one and a half miles from Bulawayo's central business district, suggests that they perceived this site, a major labor catchment area, would be a lunatic catchment area as well. The birth of Ingutsheni Lunatic asylum was an expression of the British invaders' reorganization of both space and meaning in their ongoing attempt at establishing social order and domesticating "fields of difference," a task for which they first employed mostly terror and violence, but gradually developed infrastructures and institutions of social control and regulation.

From Enhlanyeni to Ingutsheni: Reorganizations of Space and Meaning Winnie told the doctor that she was at Enhlanyeni, the locative form of the Sindebele word for mad people, enhlanya. The word enhlanyeni ( enhlanya + eni) means the place of mad people. According to Dr. Baker, Winnie should have answered Ingutsheni ( ingubo + eni), which, in Sindebele means the place of the blanket, or the blanketed or covered place. Ingubo was also the name of an Ndebele amabutho (military regiment) under the last independent Ndebele king, Lobengula Khumalo. 16 The Ingubo regiment protected King Lobengula's wives, among other things, and many people continue to associate Ingutsheni with Lobengula's wives. Indeed, during a visit to the Ingutsheni Mental Hospital in 1992, I spoke to one of the hospital nurses who said oflngutsheni, "Lobengula's wives lived here. "17 Generally speaking, although it was a warrior regiment, the Ingubo regiment had a primarily social and reproductive function. The name Ingutsheni thus connotes the idea of care and protection of the Ndebele nation, and not, as evinced by Winnie's comment, a place for mad people-that would be enhlanyeni. Even though Dr. Baker had an Mrican interpreter to explain the meaning of the Sindebele words to him, he apparently did not accept Winnie's answer as a reasonable one. What is more, Winnie may have sensed this because when Baker asked her where she was a second time, she responded, "I am at baas's [master's] house." Her second response was within the idiom of colonial master-servant re-

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lations and the race-based mode of communication that reinforced a social hierarchy, casting blacks in subservient roles. When the doctor asked her why she was at Ingutsheni, she gave another series of what the doctor determined to be unreasonable responses. She said that she had followed her grandfather and brother-in-law who migrated to Bulawayo from Nyasaland for work. The doctor asked her again why she was at Ingutsheni. As if stabbing in the dark for the right response, the response that would bring about her release from the colonial institution, she next said, · "I came here to visit the head nurse." The same interpretative confusion was evident with Chinyemba, described as a "kitchen boy" in his psychiatric case file. He had fresh abrasions on his neck that were described in his file as "not self inflicted." During his psychiatric interview, Chinyemba told the doctor that "this place used to be called Ingutsheni, but is no longer so. It is now the place where white people are living." From his point of view, when the Ingubo regiment was defeated by the British troops in the 1893 Anglo-Matabele war and the last independent Ndebele king, Lobengula Khumalo, fled from Matabeleland with his entourage, Ingutsheni ceased to be a reality and became a memory. Of course, it was the colonizer's perspective that counted. Within the monologue of reason about madness, Chinyemba's account was wrong; his reasoning was unreasonable and he showed a lack of insight. Indeed, when the doctors at Ingutsheni finally decided that he was well enough to be allowed out on leave, one year after his admission in 1942, they changed their minds and his leave was canceled because, according to the doctor in charge, "as soon as he was told that he would be released he asked me to go to the police and recover a lucky charm which he described as the 'Charm of God.'" Chinyemba died at the place that "used to be called Ingutsheni" in 1945. 18 The naming of the asylum in Southern Rhodesia was an expression of the reorganization of space and meaning during the process of colonization. Ingutsheni was transposed from a precolonial to a colonial entity, from a place for the care of the Ndebele nation to a place for the care of the new colonial order of things and for the containment of those who threatened it. The politics of this institution and its naming resonated with imperialist conquest and appropriation. Perhaps Winnie and Chinyemba were reluctant to act in complicity with these things. Doctors like Baker, on the other had, had no such reservations. The opening of an asylum in Southern Rhodesia launched a lengthy monologue of European reason, derived from European history and experience. As interpreted by British colonial authorities in Mrica, this discourse rarely

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took into account the reasons given by Mricans, whether sane or insane. The asylum was a sign and a symbol of colonization and colonization was, first and foremost, a form of domination, not engagement. The story of the redesignation of Ingutsheni as an asylum in Southern Rhodesia is, in essence, a story about the domestication of conquest in Southern Rhodesia. Before Cecil Rhodes's British South Mrica Company (BSAC) invaded the Zimbabwe plateau in 18go, extending South Mrica's mining economy and British imperial rule north of the Limpopo River, and before they displaced the Ndebele state at the end of 1893, Bulawayo was GuBulawayo, the headquarters of the Ndebele monarchy. King Mzilikazi, one of Shaka Zulu's generals, broke away from the autocratic Zulu ruler around 1828, founded the Ndebele nation, and took this newly imagined community north. Mzilikazi had to contend with the Boers when his group first decamped in the Transvaal and was pestered by his "friend" Robert Moffat of the London Missionary Society for permission to evangelize among his people. It was his son, however, who faced the imperialist onslaught of the late nineteenth century. King Lobengula succeeded his father in 1868 and, in addition to consolidating his kingdom, collecting tribute from vassals, and dealing with opponents, he was confronted with a new brand of enemy altogether: men like Charles Rudd, an emissary of Cecil Rhodes, who, with Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, tricked Lobengula into signing away much of the Ndebele and the Shona lands and resources in what was called the Rudd Concession. It was on the basis of this concession that Rhodes received a royal charter and formed the BSAC to invade and exploit the lands north of the Limpopo. Rhodes's invading army consisted of 189 mercenaries, the Pioneer Corps, who were each paid seven shillings and sixpence per day 19 and promised three thousand acres of farmland as booty, and a group of 500 BSAC police, each paid five shillings per day and promised ten mining claims as booty. 20 Many of these men were the kind of men that philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to as "capitalism's human debris." 21 Initially, the BSAC bypassed Ndebele controlled Matabeleland and headed straight for Mashonaland, inhabited by the less centralized Shona whom the British considered to be vassals of the Ndebele and a generally subservient people. However, Rhodes soon realized that there was no second Rand in Mashonaland, that the so-called "ancient" gold workings at Fort Victoria had been exhausted, and that it would be necessary to defeat King Lobengula and the Ndebele sooner rather than later to gain complete access to the mineral and labor resources of both Mashonaland and

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Matabeland and make the colony profitable. BSAC administrators manufactured a pretext for war with the Ndebele. Leander StarrJameson, the BSAC administrator in Mashonaland, wired Cecil Rhodes this message: ''We have the excuse for a row over murdered women and children now and getting Matabeleland open would give us a tremendous lift in shares and everything else. "2 2 King Lobengula may have hoped that the deceptively acquired Rudd Concession would render Matabeleland a British protectorate and thus leave his kingdom intact-a status that was enjoyed by his neighbor to the south, King Khama of Bechuanaland-but this was not to be. Jameson declared wholesale war on the vastly outarmed Ndebele in 1893, seeking to topple that kingdom or, in today's parlance, to decapitate Lobengula's regime. Mter a series of battles in which observers described Ndebele amabutho as bravely standing up to the Europeans' machine guns, Lobengula fled north with some of his wives and loyal forces. They traveled during the height of the rainy season through the waterlogged and malarial veldt, finding this preferable i:o surrendering to the British and risking the fate of other Mrican kings and chiefs captured after resisting the imperialist onslaught. Perhaps Lobengula had heard what happened to King Hintsa during the Sixth Frontier War between the Xhosa and the British in the Eastern Cape: lured by General D'Urban's promises of security, Hintsa fled when he realized that he had been tricked. British troops in pursuit shot him in the back of the head, literally taking his head off, and souvenir hunters among them attempted to extract the king's molars with their bayonets. Other Mrican chiefs met similar fates once they found themselves in European hands. 23 If they were not killed, they languished in exile in places like Robben Island. As Lobengula and his entourage fled, the British hunted them down like wild animals. They sent an Mfengu tracker from South Mrica, John Grootboer, to do the job, along with 200 Mrican carriers, 320 white soldiers with automatic rifles, and three maxim guns. Like other armed Mrican men (and women) throughout the continent at the time, the Ndebele sought to repel European imperialist advances with outmoded muskets. The technological gap between Europeans and Mrica was insurmountable in all but the most mountainous of areas and densest jungles, areas that gave local warriors at least a short-term advantage against imperialist troops. Generally speaking, however, the muskets and spears that Mricans possessed could not compete with European armaments. While muskets had a range of only one hundred yards, took as much as

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a minute to reload between each shot, and fared poorly when wet, 24 maxim guns could shoot much farther, and could fire as many as eleven bullets per second. 25 The British turned their maxim guns on the Ndebele in 1893 as they had on the Ashanti in 1874 and would again on the Ndebele and Shona during the uprisings of 1896-97, and the Sudanese Mahdists at the battle of Omdurman in 1898. Thousands of Africans died for every one European, and Winston Churchill articulated the thrill he felt amongst the carnage: "nothing like the battle of Omdurman will ever be seen again .... It was the last link in the long chain of those spectacular conflicts whose vivid and majestic splendor has done so much to invest war with glamour." He bragged of a grossly uneven exchange: "Of course we should win. Of course we should mow them down." 26 Robert Baden-Powell, who fought against both the Boers and the Ashanti and who also founded the Boy Scout movement, 27 said about the British battle against the Ndebele that he was pleased "to have a go" at an enemy "without much capacity to inflict damage on trained soldiers. "28 Although the British never captured Lobengula, they did cause him to flee and thus, unlike the literal decapitation of the Xhosa King Hintsa, they figuratively decapitated the Ndebele nation. Cecil john Rhodes, after whom the colony was named, built his headquarters where Lobengula's court had been; at least, this was the claim. He symbolically supplanted the authority of the Ndebele paramount and the Ndebele nation. But the colony was not conquered yet, and it certainly was not domesticated and in 1896-97 there were a series of African uprisings, known as the Chimurenga among the Shona peoples and the Imfazo among the Ndebele. After the defeat of Lobengula during the Anglo-Matabele war, the BSAC felt that they had destroyed African resistance to their rule and became complacent. Meanwhile, African grievances mounted as the insult of colonial invasion was exacerbated by plagues of natural disasters, including a Rinderpest epidemic that decimated a sizable number of the Ndebele cattle that remained after the European looting spree following the 1893 war. 29 In December 1895, a large contingent of the BSAC troops was absent from the colony, caught up in the failed Jameson Raid against the Transvaal Republic. The Shona and Ndebele seized on the opportunity and rebelled. The uprisings of 1896-97 resulted in the deaths of 10 percent of the colony's white population. 30 Europeans were both apprehensive and resentful of the degree of vulnerability the uprisings had exposed. According to the chief native commissioner at the time, H. M. Taberer, whites complained that the up-

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risings had been totally inconsistent with "all our native lore. "31 Such lore included the idea that the British had destroyed the Ndebele military state and capacity for resistance, and that the Shona were an idle, lazy, and avaricious yet timid people who were "hereditary carriers and miners. "32 Moreover, according to British journalist, E. F. Knight, Mricans were suspicious by nature, but felt an implicit trust in the white man. 33 An administrator with the BSAC, Hugh Marshall Hole, admitted that Europeans had been "beguiled into the idea that they [the Mricans] were content" and that this had made them vulnerable. 34 While the colonial authorities were much more cautious after the uprising, they retained many of their stereotypes. The British colonizers' construction of the colonial subject as Other was essential to their ability to rule. The contours and complexity of that otherness, however, would change as would the colonizer's responses, one of which was to get know "the natives" better, a component of the process of colonial domestication.

Creating Boundaries Post-uprising native administration became more systematic, with colonial authorities placing a stronger emphasis on defining and marking boundaries. Immediately after the uprisings, H. M. Taberer instructed his staff of native commissioners to suspend their regular activities of collecting taxes and native laborers, and to use their time instead "gaining a more thorough knowledge of their districts, ... making maps and drawing up statistics. "35 As Benedict Anderson writes, they became concerned to "make their domain visible." 36 Taberer's directive illustrates how the establishment of boundaries in a colonial society was an active process, not a given. The 1896-97 uprisings created the impetus for boundary clarification as the settler community grew increasingly paranoid about Mrican resentment, more conscious about themselves and their collective vulnerability, and more invested in the construction of what Dane Kennedy has described as "boundaries of protection. "37 Community consciousness developed, as did apparatuses of surveillance. The nature of native administration changed after the end of hostilities in 1897. Once the native department had taken time out to draw maps of districts with the obvious goal of gaining greater control over Mrican space, they realized that it was not sufficient to merely occupy this space; they had to domesticate it as well. 38 As the mediators between the

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spaces of the colonizers and the spaces of the colonized, between the "old" Mrican order and the "new" colonial order, the native commissioners were central to this process. Mrican chiefs and headmen were required to report to the native commissioners, who reported to the chief native commissioners who, in turn, reported to the administrator. Thus, the native commissioners were the eyes and ears of the aspirant colonial order, and they formalized the system of exploiting and administering the territory, of locating huts and laborers, mapping and taxing them, setting up settlements and reserves, patrolling, and getting to know the Mricans and their movements. 39 What was previously known about "the natives" was generally based on the crude and self-serving stereotypes of the racialized and, in the case of Mrican women, sexualized, Other. Most of these stereotypes had long histories in English society and were not fundamentally altered by the realities "on the spot. "40 This "knowledge" had, however, proven inadequate. Native commissioners began taking notes and making regular reports on the disposition of local Mricans. A standard section in their annual reports during the early twentieth century was entitled, "Attitudes and Demeanor of the Natives." When native commissioners heard rumors and suspected discontent among the Mrican inhabitants of his district, they sent out patrols to survey and contain the situation, to rein in the disorder as soon as it occurred. 41 Europeans sought to assert their control over Mrican space. The native commissioners patrolled the rural areas to make sure that no one was out of his or her place, while the police patrolled and raided Mrican homes in urban locations. In 1898, under Government Notice No. 181, known as the Native Locations Ordinance, location inspectors were appointed to "search any hut, house, or habitation within the limits of any Native Location for idle or disorderly persons," and/or intoxicants. 42 The colonial authorities established a 9:oo p.m. curfew on all Mricans dwelling in so-called white towns and generally enhanced the ways in which they kept their colonial subjects in the "right places." Of course, different people had different "right places" in both the physical and the ideological senses of the term. Similarly, some people were more forcefully inscribed by the state into such places than others. Mrican men were singled out by the Hut Tax of 1894, the Pass Laws of 1902, and the Masters and Servants Act of 1901. This was because of their central role in the colonial economy. Mrican women, on the other hand, were generally ignored by these formal colonial control measures. The Native Registration Ordinance of 1901, for example, illustrates the ways

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in which women were neither formally excluded nor included within colonial space and influx controls. Section 9 of the act ruled that "no native, not being a married woman whose husband is in employment in the township, shall remain within the limits of any township to which this Ordinance applies without being in possession of" a pass of some sort. 43 African women were not issued passes and, while this meant that they were not formally regulated, it also meant that their existence in the towns was always precarious and contingent. While no legislation explicitly prevented the movement of African women, all of their movements could be subjected to the informal, discretionary sanction of an agent of the state, the location, or the mine compound. At the turn of the century, some native commissioners developed the policy of arresting any African woman whom they suspected of "leading an immoral life" or who were "found wandering from her kraal and unable to give a good account of herself. "44 These developments were all part of the process of establishing colonial social order, of "domesticating the fields of difference." African labor was recognized as key to a viable colonial order in Southern Rhodesia. African male labor was what colonial capitalists wanted, and as the state and capital made a more concerted effort to attract (and compel) this male labor into waged employment, the urban African population became more and more masculine. By 1908, African males far exceeded African females in the towns. 45 The sex ratio within the white urban community was undergoing a transformation in the opposite direction, from more than seven white men for every white woman in 1894 to two for every one in 1911. 46 The expansion in the white female population reflected a greater commitment to the establishment and regulation of boundaries. The population increase reflected the decision that white female immigration was desirable due to the viability of Southern Rhodesia as a white settler colony; and once this decision was made, the fear and anxiety associated with the protection of these women from the sexual perils attributed to black men developed into the stricter establishment and regulation of boundaries. So complete were the imperialist visions of Cecil Rhodes, and so deep were his desires to reign over the conquered land and its people even after death, he willed that his body should be interred at the Matopos. An article in a colonial journal proclaimed: "A man stronger than Mzilikazi coming after him broke the power of his heir and of his race, divided their spoils, and even in death holds the land. From his vantage point his spirit will keep watch over his conquest." 47 Matopos was and remains an

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area of dramatic granite boulders, one perched on another like huge, extraterrestrial stone acrobats maintaining their precarious balance for millennia. Rhodes chose what he considered to be the apex of the regional spiritual complex, the Mwari (high god) spiritual complex, the home of vadzimu (regional spirits), whose female oracle was said to have instructed the warriors during the uprisings. Rhodes was buried there in 1902 and, in 1904, was joined by the bodies of the fallen members of the Shangani Patrol, a small sortie that went after Lobengula and his entourage and were slain by his warriors. Years later in 1924, when Dr. Leander Starr Jameson died, he was also buried there. Like sentinels perched on the mountaintop, the two imperialists' bones and those of their brave, albeit unsuccessful, warriors lay at the place the settlers renamed World's View. According to Terrence Ranger, in addition to being a lookout post for the spirits of these conquerors, the Matopos became a national park, "a white man's playground" and a "monumental center of the white Rhodesian 'nation,"' guarded by Ndebele men dressed as traditional warriors to signal their nation's submission and consent to alien rule. By 1908, when the BSAC opened the Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum, Ranger writes that "the hills of the Matopos had been tamed, they had been entrenched upon all sides by the squares and oblongs offarms."48 In other words, the Matopos was domesticated just as Bulawayo had been.

The "Growing Needs of the Community'' Perhaps the process that led to the birth of the asylum in Southern Rhodesia is best framed by a comment from the colony's attorney general in 1908. Robert Tredgold explained the decision to open Ingutsheni in terms of "the growing needs of the community. "49 His statement implied the existence of a community (which one can infer to mean a white settler community) whose development was linked with specific "growing needs." This linkage is significant because the existence of community among the colonizers was not a given, but rather developed over time. The birth of the asylum in Southern Rhodesia was thus enmeshed with the development of a sense of community among white settlers, and with their ability and inclination to identify and guard boundaries around this imagined community, and then to regulate the transgression of these boundaries. The process of establishing the Southern Rhodesian asylum was tied to the transformation of the colony from a frontier society where primi-

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tive capitalist accumulation and terror reigned and where power was purely repressive to a white settler colony where some aspects of colonial power became productive; where, in some arenas at least, the colonial authorities used power to produce and reproduce a certain order of things. Mter this reorientation, the colony's spatial, social, and ideological boundaries, norms, and "right places" were at once better defined and seemingly more imperiled. In other words, the boundaries had to be drawn before they could be violated. Thus, the growing consciousness of such boundaries in Southern Rhodesia implied by Tredgold' s 1908 statement was many years in coming. During the early years of European occupation, the white population consisted primarily of male fortune hunters who suffered few restraining influences and who were, according to a memoir by two white nursing sisters in Umtali during the 18gos, a rough and unruly crowd of whom at least two-thirds were drunk at any given time. 50 Not surprisingly, there are few official references to the certification of "lunatics" during this period. Of course, this is not to say that people did not suffer from mental disorders; there are numerous references in memoirs and historical manuscripts to European men and women described as having been "ruined" by drink and diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness. 5 1 It is likely that the conditions during this early era of colonial rule were similar to those that existed in the early years of Cape colonization, which many believed to have been highly conducive of insanity. The first recorded case of certified insanity in Southern Rhodesia involved a European man named Edge low. Certified in 1894, Edgelow was the first European from Southern Rhodesia to be taken before the high court, judged insane, and sent to the Pretoria Asylum in the Transvaal Republic. 5 2 The Pretoria Asylum's establishment in 1892, six years after major gold reefs were discovered on the Witwatersrand, evinces a connection between the growing settler colonial consciousness of the problem of insanity and the rise of industrialization and urbanization on the Rand. Before this, the policy of keeping so-called lunatics in prisons until they could be transferred to asylums in the Cape had apparently seemed adequate. A similar pattern was followed in Southern Rhodesia. Edgelow's certification predated anything that could be remotely described as a domesticated colonial space. Thus, while the frontier environment of the colony undoubtedly produced mental illnesses, many organic in nature due to malaria and excessive alcohol consumption, it did not result in a heightened sensitivity among BSAC administrators to behavioral abnormalities. Southern Rhodesia's specific policies relating

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to the mentally ill were few. In 1892 a "master" of the court was appointed to manage and administer the estates of "lunatics, minors, insolvents [and] absent and deceased persons". 53 Little else was written into the colony's statute books on this subject, and the problem of "lunacy" was, not surprisingly, a low priority during the fortune hunting and wild speculation that characterized the 18gos. Between 18go and 18g6, the white conquerors exercised brutal and arbitrary power over the native inhabitants. 5 4 The Matabeleland Order in Council was enacted after the Ndebele defeat in 1894, Lobengula's departure, and the rounding up of the chiefs. The order stipulated that the BSAC's administration of Southern Rhodesia fell under the juridical control and supervision of the high commissioner in Cape Town, who was to regulate the company's Mrica policy. In reality, however, little regulation occurred. 5 5 The BSAC's policy was to facilitate primitive capitalist accumulation at the expense of indigenous peoples' rights to their own land and labor. To this end, kraals were frequently burnt, chiefs were flogged or summarily executed for the most minor offenses, and laborers were press-ganged into service. In one notorious incident, a European man named Bennett alleged that Mricans from a local village had stolen his property. In retaliation, Captain Lendy of the BSAP sent a patrol that killed the chief of the offending village, his sons, and twenty-one others. Leander StarrJameson tacitly approved of this brutality, considering it an example to other "impertinent natives." Jameson promoted Captain Lendy to magistrate of Fort Victoria, a daunting step given that magistrates were the primary arbiters of the new order of justice. 56 Another massacre occurred in Mazoe District in 18g2. A French man was murdered by angry villagers for raping an Mrican woman. The BSAP responded with mass murder. According to StanlakeSamkange's work on this period of Chata Ro (Charter Rule) in Southern Rhodesia, the climate in those years leant itself to such cases of white on black sexual assault. Samkange implies that much of the violence initiated by Mricans against Europeans was in retaliation for this form of violation. 57 While this topic is avoided in much of the historiography of colonial British Central and Southern Mrica, there are many tacit admissions of both consensual and nonconsensual sexual relations-or rape-between white men and black women. However justified the action against the Frenchman may have been, the colonial response was to kill seven Mricans, capture seven others, and set fire to four Mrican kraals. 5 8 The extreme drunkenness and erratic behavior of the early white community can be attributed to its predominantly masculine character. The

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vast majority of the estimated 1,12 2 whites in Mashonaland in 1893 were males. 5 9 At the beginning of 1894, the white population ofBulawayo was estimated to be 1,232 men and only 164 women. The sex disparity in favor of males was even starker in the outlying districts. Many if not most of these men were in desperate economic straits. Many had previously tried their luck prospecting for diamonds in Kimberly or gold on the Witwatersrand. Many had fought imperialist wars against indigenous peoples and stolen land and cattle, but remained poor and in search of the elusive bonanza. 60 In the context of this psychodrama, the normative standard for white male behavior must have been terrifying. A British journalist by the name of E. F. Knight was sent to Rhodesia in the mid-189os to write a glowing report about the colony's mining prospects for the BSAC's London investors. While there, Knight observed the low caliber of the Europeans who were settling in the colony. He was concerned that the colony was attracting too many low-skilled workers and "clerk types," and considered the indigenous populations more suitable to satisfy capital's labor needs than whites. He wrote of how the Shona were "hereditary miners" and inexpensive to boot, and wondered how white labor could possibly compete with them. He feared that iflowskilled whites remained in the country, they would degrade "into the shame of our race to be found in every country where native labour is procurable, the mean white, a lower creature by far than the black savage by his side."61 Had Edgelow been one of those "mean whites" about whom Knight spoke? Did a rather depraved lifestyle and frontier-like environment lead to this man's ruin? Perhaps he had suffered a bout of malaria, or maybe one too many unsuccessful quests for the El Dorado pushed him to the breaking point. In her work on the European population ofBritish India during a slightly earlier period, Waltraud Ernst argues that the label of lunacy was frequently applied to those whites who were seen as "detrimental to the maintenance of British rule" and "humiliating to the British character."62 Were similar reasons involved in Edgelow's certification? The answer seems to be no. In late-nineteenth-century Southern Rhodesia, there was no clearly defined colonial community, nor were there wellarticulated boundaries inscribing or regulating behavior. The result of these absences was that "the problem oflunacy" was only infrequently addressed. Men like Edgelow must have exhibited extreme degrees of odd and/ or violent behavior to warrant this designation at this early date. During a transitional period of setting up spatial, social, and ideological boundaries and improving apparatuses of surveillance, the first for-

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mal legislative attempts were made to deal with the number of people who were losing their minds in the colony. On January 17, 1898, a year after the suppression of the 1896-97 rising, the high commissioner in Cape Town enacted a proclamation making the Cape Colony Lunacy Act of 1879 applicable to Southern Rhodesia. 63 This legislation referred to "dangerous lunatics" who needed to be under "care or control. "64 It provided for the commitment of such persons and for the management of their estates and property. 65 Section 1 of the act specifically provided for a person "discovered under circumstances indicating that he is insane and wanting to commit suicide, or if he exhibits the intention of committing an indictable offence." In other words, the commission or attempted commission of a criminal act was required under the Cape Act of 1879. 66 The suspect was arrested and placed "under observation," usually in a prison. If the offending behavior persisted, he or she was examined by two medical practitioners, taken before a resident magistrate, officially declared insane, and appointed a Curator ad Litem who was assigned by the magistrate to manage all court proceedings on his or her behalf. 67 The suspected lunatic was eventually sent to an asylum, usually in South Africa. Until this occurred, he or she was returned to the custody of Southern Rhodesian prison authorities. 68 The BSAC and the imperial government did not choose to apply the subsequent Cape Lunacy Act of 1897 to the new colony. This act was more ambitious than that of 1879 as it provided for the detention of "lunatics not dangerous or criminal" as well as "voluntary patients."69 Perhaps this newer legislation was not applied to Southern Rhodesia because the officials had not yet begun thinking of Southern Rhodesia as a complete society independent from South Africa and needing its own system for comprehensively managing mental disorders. Southern Rhodesia was as yet unsure of its economic viability, and this fact must have contributed to the relatively low priority placed on lunacy legislation by the colonizers. As the colonizers began to enjoy a secure economic base and develop a distinct race and class consciousness, things began to change. For one thing, the colonial officials became more concerned about confirming and regulating the geographical borders of the colony. For years, the border with Portuguese East Africa was porous, enabling Africans resistant to colonial domination and efforts at domestication to cross the border rather than sell their labor to earn money to pay tax-what the colonizers wanted and were attempting to compel. Between 1901 and 1903 the chief native commissioner of Mashonaland, Herbert Taylor, complained

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bitterly about the Rozwi outlaw, the notorious chief Mapondera of the Murewa district in the northeast. Taylor complained about the way the chief used his proximity to the border to evade punitive expeditions against his people by crossing the border with his people. The renegade gained influence and a following among groups like the Fungwi of the northern Mazoe and Mtoko districts, whom Herbert Taylor described as "a very lazy lot" who also "made use of the proximity of their kraals to the Portuguese border to evade the payment of hut tax." Another factor in their unruliness was that "they possess no movable property which could be attached on account of failure to meet taxation." Due to what was framed as economic backwardness, meaning that they had few material needs, tactics like the burning down of Mapondera's huts and the destruction of his belongings did not bring about his surrender. The only hope, therefore, was closing the border. Herbert Taylor emphasized the importance of the open borders on the colonial conception of undomesticated Africa in his annual report for 1902. He wrote, with reference to the African communities against whom patrols were sent and from whom submission was still sought, It will be noted that the above remarks of necessity relate solely to those natives who reside along the borders of our territories, and whose defiant attitude is materially assisted by reason of their proximity to the Portuguese border, across which they are well able to proceed whenever they consider that any meeting or contact with the Native Commissioner will interfere in any way with their indolent and lazy life. 70

Following the growth of a secure economic base, the colonizers required a secure source of native labor that they sought, in part, through taxation. Porous borders hindered this. With the new economic confidence came the development of a settler class, and the increased presence of European women meant, moreover, that social borders and boundaries were to be imposed and guarded as well. One of the first officials in Southern Rhodesia to recommend the building of an asylum in the colony was, not surprisingly, the minister of health, Dr. Andrew Fleming. Doctor Fleming had been in charge of Southern Rhodesia's medical services since 1896, 71 and his was the central voice on issues of colonial public health until his retirement in 1923. 72 He became concerned about the "problem of lunacy" in the colony long before the attorney general took up the cause. Fleming first sounded the alarm in his 1902 Report of the Public Health, where he noted

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the presence of more and more alleged lunatics in the colony's prison cells. 73 He considered defective the practice of detaining suspected and certified lunatics in the colony's prisons until their transfer to southern asylums and was particularly uncomfortable about the proximity between "mental cases" and "regular prisoners." He reported that the Bulawayo jail contained a motley assortment ofthe diseased and the deficient, such as persons suffering from "syphilis, delirium tremens, and lunacy." This mixture of deviants was a problem to Fleming's mind as it had been for other public health officials in various parts of the Western world. Fleming appears to have been concerned about the confusion that the presence of mad men and mad women created at the colony's penal institutions.74 He complained in 1903 of nine "mental cases" at the Bulawayo jail that were impossible to isolate from other inmates. According to Fleming: 'They [lunatics] occupy the cells to such an extent as to cause crowding of the other prisoners, and they, as well as delirium tremens cases, disturb prisoners and warders, largely increasing the work of the latter."75 A partial census of Bulawayo taken in 1904 indicates that the prison contained one European and nine Mrican lunatics. 76 Fleming had strong feelings about public order, and the burden that lunatics placed on prison staff and facilities was of concern to him. Not only had the jailers to keep suspected lunatics under control, they were also expected to observe them and, along with the district surgeons, to write monthly reports to the local magistrate and the attorney general about their progress. 77 Only when certified was the patient appointed a CuratrYr ad Litem "for the care of his person." Following these legal procedures, the suspected lunatic was subject to transfer to an asylum. In the case of the man who would later become the first patient at Ingutsheni, a man named Hotembe, the attorney general had issued an order for the "Curator of the person ... [to] be granted leave to remove the said Lunatic beyond the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court to Pretoria in the Transvaal colony [or some other asylum] should it be deemed expedient."78 The lengthiness of these procedures, combined with the fact that the southern asylums were chronically overcrowded, meant that suspects had often spent several months in Southern Rhodesian prisons before transfer. Needless to say, the jailers and prison staff had no special training in the identification or treatment of mental illness. Records of Salisbury jail in 1906 offer an example of a jailhouse diagnosis and treatment regime. The case involved an Mrican man referred to as "Martin a.k.a. Micke." Records do not indicate whether his initial arrest was due to the commission of a violent act or some lesser legal in-

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39

fraction, nor do they indicate whether he was employed in the town. Perhaps he was found wandering and apprehended under the vagrancy laws, or perhaps he committed an offense by deserting from his place of employment, a violation of the Native Pass Ordinance of 1904. 79 Whatever cause brought him under jailer Healy's gaze, his behavior once there was described as "dull, surly and uncommunicative."80 Once Martin was placed in his jail cell, his keeper searched for clues to his disorder. Either Healy or one of the Mrican guards observed that Martin was in the habit of committing "self abuse." In other words, Martin masturbated. The jailer deduced from this that his insanity had resulted from this masturbation and confined Martin to a strailjacket during the night, immobilizing his hands. 81 In the report that followed, Healy wrote: He [Martin] was placed in a straitjacket at night, but on two occasions he managed to unloose his hands and indulge in self abuse, his appearance on the day following this self abuse was somewhat similar to that already described on the 16th, but the bad effects would seem to have worn away by the following day. 8 2

This strategy continued until Martin's brother was located and the authorities decided to release Martin into his care. The practice of releasing "lunatics" into the care of relatives was common. In the case of an alleged lunatic named Ngombechena kept at the Salisbury jail, the attorney general determined that he was "sufficiently harmless" to be released into the custody of his son, 83 contingent on the son's agreeing to inform the authorities of "any serious recurrence of mania" and promising to keep his father away from any areas inhabited by Europeans. Europeans were handled similarly. In the cases of alleged lunatics Calvert and McDonald, the secretary of the law department wrote the Salisbury magistrate stating that "the friends of these men should be communicated with in order that the duty of taking charge of them may not be left to the Government." 84 Section 10 ofthe 1879 Cape Act provided that the next of kin could request the release of a lunatic to their custody and that the governor could make this order even if that person was considered dangerously insane, as long as that relative could ensure the safe keeping of the alleged lunatic. 85 The new state typically resisted responsibility for what it considered to be a family's duty, but in cases where no family or friends could be found, or where family and friends were incapable of controlling an alleged lunatic, the state stepped in. Similarly, in

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cases where an alleged lunatic had been sentenced for committing a violent crime, the burden of his insanity fell to the state. 86 In other instances, however, the state resisted expanding its realm of responsibility into this sphere for what appear to have been straightforward financial and infrastructural reasons. By 1908, Bulawayo had become a settler city. African male migrant workers traveled there or to nearby mines and ranches in search of wages to pay their taxes to the new rulers of British Central Africa. African women migrated there to follow their men, or to market services in areas where few women lived. The period around 1908 marked the first expansion of the colonial economy in the history of Southern Rhodesia, and a new phase of "practical colonization" arose, resulting in numerous civic improvements and public works projects. For example, Bulawayo inaugurated a 'Town Improvement Scheme" for the stated purpose of " [carrying] out public works of a permanent nature. "87 The government sponsored the building of permanent roads, the extension of railway lines, and the development of agricultural settlement schemes to encourage the creation of a settled European farming class. 88 There were new developments in the public health field as well, reflecting the brighter prognosis for the colony's future during this postdepression period. The Bulawayo Memorial Hospital opened new maternity and children's wards. 89 The colonial government made a longer-term investment in the labor of the colony by demanding that employers of African labor comply with a minimum diet scale.9° The public health department placed the mines' medical inspectors under its aegis in an effort to standardize levels of nutrition and care received by African workers. By doing so, they sought to facilitate the regular supply of labor to the colony. What finally succeeded in getting the government to incur the expense of institutionalizing the insane locally was the assessment that the overall costs would be lower than what they were already paying. Essentially, the costs involved in maintaining the insane in local prisons and South African asylums began to exceed the projected costs of confining them in an asylum at home. The old system involved the expense of supplying escorts, often two constables, and the expense of railway fares. The largest expense by far involved maintaining "pauper lunatics" in asylums outside the colony. 91 In 1904 alone, the government of Southern Rhodesia paid £1,426 to South African asylums for this purpose, in 1906 they paid £2,211, and in 1907 they paid £2,543. 92 At the same time, Southern Rhodesia faced the immediate and pressing need to replace the padded cells at the Bulawayo jail where "violent

"LoBENGULA's WivEs LIVED HERE"

lunatics" were held. 93 These had become so damaged that the colony's Secretary of Law deemed them irreparable. 94 Fleming invited the settler community and colonial authorities to think in terms of their own selfinterest, warning that "there must shortly come a time when the establishment of a lunatic asylum in Rhodesia will not only become a necessity, but an economy."95 The financial arguments appear to have been decisive. In early 1908, the Legislative Council allocated £3,500 for the erection and equipping of a lunatic asylum. 96 Accompanying the financial incentives, however, was an expanding sense of state responsibility over the reproduction of the social and economic conditions of the colony. In came the era of "practical colonization,"97 and a twenty-five year period of custodial care in British Central Mrica's first lunatic asylum followed.

More on the Politics of a Name The contest over space and meaning between the colonizer and the colonized was embodied in the naming of the asylum and in the transpositioning oflngutsheni from a site for the reproduction ofthe precolonial order to a site for the reproduction of the new colonial order. Coupling the Sindebele word, ingutsheni, with the English concept of asylum and locating this hybrid near the colonial town of Bulawayo signified the broader process whereby a white, alien, bourgeois, and patriarchal order was superimposed on Mrican spaces and meanings. An official colonial account defined Ingutsheni as "the one who wears a wrap."98 While this definition was technically inaccurate, it does convey the idea of something that covers. Today the name connotes the idea of care and protectionY9 The name may have been selected for the colonial asylum because the authorities considered it the Sindebele language's closest synonym to the English word asylum, "any secure retreat." 100 However, it may also have been chosen because of the institution's location in an area characterized by its tall and concealing grass cover, its blanket of grass. During the years of the asylum, the advantages of this scenery did not escape the notice of the many Ingutsheni inmates who attempted to escape by hiding in this grass. 101 In both precolonial and colonial incarnations, Ingubo/Ingutsheni, the regiment and place, was appointed with functions relating to both public safety and public health. In other words, it functioned to preserve that which was necessary for the reproduction of the dominant social or-

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der. The Ingubo Regiment was installed by the reigning Ndebele king, had the role of fighting against external enemies, and played a central role in the annual Nxwalo, or first fruits ceremony, held at Bulawayo. A combination fertility ceremony, harvest festival, and celebration of national military potency, 102 Nxwalo functioned as a national cleansing, healing, and prophylactic ceremony for which the Ingubo and the Imbezu (two Ndebele "crack" regiments) collected medicines. 103 Even after Lobengula's defeat, the demobilization ofthe Ingubo regiment, and the discontinuation of Nxwalo ceremonies, Ingubo village remained significant as the home ofLobengula's son and potential successor Nyamande, who would later wage a political fight for the restoration of the Ndebele monarchy. 104 The asylum, on the other hand, protected colonial society against dangers from within. In june 1go8, the word Ingutsheniwas appropriated by Europeans and given to the institution assigned the task of protecting a new order and community, and of suppressing new enemies. Not surprisingly, Winnie, Chinyemba, and other Sindebele-speaking people refused to call the new institution "Ingutsheni" and referred to it as Enhlanyeni instead, 105 or simply as "the place where white people are now living." According to novelist Yvonne Vera, after the 1g6os, people simply called it Twenty-third Avenue, and when they wanted to scare someone into conformity, they would threaten to send them there. 106 The birth of Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum on the outskirts of Bulawayo in 1908 was a product of eighteen years of domestication. Boundaries were defined and under surveillance; transgressions of these boundaries were detected by the police, military men, doctors, anxious settlers, and domesticated Mricans. At times, these transgressions were viewed as unreasonable and the agents of these acts, these movements outside the "right places," were certified as insane. When the cost of sending these men and women down south to the asylums in the Transvaal, Natal, or Cape Town was considered too high, when their presence in the jails of the colony was considered too disruptive, and when the settler community began to feel that they were there to stay, the authorities in Southern Rhodesia felt ready to invest in the development of institutions and infrastructures of social control and regulation. The reincarnated Ingutsheni was one such example.

2. Bodies in Custody Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum, I 908- I 9 3 3

Ingutsheni opened to little or no fanfare. There was no official ribboncutting ceremony, no high-ranking colonial officials were present, and no press releases were issued to announce the event as one might expect at the opening of a new colonial institution. The local Bulawayo newspaper, the Bulawayo Chronicle, did not even cover the event. 1 It would seem that this event did not provide the colonial officials with a suitable opportunity with which to arrogate their role as civilizing agents or to congratulate themselves for having planted another marker of progress in Mrica. In fact, the event was rather uneventful. The doors opened and the first batch of inmates arrived. They were a motley crew of fourteen men and two women; thirteen Mricans and three Europeans who were led from the Bulawayo jailhouse, another colonial institution, first opened in 1894 for the confinement of rebellious Ndebele, which, like other prisons in the colony, became a way station for the insane on their journey to asylums in South Mrica. The "patients" trudged beyond the paved roads of the central business district and beyond the existing urban grid. They passed the Rhodesian Railway yards and worker compounds, the Rhodesian Native Labor Bureau (RNLB) offices, and the British South Mrican Police (BSAP) training ground. The asylum was surrounded on two sides by cow-filled pastures belonging to the Cold Storage slaughter house and was both remote from and proximate to a major European commercial and residential center. While not difficult to get to, one did not see it until one was right upon it. 2 It is unclear exactly how the whites and blacks were kept separate during the journey, or how the superior rank of whiteness was performed during their short march, but once they arrived at

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Ingutsheni they were led into different wards, ate different foods, and were, in some cases, assigned different therapies. Based on the virtual silence surrounding the opening, it is apparent that the Southern Rhodesian government did not intend that Ingutsheni would be anything more than a custodial institution, plain and simple: a necessary addition to the social infrastructure, but nothing to showcase. In the beginning, the administrators of Southern Rhodesia seemed less clear about what Ingutsheni was to be than they were about what it was not to be. They were determined that it was not to be a charitable institution and that it should not become a dumping ground for the harmlessly insane members of Mrican families. Indeed, on the day following the opening of Ingutsheni, Attorney General Robert Tredgold went before the legislative council to debate the merits of the proposed new lunacy ordinance, which would frame the procedures by which individuals would be suspected, certified, and detained as insane in the colony. Tredgold informed the legislators that he had no grand vision for the asylum and gave no indication that its opening was meant to usher in a new policy of the aggressive pursuit and confinement of difference and deviance. Rather, he encouraged the legislators to think of the asylum as a place of last resort; as simply an alternative to prison for the dangerous lunatic. 3 While the opening of an insane asylum in the colony did constitute social reform in that the innocence of unreason was being separated from the guilt of crime, debates both prior to and after the occasion make it clear that the colonial authorities firmly resisted the idea of the state providing anything resembling social welfare for Mricans. Southern Rhodesia's resistance to the exercise of what Michel Foucault defined as "productive power"-the concept of power actively engaging in the production of subjectivities that could police themselves-was very strong during this period in the colony's history. 4 As in Western societies before and during the nineteenth century, the harmless insane were thought to be the responsibility of their families, not the state. Tredgold was careful to assure the legislative council that his department had designed provisions to safeguard against "harmless lunatics" being dumped on the state for care and control. 5 Ingutsheni was to be a custodial institution only. It differed from its cousin, the prison, only insofar as its inmates were the "unintentional dangerous" and thus could not be held responsible for their transgressions. 6 The decision to build the asylum and to pass commitment-facilitating legislation reflected the white settler community's growing understanding of what was required to reproduce themselves and their privileges.

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These moves similarly reflected a growing, though conflicted and limited, acceptance of some responsibility for the physical reproduction of the Mrican wage labor force, which, in the mining industry alone, numbered 30,865 by 1908. 7 This changing perspective resulted from two major developments: the expansion of the colonial economy due to the rising profitability of the mining industry, and the growth of a more settled white community. 8 A sense of potential filled the air in 1go8, making the expanding settler colony more willing to imagine and invest in the country's long-term progress, albeit warily. Tredgold spoke positively about applying some of the "enormous progress" that had been made in the area of "mental science" to the situation in Southern Rhodesia. He suggested placing the colony's lunacy legislation "more in line with contemporaneous legislation" in practice in South Mrica. His advocacy of Lunacy Ordinance No. 3 of 1go8, however, was cautious, as he felt that the colony would have to grow into the "advanced piece oflegislation" over time. 9 Not only did the authorities fail at this time to imagine Ingutsheni as a "modern" curative or charitable institution, they did not consider gender inclusiveness to be appropriate either. In fact, the colonial authorities initially proposed that Ingutsheni accommodate male patients only. Further, while Mrican male certified lunatics were to be admitted and confined there until they were discharged as recovered, escaped, or died, European male certified lunatics were to be kept there only until their transfer to one of the South Mrican asylums could be arranged. 10 Thus, where European males were concerned, Ingutsheni retained the limited function that the local prisons had performed previously: it was a way station. White women were excluded from the plan altogether. Ingutsheni was not considered suitable for even their short-term confinement. Under the rubric of the reigning white supremacist ideology, whites required more services and comforts than the colonial authorities were willing to provide at Ingutsheni, at least during its early years. All whites, no matter their class or mental condition, were members of the master class and were increasingly expected to exemplify white superiority. It had become important to imperialism for whites to be, as much as possible, ensconced within the accoutrements of Western civilization. In the context of the asylum, this would include a cheery environment with gardens and pictures on the wall, a trained nursing staff, and recreational activities. Ingutsheni lacked all of these. The authorities rather expeditiously overcame their squeamishness about white men (mostly poor), however, and formally incorporated them

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into the asylum as permanent residents. However, European women were not incorporated into the asylum until 1926Y Their exclusion was indicative of the role that white women played as the embodiments, the corporal symbols, of European civilization. Again, Ingutsheni was not considered exemplary of that civilization; by 1908, lunatic asylums were already viewed as backward. White women's exclusion from the early asylum was resonant of the relationship between the presence or absence of European women from colonial spaces and institutions, and the presence or absence of a full commitment to that place as a "civilized" space. 12 The colonizers were not yet willing to make the investments in Ingutsheni that would be required for it to become white-woman-ready, and so white women certified insane were sent elsewhere in South Mrica. Mrican women were also excluded from the list of intended inmates, but not because they were thought to require greater and more costly amenities. 13 Rather, their exclusion resulted from the ways in which Mrican women were being construed by the colonial authorities, that is, how they were being inscribed into, or excluded from, the demarcated spaces of the colony. The best way to describe their experience in most regards would be to say that they were the unplanned for. It is as if the colonial state viewed Mrican women as always someone else's problem. A father, husband, or missionary was expected to intercede on their behalf or to serve as guardian, regardless of the woman's mental state. Of course, not being planned for and not existing are two entirely different things. The only group for whom the asylum appears to have been intended initially was Mrican men. Because of the nature of the colonial economy, they had to be mobile and present in European space. At the same time, they were conceived as, and in reality were, the colonizers' greatest threat. Many of the institutional developments in Southern Rhodesia during this period were thus concerned with creating protections against the assertions of Mrican men. 14 Perhaps the asylum had such unglamorous and unassuming beginnings because it was meant to fill the need for a local repository for insane casualties of a migrant labor economy. What went on inside the asylum bore a close relationship to what was going on outside. Specifically, the ways in which people were mapped or unmapped into colonial space was reflected in the space allocations within the asylum. This chapter discusses Ingutsheni's first twenty-five years of operation, when it was a purely custodial institution. Between 1908 and the end of 1933, just over sixteen hundred patients were admitted there. 15 This number included Mrican and European men, and

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Mrican women who, while not planned for, were among the first batch of patients to arrive at the asylum. As European women were not admitted to Ingutsheni until 1926, they accounted for only a small fraction of this total. 16 I examine the nature of the asylum's regime during the first quarter century, explore the ways in which space and authority were allocated, and demonstrate how almost all elements of the asylum regime were mediated by questions of race, gender, and class.

The Asylum Keepers To characterize an institution as "custodial" is to imply that it featured custodians and persons or things in custody. At Ingutsheni, these roles were filled by keepers and inmates, or the kept. A head keeper was responsible for the daily decision-making and management of the asylum. His decidedly unmodern title was reminiscent of the notorious Bethlehem (Bedlam) Asylum in England, a fact that apparently did not trouble the colonial authorities who clearly did not seem to be seeking prestige through this institution. 17 In fact, when searching for the first head keeper for Ingutsheni, Attorney General Robert Tredgold and Medical Director Andrew Fleming described their ideal candidate as "a suitable non-commissioned officer for whom the position would be a promotion."18 They wanted someone who had risen sufficiently within the noncommissioned officers' ranks to have gained experience managing other men, but not enough to have developed expectations of high status, authority, or pay. The first head keeper's name was R. Smith, and with his appointment began a history of two-tiered management at the asylum. 19 This system was similar in character to the two-tiers-commissioned and noncommissioned officers-within the militaries of countries such as Britain and the United States, where the different tracks represented different classes and life trajectories as well as occupational rank. The head keeper of Ingutsheni was at the helm of the lower track of the asylum. His salary was commensurate with the salary of a Southern Rhodesian jailer at the time. In 1go8, Smith received £200 per annum, including his quarters and rations. 20 E. A. Lester, the jailer at the Hartley prison, received £18o per annum, with his quarters, rations, and uniform included. Lester received an additional sum of £6o per annum for his service as one of the colony's executioners, an option unavailable to Smith as the head keeper

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of the lunatic asylum. 21 Unlike the jailer, who fell completely within the orbit of the department of law, the asylum's head keeper, while directly affected by that department, was under the authority of the department of public health. As such, Smith had to report to the colony's assistant medical director, Dr. W. M. Eaton. Doctor Eaton was appointed medical superintendent of the asylum in 1908 and remained in that position for sixteen years. He was born in Britain, trained at Edinburgh, and entered the colonial medical service in 18gg as the town of Hartley's district surgeon. When in 1go8 he was appointed medical superintendent of the Bulawayo Memorial Hospital, his additional oversight responsibilities included lazarettos, district surgeries, and the medical inspectors of mines in the Matabeleland region. 22 Needless to say, Eaton was a very busy man and his ability to keep a close eye on Ingutsheni was limited. Eaton was at the pinnacle oflngutsheni's upper track, which consisted of its trained medical personnel. While the position of resident medical superintendent for the asylum existed technically, it was often empty. In 1914, a Dr. R. W. Jameson was appointed acting medical superintendent, but only remained at Ingutsheni a few years. 23 Other medical personnel during the period included doctors Ernest Edward Head, Alfred Vigne, Alexander William F arrester, and Richard Morris. The greater part of the clinical work at Ingutsheni was performed by these doctors. There is little indication that this involved much more than periodic visits to perform medical examinations of the suspected lunatics and to care for patients with acute physical illnesses. Most of the paperwork comprised legal documents relating to the patient's commitment to the asylum: urgency orders permitting the temporary confinement of patients against their will and before certification, summary reception orders, and warrants for commitment and further examination that allowed a suspect to remain in confinement beyond the expiration of an urgency order. Another legal form appointed the Curator ad Litem, or legal representative of the "body of the patient," who became legally incapacitated after he or she was certified insane. 24 Each suspected lunatic's file was supposed to contain two medical certificates, at least one of them from a district surgeon, a statement to accompany the medical certificate, which was filled out by the local magistrate and included information about the suspect and his or her family's financial status, and summaries of affidavits concerning the suspect's suspicious behavior. The patient's files also contained receipts for

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any money or property that the patient carried at admission and letters from family or friends. Additional documents were notices of the patient's changing relationship to the asylum, for instance, the notice of admission, the notice of discharge, the notice of escape, and the notice of death. Conspicuous by their absence were any clinical reports. The only form besides the medical certificates containing information about the patient's clinical health was the notice of death, which provided information on the cause of death. It seems likely that if a patient's relatives, a keeper, or a medical practitioner thought that a patient was fit for discharge, he or she was examined and discharged. Most work at the asylum was performed by the staff of keepers: bathing and feeding patients, preventing escapes, restraining those who became violent, and supervising patients at work and play. Little skill was required for carrying out such tasks. This was fortunate because the skill level among the asylum's nonmedical staff was low. Confirming Ingutsheni's emphasis on custodial care is the initial absence of nurses on the staff. In 191 2, Ingutsheni' s staff consisted of two European male keepers, one European female keeper, four native male keepers, and Dr.Jameson. 25 Like lunatic asylums in other colonies and in Britain and the United States, Ingutsheni strove to be self-supporting. However, in practice it was one of the least self-supporting government hospitals in the colony. Ingutsheni consistently ran a deficit, at least partly because a large percentage of its inmates were "pauper lunatics." This label meant that the inmate's family or home government did not pay for his or her maintenance at the asylum. In 1910, the assistant medical superintendent's balance sheet reflected expenditures far exceeding receipts: £1,739 to £155. At the same time, the colony was still paying for the maintenance of twentyseven "lunatics" in southern asylums, a cost that, in 1910, amounted to £1,607.26 Finding ways to supplement the paltry income from inmate maintenance fees was a preoccupation of the asylum managers from an early date and influenced staffing as well as treatment decisions. Work in the fields, on the asylum grounds, and on the asylum wards was described by Dr. Eaton and the various asylum superintendents as "therapeutic," but it is evident that this work was also appreciated for its economic value. In 1912, Dr. Eaton commented on how the "labour available is utilised in the grounds, which are being brought under cultivation and assuming a cheerful and pleasing appearance." 27 The Western notion of work

so

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as therapy was most welcome in the cost-cutting environment of the colony. 28 It appears that while some Europeans were engaged in various forms of physical labor, the white supremacist orientation of the colony exempted European patients from the work that they would have performed in European asylums, or in asylums in colonies with white majorities. For example, in New South Wales, Australia, at about the same time, white female patients worked in the hospital kitchen and laundries, and performed ward work and institutional sewing, while white men maintained the hospital grounds, painted fences, and built roads. 29 Such a division of "therapeutic" labor could not occur at Ingutsheni because the various color bars prevented whites from performing what was considered "kaffir work." Thus the order outside was reflected within the asylum, and "therapy" for the European patients consisted mainly of pottering around in "airing courts" designated for their exclusive use. Africans, on the other hand, "[worked] on the land in parties all day." 30 During World War I, efforts were made to generate additional income through the expansion of the asylum's farming enterprise. Strapped for funds due to the war effort, the colonial authorities sought to meet the costs of the expanding asylum population by generating income internally. They were, for a time, willing to invest in long-term projects involving the asylum, such as expanding its farmland to incorporate twenty additional acres. They also increased the size of the asylum's dairy herd. 31 Thus the asylum authorities attempted to generate revenue, or at least reduce expenses, by becoming self-sufficient in most foodstuffs. 32 While there was some improvement in the balance of payments with the commencement and expansion of agricultural enterprises, the deficit nonetheless persisted. The gross expenditure for 1914 was £2,644, while revenue was £145· After a second expansion in 1920, this time to incorporate grounds previously belonging the Bulawayo military reserve, the situation improved. Income-generating activities, however, often were considered to require the hiring of trained European staff: European overseers to direct and supervise African work squads and a European ornamental gardener to supervise European patients. 33 The persistent deficit may explain the overtly capitalistic swing taken by the asylum in the early 1920s. In 1923, Dr. Forrester, then superintendent oflngutsheni, wanted to add cotton to the crops cultivated at the asylum. Forrester apparently saw no reason why picking cotton was any less therapeutic than sowing and picking any other crop. Medical Director Fleming, on the other hand, ini-

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tially refused to endorse Forrester's idea, stating that he was unsure of the advisability of replacing the consumable crop of maize with a purely commercial crop like cotton. Fleming was also concerned that this might lead to unfair competition since the asylum would have the "advantage of cheap labour [when] entering into competition with other growers in the country. "34 The asylum already grew maize and other vegetables for its own consumption and for sale, and had a sizable dairy herd, but in 1922 and 1923, as Forrester pointed out, the maize crop had been poor. Ignoring Fleming's advice, cotton was tried as an experimental crop and, according to Forrester, "besides proving useful and congenial employment for native patients, the yield was encouraging." Forrester estimated that the value of that year's cotton crop was £1 oo. Consequently, a larger area of land was put aside for cotton production the following season: it seems that success spoke for itself in this case. 35 The medical director did not object again. Another form of revenue-earning "treatment" employed at the asylum, along with "open-air work on the farm," was the commercial production of mattresses. This enterprise was described as "therapeutic indoor work. "36 Like cotton production, it became a significant source of income for the asylum, which sold its mattresses to other government hospitals. Dairy and produce remained the asylum's biggest earner, and in 1921 they generated £844 in income, providing a considerable saving to the institution. 3 7 Because of the nature of the work and its poor pay and low status, attendants' work seldom attracted highly qualified individuals. It was almost an international rule that asylum superintendents spoke disparagingly of their subordinates. 38 However, these low qualifications did not exercise the higher officials for many years. Reviewing the letters of the medical superintendents and head keepers, it becomes apparent that the supervisory medical staff was relatively content with the status quo as long as the asylum grew in an economically self-supporting direction and did not suffer too many crises. However, the colonial authorities' attitudes were somewhat affected by the West's changing perceptions of madness after World War I. In much of the Western world, madness was in the process of being redesignated as a medical issue; the idea of curability through biomedical intervention was gaining ascendance. No radical changes occurred in Southern Rhodesia during this time, yet there does seem to have been the beginning of a shift in orientation from the view of madness as a predominately public order issue toward madness as a health ISSUe.

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As madness became more recognized as a health problem, the med-

ical director began advocating certain changes in asylum nomenclature and staffing. For example in 1921, Dr. Fleming suggested that the title of head keeper, which had up to that point been the highest office held by the asylum's residential staff, be changed to assistant superintendent. Similarly, he suggested that the under keeper become head attendant. This change in designation affected two men in particular: David MacLean and David Fenton. MacLean, who had been head keeper since 1919, shortly after Smith's retirement, became the assistant superintendent, and Fenton, who had been hired the previous year as under keeper, became head attendant. The idea behind these new titles was to shed some of the prisonlike aura that surrounded the colony's asylum, and to bring Southern Rhodesia more into line with contemporary concepts of mental health practice. While it may have sounded more modern, Ingutsheni remained in the figurative Dark Ages when it came to the management of the asylum. Job descriptions for the majority of European and Mrican staff involved overseeing and attending to the patients and the grounds of the asylum as well as controlling the often violent or manic patients; most of what might be called "treatment" at Ingutsheni during this period involved subduing patients. 39 On occasion, staff resorted to the use of mechanical restraint, although this was discouraged, and more frequently, the "strong rooms."40 As in asylums around the world at that time, these methods were used to prevent patients from hurting themselves and from hurting others. Each case of seclusion and restraint was recorded in the annual reports of the superintendent of the asylum. The staff appeared to be adequate for the kind of work that was being required of it. Indeed, while the authorities would occasionally complain about the difficulties of running a hospital without an adequate, trained nursing staff, they seemed reluctant to make the investment necessary to hire them. When they did employ trained nurses, they were often reluctant to pay them what the nurses felt they were worth, which was usually based on the going rate in South Mrica. In 1924, the white nursing staff at Ingutsheni went on strike because of the government's failure to accede to their demands for improved terms of employment. 41 Little appears to have come of this strike, however. Debate around whether or not to admit European women to the asylum reveals a great deal about the reluctance on the part of the state to invest in improving its staff or in converting Ingutsheni into something

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more than a purely custodial institution. Given that the presence or absence of white women was often a marker for whether or not the colonizers had a stake in a particular institution and its modernization, the main reasons for keeping European women out oflngutsheni during this period related to the cost of maintaining those women in the manner suited to colonial ideological requirements. This discussion began during World War I when financial resources were limited and new nonwar-related construction projects were rare. Mter the influenza pandemic of 1918 and the conclusion of World War I in 1919, there appears to have been an increased willingness on the part of the state to invest in medical and public health services and personnel. By the early 1920s, the colonial state had come to understand that it would have to play a greater role in the colony's public health and that much more work would have to be done in the area of prevention. This heightened concern and action was directed mainly toward the control of venereal diseases. 42 Changes began to occur in the area of mental health care as well, and in 1923, the year of responsible government, discussion about making Ingutsheni white-woman-friendly resumed. Doctor Fleming began to promote self-advancement among the asylum's white staff by encouraging them to take the Medical Psychological Society examination after their third year of service. He instituted a system whereby those who successfully completed the exam were eligible for promotion to the position of nurse and to a raise of £2 per month. 43 The staff, however, did not readily take advantage of this opportunity to improve their skills. Fleming was often unimpressed with the local female applicants whom he described as "too young and in a few cases too illiterate to be considered." Moreover, the local females were usually unwilling to stay in service long, generally leaving once they found husbands. 44 As a result of these limitations, together with the exclusion of Mricans from the advancement pool, the vast majority of the asylum's trained staff had to be recruited either from "Home" (meaning Britain) or from South Mrica, a trend that continued to characterize asylum staffing. It appears that there was a connection between the colonial authorities' decision in 1924 to finally admit European women and the added urgency that was placed on the recruitment of trained nurses at this time. In his 1924 Report on the Public Health, Dr. Fleming mentioned that two trained mental nurses had been recruited in England and would arrive in Southern Rhodesia shortly. He described these nurses as "senior men with training in mental nursing. "45

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The commitment to improving the European staff at Ingutsheni continued to grow. This new willingness must be seen within the context of what the authorities perceived as the growing needs of the expanding settler population. The number of new European immigrants almost doubled, from 2,835 in 1926 to 4,984 in 1927. 46 Both the demand for, and the supply of, Mrican laborers was rising. Not surprisingly, the asylum population also rose, from 257 in 1925 to 295 in 1927. 47 Ingutsheni's staff increased, though less dramatically. In 1928, Ingutsheni employed nine men and women who were still referred to as "keepers" by the asylum superintendent as well as a farm overseer, two Mrican interpreters, one nurse matron, one nursing sister, and three male nurses. 48 While mental institutions everywhere straddled the line between public order and public health, it is safe to say that during its first twenty-five years, Ingutsheni spent most of its time approximating a prison, and its staff reflected this fact. The following section will discuss the inmates who inhabited this custodial environment and how the nature of this group, as well as the nature of their environs at the asylum, was being shaped during these years. It looks at the intersection between asylum and society, and the ways-in which race, sex, and economy mediated the nature of space within the asylum.

Spaces and Bodies When the asylum opened, there were two wards only, located in close proximity to each other. As was often the case in Southern Rhodesia, the colonizers compensated for the inevitability of physical proximity, at least between Europeans and Mrican men, by fostering distance in other ways. This was accomplished at the site of the asylum in numerous ways. For example, the white male ward was built in brick, 49 while the black male ward was constructed of wood and iron in a manner similar to most compound housing provided for Mrican workers at the time. 5° While there were ten "lunatics" in the Bulawayo jail, thirty still in South Mrican asylums, an additional undisclosed number in other jails around the colony, and warnings that the insane population was growing, 5 1 there were only twenty inmate "beds" at Ingutsheni Asylum. 52 The fact that the asylum commenced operations with accommodation for only twentyeighteen Mricans and two Europeans-meant that Ingutsheni was born too small. 5 3 The history oflngutsheni reflects a perpetual crisis between inmates and space, which began immediately. The first prison to comply

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with an order from the secretary of law to transfer lunatics from prisons was Bulawayo Jail, 54 presumably because of its proximity to the asylum. The jail was so close, in fact, that on June 23, 1go8, Ingutsheni's first sixteen inmates arrived at the asylum by foot. These prisoner I patients were, of course, accompanied by a police escort and, at least in the case of the Mrican men, they wore shackles. 55 There were three white men, eleven black men, and two black women among this first group of inmates. The names on their files, which may or may not have been their actual names, were (Europeans) Edward,Joseph, and Thomas; (Mrican men) Nyamandi, Mahliwe, Tshipisa, Hotembe, Whadliwa, Muneuksa, Amrisi, Hohnnie, Lukwaba, Felebe, and Martin; and (Mrican women) Zwena and Hlombaze.56 The presence of women resulted in what may have been Ingutsheni's first major crisis. As the asylum was designed for men only, no separate accommodation existed for these women. It is hard to understand why this eventuality had not been planned for. If the colonial authorities had no intention of accommodating such women, why were they included in the group of sixteen patients sent from the Bulawayo jail to Ingutsheni? The answer to this question is not obvious. The general dilemma, however, seems to reflect a certain level of denial, an unwillingness on the part of the authorities to accept that the state bore any responsibility for the care and control of Mrican females. Fortunately for the state, the husband of one of the women, Zwena, came to collect her, and the authorities seemed eager to aid him in his mission. A "warrant of liberation" was thus issued, and Zwena was released into her husband's custody. 57 No man came to claim Hlombaze, however. This woman, "found" several months earlier while "wandering" through the town of Selukwe, became a test case for what to do when Mrican women appeared inexplicably in colonial spaces. Hlombaze and the child she carried with her were detained under an "urgency order." Hlombaze was sent to jail "for observation." While in jail she was examined by two medical officers, following which a "summary reception order" was issued as per the Lunacy Ordinance of 1go8. This order permitted her reception and confinement at a prison or mental institution. Hlombaze was sent to the jail in Bulawayo in anticipation of the new asylum or, perhaps, just because that jail had better facilities for managing insane inmates. When Ingutsheni opened, she was transferred there. Because there were no Mrican female quarters, Hlombaze was kept in one of the padded cells attached to the Mrican male ward. It is not clear whether or not her child was kept there with her. 58 The Hlombaze situation came to a head on October 16, 1go8, when

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the medical director ofBulawayo, Dr. William Eaton, was told that "three lunatics from Gatooma" (males) were on their way to Bulawayo and needed accommodation. Ingutsheni was already reaching its capacity, and Hlombaze's single occupancy of one of the asylum's padded cells became an extravagance. In light of this situation, the authorities sought alternative temporary accommodations. Doctor Eaton asked Attorney General Tredgold for permission to send Hlombaze back to jail. 5 9 Tredgold, however, disliked the idea. In his capacity as ex-officio Curator ad Litem, he represented the interests of the certified insane, but the idea of holding this woman in the prison apparently offended his sensibilities, at least at first. 60 His reluctance is difficult to understand in view of the fact that, only a few months earlier, it had been standard policy to keep all lunacy suspects, male and female, in prisons. Had the attorney general momentarily forgotten the colonial context? Doctor Eaton seemed to think so, and reminded his colleague that Hlombaze was no lady in the settler .colonial sense of the term; that she had already spent time in jail before being transferred to the asylum; and that, according to Eaton's logic, her return there would not cause her any additional hardship. The sub text of Eaton's rejoinder was that Tredgold should not attach the same significance to her care and comfort as he would for a European woman. Hlombaze was sent back to the Bulawayo jail. 61 Extensions to the asylum were completed by the end of 1go8, but they were so minimal on the African side that they were not adequate for long. The inmate population at the end of 1go8 consisted of three Europeans and seventeen Africans. Thirty suspected lunatics remained in South African asylums and an uncounted number remained in Southern Rhodesian prisons. After the extensions were made in 1go8, the asylum could accommodate ten European males, eighteen African males, and two African females. 62 Any impact on the overall comfort oflngutsheni's patient body was short-lived. By the end of 1909, the Ingutsheni population consisted of seven European males, twenty-nine African males, and two African females. 63 In other words, the European male section was nearly full, the African female section was full, and the African male section was grossly overcrowded. Extensions were again made in 191 o. Ironically, while this step was taken in response to overcrowding that was most serious on the native male wards, the medical director made improvements to the European male facilities the first priority. One explanation for the fact that improvements were being made to the one ward that was not overcrowded, in addition to racial discrimination, was that the colonizers were begin-

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ning to view white males as a permanent group rather than one awaiting transfer. The Mrican male wards were expanded as well, for once far beyond immediate need and in anticipation of future growth, to accommodate fifty-two inmates. Perhaps not so surprisingly, the space for Mrican women remained constant at two. By the end of 1910 however, the population at Ingutsheni consisted of thirteen European men, fortyeight Mrican men, and six Mrican women. In other words, the asylum was bulging at the seams again. 64 Even Dr. Eaton, who does not appear to have been squeamish, refused to admit further cases until additional buildings were erected. 65 It took another year oflngutsheni's being described as "hopelessly overcrowded" before money and approval were obtained for further additions. This time the Mrican male ward space was expanded to accommodate a total of seventy-two inmates. The overcrowding in the Mrican female ward was addressed with the provision of three small wards, bringing their accommodations up to eight. 66 Perhaps predictably, although the situation in the European male sections of the hospital had not yet reached crisis proportions, they gained six additional beds, a bath, a large exercise yard, and a dining area. 67 Throughout the period under discussion, 1908-33, the number oflunatics annually certified rose steadily. According to Dr. Fleming, this trend was especially apparent among Mricans. 68 The Hlombaze example is one of many illustrations of the tensions that existed between the colonial desire to preserve order through the segregation of the insane and the simultaneous reluctance to spend money on what could be construed as social welfare for Mricans and n'er-do-well whites. Meanwhile, the numbers of patients (mostly paupers) needing accommodations continued to rise. The situation was considered so desperate in 1915 that, even with the war raging, the authorities decided to build a new section for twenty-five Mrican male patients. The population continued to grow and by this year, 1915, the daily average of patients treated was eighty-nine as compared with sixty-nine in 1913 and only seventeen five years earlier. 69 Southern Rhodesia was unable to keep up with the increasing demands on this facility and again found it necessary to transfer a number of patients to South Mrican asylums. In February 1917, the medical director reported that there were still twenty-nine "Rhodesian lunatics" in asylums in the Union of South Mrica, costing the administration of Southern Rhodesia £2,153·56 for the year. The vast majority of this sum was spent on European men-a total of£1,362.50 in 1917. 70 This

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amount was so much larger than the maintenance fees for a much larger number of Mrican patients because the maintenance fees for Europeans in South Mrican asylums were more than twice as high as those for Mricans. This discrepancy resulted, of course, from the differences in the staff, facilities, and dietary standards available to white inmates. While Southern Rhodesians were reluctant to incur the additional cost of adapting Ingutsheni to serve a larger white population, the fact that they were sending money out of the country was becoming irksome. For this reason, the legislative council allocated two thousand pounds of the fifteenthousand-pound budget for "sporadic diseases" to extending the asylum. 71 An additional loan of two thousand pounds was obtained from the British South Mrica Company. With these expenditures, the government attempted to "ensure that the entire cost of the maintenance of Rhodesian lunatics should be spent in the Territory." The funds financed a new house for Mr. MacLean, the asylum's new head keeper, additions to the Mrican male wards (one small dormitory and two single rooms), and an extension to the European male ward for the accommodation of an additional eleven patients and two keepers. Further, the European men got a new veranda. 72 Though plans were being made to expand accommodation for European men, the question of accommodating European women at Ingutsheni was again placed on a back burner. The medical director decided that removing three European women from South Mrican asylums, where they cost the Southern Rhodesia government £g1.5 each per year, would be too dear. He reasoned that three European female patients would necessitate the hiring of two additional European female attendants. Additional accommodation would have to be constructed for both the patients and new staff. Since white women were the target group, this accommodation would have to be of a much higher standard than had previously been the case. The immediate expense of transferring these women to Ingutsheni was estimated at £1,8oo per year, which was considered prohibitive. When one considers that the cost of keeping European female "pauper lunatics" in South Mrican asylums was £274·5· the colonizers' decision to continue to exclude them from Ingutsheni seemed sensible. White men, on the other hand, could be transferred with great savings to Southern Rhodesia and, in 191 7, the white male ward capacity was increased to thirty, and seventeen white male patients were returned to Southern Rhodesia from South Mrica. An escort of one guard, Ingutsheni's under keeper, and five Mrican and European members of the

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BSAP were sent to the Pretoria Asylum to fetch the men. 73 Perhaps Mr. Edge low, Southern Rhodesia's first certified lunatic, was one of these seventeen returnees. With the repatriation of these Southern Rhodesian patients, the asylum was again reaching its capacity, with twenty-five white men, one hundred black men, and twenty-three black women in residence. At this time, only the black female wards were actually overcrowded, with twenty-three in a ward designed for twenty. Ironically, even with this overcrowding, the superintendent of the asylum reported that Mrican women were adequately housed. Mter two more years of no extensions, however, even Forrester admitted the situation had become strained, inconvenient, and "attended with dangers I need not go into." 74 These "dangers" emanated from the Mrican female section and appear to have been related to hygienic issues. So low were the needs of Mrican women on the colonial list of priorities that the next improvements made to the asylum, in 1920, were to benefit the European staff. Looking ahead, Dr. Eaton presented the most pressing needs at the asylum in this order: "painting and glazing of the European division of the asylum, a new laundry and cow shed, and new quarters for natives?" 75 Even the cows got housing before the native women. 76 During the early 1920s, the Southern Rhodesian authorities began seriously discussing the creation of what was being described as a "European women's hospital." 77 One reason was certainly the growing cost of maintaining white women in South Mrican asylums. The fact of the matter was that the number of "pauper" women in South Mrican asylums was increasing. More and more husbands and families were refusing to pay for the women's upkeep. 78 In addition to the cost, there was a growing concern about the continued practice of keeping them in Southern Rhodesian prisons while awaiting transfer. A member of parliament from Bulawayo South, Mr. Hadfield, was particularly vocal on the issue. He worried that women who were only "temporarily insane" would become incurable if kept in the jails too long. It is indeed difficult to understand how this seeming contradiction was allowed to continue for as long as it did. On the one hand, white women were considered to have extra needs, but, on the other hand, they were being kept in prisons with few special facilities. 79 Doctor Fleming confirmed this practice and agreed with Hadfield's concern, stating that when European women were detained in jails for long periods of time and not treated for their ailment early, "while the disorder is in a remediable stage," the hope for recovery was reduced. He also worried that the complete separation of patients from their relatives

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and friends caused by transfer to South Mrican hospitals was not in their best interest either. 80 Although the authorities had long ago convinced themselves that the issues of European and Mrican women were as different as night and day, they appear to have linked the two groups in their discussions of the asylum, and it became almost impolitic to address the needs of Mrican women while ignoring the lack of facilities for European women. By 1924, the Mrican female ward was grossly overcrowded-two women, and almost all of these women had been stricken with chickenpox due to the impossibility of effectively isolating the sick. 81 Additional factors conducive to the spread of disease were the lack of water and generally inadequate sanitation. 82 At the same time, 144 black men occupied a space earmarked for 132. The previous policy of refusing admission to patients to compensate for the lack of space became difficult as, according to Dr. Forrester, then superintendent at Ingutsheni, more and more of the asylum's Mrican inmates were classified as "Congenital Mental Defectives, Melancholies and Stuporous types." This changing composition of Mrican admissions, he held, resulted in a residue of "utterly hopeless and incurable cases [remaining] over each year. "83 Forrester sought something or someone to blame for this inconvenience and, with a combination of insight, slavish adherence to stereotypes, and feigned ignorance, he argued that: Worry and troubles of some kind or other could be assigned as a contributing cause of the mental breakdown of many cases of insanity among natives, and with their belief in witchcraft and distrust of each other, it is not to be wondered at that they have exaggerated and colored mental vision, which no doubt contributes to their mental breakdown .... Insanity due to daka [sic] consumption among natives is said to have declined. 84

Doctor Eaton was very vague and generally reluctant to attribute the increase in the so-called incurable population at Ingutsheni to social factors. While he at times acknowledged the unhealthy and often stressful working conditions of many Mrican men who lived in towns, particularly those in European employment, he chose to blame Mrican beliefs in witchcraft and marijuana smoking for the presumed rise in the incidence of mental breakdowns, and he speculated that the increase in numbers was not so much an increase in the incidence of insanity as a change in the attitudes of Mrican relatives. 85 In other words, he thought that they were taking advantage of the colonial ratepayer's largesse by dumping

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their "harmless insane" relatives onto the state, as Tredgold had feared might happen. As the Mrican population escalated and the cost of maintaining European women outside of the colony rose, construction of new buildings for European and Mrican females began. The fanfare that accompanied the opening of the new European "hospital" in 1926 was in stark contrast to the indifference apparent at the initial opening of the asylum in 1908. The "honourable colonial secretary," the treasurer, the mayor, and members of the town council and the public were present. The colonial secretary delivered a speech explaining why the government found the building necessary and how it represented a great advance. Doctor Andrew Fleming attended this inauguration and delivered a speech reinforcing the colonial secretary's assertions of progress. Fleming informed his audience that the European female ward had been "designed on modern lines with a view to suit climatic conditions as well as providing the greatest possible comfort for the patients." A new Mrican female block had also been completed. Of this ward, Fleming stated that "the natives are also well housed, and what is of the greatest importance, they have ample room and live under vastly improved hygienic conditions."86 Immediately, sixteen European women were moved from South Mrican asylums to Ingutsheni. 87 Ingutsheni's capacious moment was short-lived however, as it shortly returned to its overcrowded state. 88

The Kept Who were these people whose numbers constantly expanded beyond the asylum's holding capacity, and why were they there? Mrican men were, throughout the history of the asylum, the most numerous group. When it opened in 1908, the ratio of Mrican males to white males was a little under six to one. This ratio fluctuated from between six to one and four to one throughout the custodial years at Ingutsheni (1908-33). Theratio of Mrican males to Mrican females also fluctuated between six to one and four to one. The numerical dominance of Mrican men at Ingutsheni paralleled the wider social and spatial economy of Southern Rhodesia, at least in those areas outside the dry, overcrowded, tsetse-fly-filled, 29 percent of the colony's land set aside for native reserves and purchase areas. Mter observing Mrican admissions patterns in South Mrican asylums, South Mrican psychiatrist B. J. F. Laubscher speculated that two overarching factors contributed to their commitment. The first had to do with

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the relationship between the Mrican alleged lunatic and places of European habitation. In other words, those who suffered their attacks while in view of Europeans, or within the orbit of European surveillance apparatuses, were most likely to be sent to the asylum. The second condition he observed was that the alleged lunatic's behavior took him/her beyond the therapies available in his or her own cultural milieu. 89 This usually meant violent and/ or extremely uncontrollable behavior that traditional healers had been unable to quell. 90 These criteria can be applied to the Mrican inmate population during the first quarter century at Ingutsheni and are consistent with the attitude ofTredgold in 1go8: that the admittees to the asylum should be dangerous. Tredgold's policy was the guiding principle for Mrican commitment throughout the custodial years. In 1931, when Ingutsheni was at the dawn of its modern age, the new medical director for the colony, Dr. Askins, reiterated this general policy that only dangerous Mricans with no family able to care for them were to be admitted. 91 Ingutsheni's early inmates generally fit this bill, being either displaced from their homes, as was David, a migrant laborer from Nyasaland, or found wandering and engaging in behavior that the colonizers deemed threatening, although not necessarily dangerous. Some of them were also convicted criminals. Most were detected while in places of European habitation. For example, Mpontandevu was apprehended after he was found masturbating on a public railway platform. Mter examining him, Dr. Alfred Vigne wrote that he was satisfied that "the said Mpontandevu is a lunatic and is a proper person to be taken charge of and detained under care and treatment." He arrived at this conclusion after observing that, in addition to "constantly practicing self abuse," the suspect was delusional. 92 A smaller group lived in the rural areas at the time of their attacks, were found to be too violent or uncontrollable to be managed by the traditional healer's methods, and were brought to the attention of a native commissioner or other colonial authority by family members and/ or other villagers. However, as the new social order made inroads into Mrican traditional institutions and practices, it is not always clear whether family members were expressing a willingness to avail themselves of the colonial idiom of lunacy management, or whether they felt compelled to do so. 93 For example, the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 18gg made it illegal for traditional healers to divine the causes of madness using traditional concepts of witchcraft or sorcery. Section 3 of this act read: ''Whomever imputes to any other person the use of non-natural means in causing any disease in any person or animal or in causing any injury to any person or property, that is to say, whoever names or indicates any

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other person as being a wizard or witch shall be guilty of an offence and liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred pounds or to imprisonment for a period not exceeding three years, or to corporal punishment not exceeding twenty lashes or any two or more of such punishments. "94 The act had the effect of making illegal one of the indigenous societies' central public health controls, the detection and expunging of witches. But as Gordon Chavunduka makes clear, most Africans continued to consult traditional healers. One example is the 1908 case of an African, Lukwaba, committed to Ingutsheni through the initiative of family. He lived with his half-sister and her husband in a homestead in the Insiza District of Matabeleland. A quarrelsome man frequently in trouble with both colonial and village authorities, Lukwaba was sent to jail in Bulawayo for stealing sheep belonging to other people. After serving his sentence, he returned to his village and immediately began committing what his sister described, through a police interpreter, as "acts such as a person out of his mind would commit." These acts included picking up his plate of food while eating and throwing it at one of his sister's children, and claiming "everything belonging to anybody else as his. "95 When Lukwaba's madness took the form of violent behavior, his sister notified the native commissioner of Insiza, perhaps as a precautionary measure, fearing that if he committed any serious misdeeds she and her husband would be held accountable. Lukwaba's sister and brother-in-law tied his hands with vine until the native commissioner arrived. He suggested that she petition for her brother's commitment in the asylum, but Lukwaba's sister wanted to try traditional methods of treatment one last time. The native commissioner apparently allowed this and left them with sets of handcuffs and leg-irons to prevent Lukwaba from causing more mischief. An inyanga was summoned. According to Lukwaba's sister's affidavit, her brother refused to take his medicines. Still, the family kept Lukwaba handcuffed for a full month while their inyanga tried unsuccessfully to treat him. In exasperation, and after admitting defeat, his sister again called for the native commissioner. This time she stated: "I have now come to the NC to say that I have failed and wish to be relieved of the responsibility of further taking care of him. He is much worse now than when he first came [back from prison]. He has threatened to burn me and my hut and is otherwise violent."96 Thus, while Lukwaba had been brought to a European official attention, the factor of his behavior being inconsistent with, and destructive to, his cultural milieu was pivotal. Another fact which would have been in operation at this early stage was

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the lack of stigma attached to the asylum. In other words, this was a new institution of the white man, not as yet associated with death as some mine hospitals were. 97 Most common were the cases of African men whose madness was detected at their places of employment. This topic will be addressed in detail in chapter 3; generally speaking, however, such cases involved a combination of working conditions that often led to "diseases of employment" and neurological complications: the fact that these laborers were in constant European view, and perhaps most important, that they were cut off from their family's ability to function as whatJohnJanzen refers to as a therapy management group. 98 All of these factors left the African migrant more susceptible to European forms of care and confinement. For this reason, many of the long-term inmates at Ingutsheni were from places other than Southern Rhodesia, such as Nyasaland or Northern Rhodesia. Section 52 of Southern Rhodesia's Lunacy Ordinance of 1go8 provided for the commitment and treatment of such individuals at the expense of their respective governments. 99 This sometimes caused financial strain as foreign governments were not always prompt in their maintenance payments. 100 As with colonial tuberculosis campaigns, the various governments of southern and central Africa sought to deny responsibility for nationals who became ill after spending a certain number of years working in an outside territory. Doctor Fleming held discussions with the administrators of Northern Rhodesia for instance and attempted to get them to accept responsibility "for asylum maintenance fees for all Northern Rhodesian natives who were found to be insane within one year of entry into the Colony." 101 The government established the Native Foreigners' Finger Print Bureau under the auspices of the Central Investigation Department to prevent the migration of mentally ill and other undesirable individuals into Southern Rhodesia. The bureau provided for "the identification of foreign native lunatics, whereby the particular Government whom it may be desired to debit with any charges for maintenance may be positively ascertained. "102 In 1924, tensions around responsibility led Dr. Eaton to instruct Southern Rhodesia's magistrates not to send "alien natives" to Ingutsheni before ascertaining whether or not the institution was able to meet the local requirements first. Doctor Eaton reported that there are at present in residence forty-two alien native non-paying patients, representing 31% of the total male natives and a daily expenditure of five pounds five shillings (£5.50). I would suggest that further effort should be

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made to return the aliens to their country of origin as their removal would enable us to meet local requirements. 103 The colonial authorities were sometimes successful in differentiating between local and "foreign native lunatics" and, on some occasions, managed to repatriate the latter to their countries of origin. Nonetheless, in 1927, 75 of a total of 191 African inmates, 39 percent of the African population at Ingutsheni, were foreign. 104 African men from Nyasaland supplied an average of 33 percent of the Southern Rhodesian African labor force during the same period. 105 The "alien native" population at Ingutsheni filled over 30 percent of the African spaces at the asylum for many years to come. Thus, the patients oflngutsheni were, by 1927, representative of the larger colonial population in which many of the Africans in places of European habitation were so-called aliens. The majority of the African women on the wards were from the local area. As the colonial public health authorities accepted the care and control of African women very reluctantly, most of the African women on the wards were either violent and unmanageable or presumed to be lost and disoriented. One example is described as "Manyadza alias Marimbga" in her file. She was sent to Ingutsheni under escort from the Fort Victoria jail in September 1911. Manyadza's case involved a rather well-known white medical missionary,John Thomas Helm of the Morgenster Mission in Fort Victoria. Helm stated that he had known the woman for several years and that she resided at the nearby Pomashana Mission Station in Ndanga. While she had been "of unsound mind" for some time, he stated that she had only become violent over the past six months. Her violence was displayed when she attacked a man with a mealie stamper, knocking him down and grabbing him by the throat, highly unusual behavior from a woman aged fifty. Manyadza was also accused of destroying fruit and other trees, and of burning down a cattle kraal. Apparently, her threat to stab the two children of the ReverendJackson of the Pomashana Mission was the last straw for the missionary and he summoned the state authorities. 106 While the European male inmates had similar general patterns-they were often violent or found wandering aimlessly-they appear to have transgressed in more varied ways. The commitments of the first European men were indicative of the transformations occurring in the nature of colonial order and the changing expectations of colonial society. In other words, they were illustrative of the creation of white male colonial subjectivities. Moreover, the routes of these inmates reflected attempts to de-

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velop and enforce a more subtle standard of normality than was the case for Mrican inmates during this period. The characteristics of early white male admissions to Ingutsheni were poor whiteness, extreme and unexplained violence, and general behavior not conforming to white prestige and notions of white manhood. Many of the white men admitted to Ingutsheni during these years would probably not have been detained during the earlier years of colony. For example, a man named Andrew was initially apprehended because he had been "found wandering" barefoot through the streets. 107 Whereas during the first decade and a half of the colonial era the sight of barefoot white males had not been at all unusual, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, it had become a sign of disorder. 108 Jollie, an unemployed mine carpenter, became conspicuous because of his inattention to "personal matters." The constable who arrested him reported that Jollie had allowed his fingernails to grow half an inch long and, when order to clip them, refused to comply. Other evidence appearing in this European man's file in support of his continued confinement was that, when asked his opinions on the war in 1915, he is said to have displayed no interest. 109 Another white inmate, Thomas, attracted attention when he "arrived in Bulawayo hatless" and, like Andrew, walked about without shoes. 110 Each of these acts breached the colonizers' sense of public decorum and threatened white prestige. Many of the white male admittees were suffering from ailments induced by excessive drinking. Thomas, for example, had been arrested for drunkenness. While incarcerated, he reacted violently and expressed feelings of being persecuted by the colonial government. Mter being labeled as delusional, Thomas was sent to Ingutsheni. He did not get along with the medical staff there and was particularly hostile toward Dr. Eaton and Dr. Ellis, who was the acting superintendent at the time. His noncooperation was too much for these doctors, who had him transferred to a South Mrican asylum. 111 Many of the white male inmates were down on their luck financially. Their ailments can also be associated with the rough frontier life in Southern Rhodesia's recent past. The residuum now had to be contained. In the period between its establishment and the early 1930s, Ingutsheni was primarily a custodial institution and little was done to suggest otherwise. For most of this period, its staff was completely untrained in psychiatric nursing and only a few employees were trained in general nursing. Considerations of economy were, by far, the overriding factors governing the asylum's management, as witnessed by the primacy of farm

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labor and other income-generating activities in the asylum's therapeutic regime. Prior to the early 1930s, the asylum was run on parallel lines to a prison by a head keeper whose compensation was commensurate with that of a jailer, and an under keeper whose compensation was commensurate with that of a warden. 112 This situation would change, however. As the power of settlers rose, they demanded more responsible government, which coincided with a changing worldwide view of mental health care as more curative than custodial. In Southern Rhodesia, this resulted in a mental health system that restored "social usefulness" according to the agents of a settler colonial social order. As a result of these two developments, Southern Rhodesian psychiatric care became more interventionist in nature and began to imagine a socially productive role for itself: the production of recovered colonial citizens and subjects.

3· Black Men, White "Civilization," and Routes to Ingutsheni Psychologists say that the first step towards the mental asylum is the cutting away of a man from all associations with his previous life. If we cut away natives from their traditional ways of life, we are taking the first step to make them unbalanced and to make them lose their grasp on life. RoGER HowMAN, "The Urbanised Native in Southern Rhodesia"

The black men inhabiting the wards oflngutsheni were both from Southern Rhodesia and beyond its borders. They were from north of the Zambezi River in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, south of the Limpopo River in Bechuanaland and South Africa, and a minority came from Portuguese East African territory. Most were labor migrants of some kind or another. In other words, most had left their homes to work for wages at a European-owned and -controlled establishment. These men were pushed from the rural areas by poverty and their need to earn cash to pay taxes, and pulled into the town and onto and mines and capitalist farms by the availability of poorly paid jobs. They rarely took their wives orchildren with them, as employers and municipal governments did not provide family housing for most of their African workers, and the workers themselves considered the conditions on the urban locations too dangerous. Also, many wanted their wives to remain in the reserves to preserve their homesteads, their social security, and the surviving edifice of their manhood. 1 Of the 2 2 1 African male patient files reviewed for this chapter, 151 of them listed the patient's employment status at the time that they became suspected of insanity. Among this group of 151, 109, or 72 percent, reported waged labor on mines, farms, European households, or public works. The fact is, only the minority of the African male admissions at

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Ingutsheni resided at their home villages at the time they committed, or threatened to commit, the act that brought them under the scrutiny of one or more colonial institutions and led to them becoming insanity suspects. Most of the men at Ingutsheni were far away from their homes. They were far beyond the reach of the members of their families who would have, under "normal" circumstances, taken charge of their therapeutic needs in times of ill health. Away from home, Mrican labor migrants were more likely than other Mricans to become objects of colonial psychiatric discourse. In his book Chibaro, which explores the world of migrant contract laborers on Southern Rhodesian mines, Charles Van Onselen speculated that the conditions on the mines were so poor that they made men loose their minds. 2 Van Onselen's argument focused on the psychosocial consequences of poor diets, violence, injustice, and the repression of wills. Later in this chapter, we will read of colonial theories of culture shock, of the unmooring effects of too much civilization on the Mricans. The accuracy or inaccuracy of any of these theories is impossible to prove. We can, however, explore the factors that led to a person becoming an object of psychiatric discourse via their detection as suspects of insanity. B. ]. F. Laubscher, a psychiatrist at the Queenstown Mental Hospital in South Mrica during the 1930s, and the author of Sex, Custom, and Psychopathology: A Study of South African Pagan Natives, observed that proximity to a place of European habitation was a key component in the process of ascribing madness in Mricans. While Dr. Laubscher resented this fact, believing it to be caused by the general irrationality of Mrican communities who failed to recognize madness as madness, and instead confused it with ukuthwasa or some other supernatural disposition, 3 thus leading to a situation whereby many insane Mricans went undetected, his point about proximity was a good one. There was a direct relationship between the preponderance of men among the Mricans employed by Europeans and the preponderance of men among Mricans at Ingutsheni. In 1921, 139,676 Mrican men were formally employed as compared to only 628 Mrican women. While the numbers of Mrican women in employment grew steadily during the 1930s, bringing the number to 3,778 (as compared to 299,450 men) in 1941, their proportion to the whole remained very low. Even when one takes into account the fact that Europeans often paid their Mrican female employees under the table, their percentage of the whole was low and the urban areas of Southern Rhodesian were decidedly male spaces. 4 Some 6,500 Mrican men and 750 Mrican women resided at the Bulawayo Mu-

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nicipal Location (Makokoba) in 1929, 6,816 men as compared to 1,237 women resided there in 1946. 5 Thus, the Mrican male population of Makokoba consistently outnumbered the Mrican female population by more than five to one. The reason for this discrepancy was the men's faster rates of incorporation into the colonial capitalist economy as labor units. But, in addition to their numeric preponderance in colonial urban space, Mrican men were surrounded by a mystique that elicited fear and anxiety among the colonizers, who feared the undomesticated black man, assuming of him both the desire and the capacity, unless closely regulated, to avenge himself. Europeans in Southern Rhodesia viewed black men as a danger to "white civilization." The black male threat took the form of "Black Peril," the range of sexual threats that black men were believed to represent to white female sexual purity as a form of white male property, and outright rebellion. Add to this peril mentality the fact that the colonial economy depended on black men's labor power and required it nearby, one can understand why the average black man's colonial existence was one of varying degrees of state-sponsored surveillance and regulation. His place on the Southern Rhodesian social, political, and geographical map was known and policed. His spatial history was traceable through the registration books called situpa, a document that specified where he was supposed to be at any given time, who his chief was, where he paid his taxes, and for whom he worked. The trail of paper that authorized his movements in and out of colonial space became a record of his colonial experience. If he was from outside the colony or, to use a colonial oxymoron, if he was an "alien native," and for some reason did not have his registration card, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) used its Native Finger Print Division to trace where he was from and where he belonged-where he paid his taxes. In other words, Mrican men were far more likely than women to fall under the colonizers' gaze. Their madness, or the behavior that was framed in terms of madness, was much more likely than Mrican women's to be witnessed by agents of the colonial state and then incorporated into a biomedical framework. While this link between proximity and detection may seem unsurprising, it was not the popular colonial explanation for Mrican male mental hospital admissions. Instead, colonial psychiatrists, amateur psychologists, and other so-called experts who were paid to know the Mrican mind most commonly argued that the preponderance of Mrican men in colonial psychiatric hospitals resulted from their greater exposure to the

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stresses and strains of European civilization, combined with their inability, rooted either in biology or culture, to adjust to "culture contact" and "transition." To the exponents of this view, the most salient force driving Africans into insanity was exposure to Western civilization. 6 Consistent with this belief, some Southern Rhodesian authorities warned about the dangers of scholastic education. For instance, in 1907, the year before Ingutsheni opened, the native commissioner of Belingwe warned: To educate him [the Mrican] in book learning alone, without the wholesome discipline oflabour, is fatal. A smattering of education suffices to give him imagination, very little of which the ordinary uncivilized native possesses. The first result of imagination is to breed ideas, and the ideas which come most readily on an idle man are his grievances or supposed grievances .... The partially educated barbarian is the man who foments discontent, leading, as it has done recently in Natal, to rebellion. 7 The rebellion in Natal to which he referred was the 1go6 Zulu (or Bambatha) rebellion waged by armed Africans against a recently imposed poll tax and, more generally, against the process of proletarianization-the creation of wage laborers through the destruction of African rural economies and taxation. The idea of scholastic education as the cause of African madness and rebellion, rather than the colonizers' ongoing war against native economic and political self-determination and their freedom of movement, was a popular thesis throughout British colonial Africa. Doctor J. C. Carothers, a government psychiatrist in colonial Kenya during the 1950s and one-time superintendent of the Mathari Mental Hospital, for example, argued that the Mau Mau rebellion during the 1950s was the result of educated African men who had developed imaginary grievances against the colonial government and rebelled. F. D. Corfield, commissioned by the British Government to produce a survey on the causes of the Mau Mau, arrived at a similar conclusion and, like Carothers, devoted the majority of his discussion to the maladjusted psychology of the Mau Mau rebels. 8 Southern Rhodesian officials such as Roger Howman, a member of the Native Department and a trained sociologist, suggested that African men had a higher incidence of mental disorder because of the "unbalancing effects" that urbanization brought about. As the 1930s were a period of increased urban migration in southern Africa, the question of its impact was on the minds of native administrators like Howman. In part, this was a continuation of the long-held view that the transition from rural/ folk/

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primitive to urban/ complex/ civilized society was a mentally destabilizing process. At the London School of Economics, Howman had studied under Bronislaw Malinowski, a founder of the field of functionalism in social anthropology, whose 1938 book, Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa, listed "defining the indices of maladjustment represented by the detribalized native" as a goal of the field. Another goal was to identifY how a sound knowledge of colonial subjects could translate into useful practice. 9 In the same year that his mentor Malinowski's book was published, Roger Howman presented a paper entitled "The Urbanized Native in Southern Africa" to a group of treasurers and accountants in South Africa. In his talk he warned of the psychological ramifications of African deculturation. 10 While some blamed African madness on the deleterious impact of migration and urbanization on the African mind, others, including two medical officers from Nyasaland, Doctors H. Shelley and W. H. Watson, cited "European civilization and contact. "11 They classified African inmates at the small Zomba asylum by ethnicity and by their respective levels of exposure to European influences. In some cases, this exposure or contact, was measured by the percentage of so-called non-Bantu blood in the patients' veins. The doctors argued that patients from the Yao, Nyanja, and Ngoni groups, described by them as the "intelligentsia of the indigenous peoples," suffered the highest rates of mental illness. Actually, all that they really found was that people from these groups were disproportionately represented in the eighty-four-bed government asylum at the prison in Zomba, something that might just as easily have been explained by the fact that these groups were more heavily urbanized, more proletarianized, and more Christianized than other groups and that, in the case of the Yao and Nyanja, they were the dominant ethnic groups in the areas surrounding Zomba. Shelley and Watson attempted to support their hypothesis by dividing the patients into two groups: those who experienced what they called European-type delusions involving cars, wealth, God, and the Bible; and those who experienced native-type delusions involving witchcraft, poisoning, and adultery. 12 Their logic went like this: African men were more numerous in the colonial mental hospital than African women because African men experienced higher levels of contact with European culture and, consequently, suffered greater alienation from their traditional social moorings. Proponents of this view did not, however, blame colonialism for this situation, and thus Shelley and Watson's report should in no way be read as anticolonialist. They, like other proponents of the civi-

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lization/ Mrican madness view, placed the onus of adjustment squarely on the Mrican. It was his or her failure to adjust to the new order of things that was at fault. As for the responsibilities of the colonial rulers, this "failure" was often rather opportunistically interpreted as supporting segregation and the perpetuation of the labor migrant system as opposed to making provisions for permanentMrican urban settlements and workerfamily housing near points of production. Rather than taking the path that Frantz Fanon would take several decades later and conclude that, "colonization itself must be brought to trial," 13 most chose the path of least resistance-a culturally arrogant, procolonial, and procapitalist approach that placed the onus on the Mrican to adjust. The major distinction among the colonial experts on the Mrican mind was really between the deculturation and the biological determinism schools of thoughtbetween those who thought that the Mrican "failure to adjust" was due to culture and those who thought it was due to biology. 14 Gender and race, or racialized gender, determined to a large degree a person's relationship to the colonial spatial and political economy, his or her rate of incorporation into that economy, and the degree to which his or her behavioral transgressions came to the notice of state authorities. Drawing on a sample of 221 Mrican male psychiatric patient files, this chapter focuses on three institutional structures and logic systems that brought Mrican men to Ingutsheni: labor migration, the colonial court system, and mission Christianity. The selected case studies all reflect the different ways in which the lives of Mrican male inmates at Ingutsheni had been bound into the structures and logic of one or more colonial institution before they were identified as possible madmen, and how this institutional involvement precipitated their admission to Ingutsheni. The men whose narratives are discussed here were migrants (David alias Mthenda, Ndiwira, Morozana, Chikaka, and Poison Lesa), a murder defendant (Hlomani), and a missionary renegade and prophet (Matthew Zwimba). All were admitted to Ingutsheni between 1go8 and 1950, and all represent and destabilize the colonizer's explanatory framework for Mrican madness: colonial civilization. Because the vast majority oflngutsheni Mrican male patients were migrants, the case studies illustrate the wide diversity within this category, as well as the distinct experience of dislocation brought on by migration and its relation to the production of colonial "madmen." This view was even held by Mricans in rural areas as illustrated by a Northern Rhodesia official in the 1950s. According toW. V. Brelsford, the cry often heard in the villages was: "He went off to the mines to work and came back

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N OR T H E R N RH O D ES I A

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Fig. 3.1 Map of colonial Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia). Courtesy of Justin Goh of Chicago CartoGraphies, Inc.

mad. " 15 David and Ndiwira were migrant laborers from Nyasaland. David worked at the Shamva gold mine in the northeastern region of Southern Rhodesia, while Ndiwira deserted from a smaller mine further north but was at Shamva when he was suspected of madness. David was most likely considered a muchona (lost one) by his Chichewa-speaking village near Blantyre, Nyasaland. Ndiwira managed to return home after spending several years at Ingutsheni. Morozana and Chikaka were employed as domestic workers in Salisbury, the capital city of Southern Rhodesia. Morozana was from Mafeking in South Mrica, and Chikaka was from just outside Salisbury. Their stories reveal interesting ways in which Mrican workers were severed from their traditional therapy managers. Similarly, the case of Poison Lesa, a "boss boy" on the Broken Hill Mine who was from a Bemba-speaking village in Northern Rhodesia, reveals how his migrant status facilitated his induction into the biomedical logic of the colonial mental hospital and how, once he was there, his family struggled

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to regain control over his care. The murder defendant, Hlomani, was a villager from the Chibi Reserve on the southeastern border of Southern Rhodesia. His family claimed that he had been mad when he committed the crime, and his brother linked his bout of insanity to the influenza he had contracted while a laborer in town. Finally, the missionary-cumprophet and founder of an independent church, Matthew Zwimba, was the mission-educated son of a Shona chief from the Zwimba Reserve near Sinoia. A deeply religious man, considered by some to be a prophet, he spent years in exile before returning to start his own independent, African-affirming Christian mission church. A nonconformist who declared war against ecclesiastical racism, Zwimba may or may not have been insane. Exploring the routes to the mental hospital traveled by these and other African men provides a basis from which to challenge colonial theories about African madness and its causes. In their place, I propose an outline of a kind of generic black man's experience of colonial "civilization" in Southern Rhodesia and its institutional logic systems. Most important is the extent to which patients and their families challenged, if unsuccessfully, these hegemonic constructs.

Migrant, Madman, Muchona "Says he came for work but got lost in the process." 16 This paraphrases what one African man told his doctor when asked how he had become an inmate at Ingutsheni. This concept of getting lost through migration, particularly to the mines, was widespread in central and southern Africa throughout the twentieth century. Among the Chichewa-speaking people ofNyasaland, the word muchona described a man who went off to work on the mines of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa and never returned. Among Sesotho speakers, such men were called lekholoa. IsiZulu speakers called them amatshipa. 17 The fact that African communities found it necessary to coin separate words to describe the phenomenon attests to the magnitude of the problem they perceived. When one combines this notion of men being lost at the mines with the common view of the mines as predatory and even cannibalistic, 18 one begins to appreciate the level of ambivalence African villagers held toward the capitalist mines. They were necessary as a source of wages, but sometimes they bit or even devoured the men who worked them. In 1912, a man whose patient file lists him as "David alias Mthenda"

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became patient number 176, the 176th person, black or white, to be admitted to Ingutsheni since it opened on June 16, 1908. David left his home in the Blantyre district of Nyasaland in search of employment in Southern Rhodesia, as thousands of his countrymen did on an annual basis. Nyasaland was a British central African colony that served as a labor reservoir for the regions of central and southern Africa. The year that David was admitted to Ingutsheni, Nyasaland provided approximately five thousand, or 14 percent, of the thirty-four thousand African men laboring on Southern Rhodesian mines. By 1925, Nyasas (as they were called) were an established group, constituting an estimated 25 percent of the mine labor force. By 1945, this figure had risen to 33 percent. 19 These men developed their own distinct niche within the Southern Rhodesian labor market. Due in part to the Scottish Presbyterian missionary presence in the Shire Highlands, and their strong emphasis on scholastic education, Nyasas were relatively well educated. Their level of education, combined with the fact that they were some of the earliest to migrate permanently to the urban areas of Southern Rhodesia, meant that they captured many of the semiskilled and better paying jobs and made slightly higher wages as a whole than other groups. 20 When David left his home, he probably assumed that he would return some day. He had no reason to suspect that he was initiating a permanent rupture from his community when he traveled southwest through Tete in Portuguese East Africa and into Southern Rhodesia at Mount Darwin. After receiving his registration papers, David was employed at the large Shamva gold mine in the Mazoe district that had opened a few years earlier. His hospital file does not indicate the type of work that he performed at Shamva or how long he worked there. It simply states that he worked for a white man named Mr. Bowes, a private contractor at the mine. He worked alongside one of his countrymen whose file lists his name as Joseph alias Achiwa. Since a large percentage of the Shamva mine labor force was from Nyasaland, this fact was not surprising. In 1927, almost all of the thirty-five hundred miners who held a five-day strike over dangerous working conditions, poor health services, a usurious mine credit system, and inadequate pay were described as long-service migrants from Nyasaland. 21 Both David and Joseph had their family names written in their files as aliases, a common practice among police, hospital, and court officials in Southern Rhodesia into the 1950s, after which time African surnames began to appear. 22 Thus, at Ingutsheni, while European patients are referred to by their full names, African patients either had one name, or a

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name and an alias. One imagines that this practice was connected to the culture of fanakalo, also known as kitchen kaffir or ki-settler. 23 A pidgin language, fanakalo was first developed as an expedient means of communication between Europeans and Mricans, and between Mricans from different areas. It originated as a trade language, as Kiswahili had. Derived primarily from the IsiZulu language, fanakalo contained smatterings of English, Mrikaans, and ChiShona, and is associated with the oppressive master-servant culture of southern Mrica. While the pidgin facilitated communication between diverse language groups within a broad region of southern and central Mrica, it also became a means by which Europeans maintained difference and distance between themselves and Mricans, a kind of linguistic defense against cross-racial understanding. David alias Mthenda and Joseph alias Achiwa existed within this culture of deliberately poor and missed understandings. When the authorities wanted to understand David, or at least his symptoms and background, they asked Joseph. But he only could describe what he had seen with his eyes because David refused to speak in their mother tongue, nor would he speak in fanakalo. Even to Joseph, David was incomprehensible. His description of David was quoted in the medical officer's report that appears in David's file. He said that David's body had been covered all over with pimples and that: Mter about a month the pimples disappeared. [David] then became strange in his manner and talked about things I could not understand. He spoke in a strange language like one half English. He got worse, talked day and night [and I] had to look after him. Ifleft alone he would wander about and lose (italics mine) himself. He couldn't cook his own food. 24

By anyone's standards it would seem that David was not well. Mter being examined at the mine hospital, he was taken to prison and examined there by two medical officers. The first one, Dr. Orphen, reported that David was suffering from persecutory delusions "involving a Blantyre native named Joseph [Achiwa] who he accused of attempting to steal his clothing." The second doctor reported that David suffered from delusions of grandiosity involving "unbounded wealth which he has put in the Standard Bank." According to Doctors Shelley and Watson ofNyasaland, the first delusion was of the "Native Type," while the second was of the "European Type," and thus a result of "culture contact."25 David was certified insane shortly after these observations. He was not admitted to Ingutsheni, however, until June 2 3, 1912, several months

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later, because of the serious overcrowding there. Apparently, there were seventy-two Mrican men on the wards that were only designed to accommodate fifty-two. The medical director described the situation as, "hopelessly overcrowded, especially with the Native lunatics, and arrangements are being made by which the building will be extended. "26 Because the number of "lunatics" annually certified was on the increase, many spent the period between their certification and their asylum admission in prison. These interim stays could be quite lengthy. 27 When space was provided in mid-1 912 for thirty-six additional Mrican men, David was transferred to Ingutsheni, 28 becoming one of the fifty-seven Mrican men and women admitted that year. 29 · All new Mrican admissions were administered a Wasserman test to detect whether they carried antibodies to treponema, the syphilis organism, in their blood. A positive Wasserman reaction indicated the presence of a syphilitic infection. David suffered from syphilis, which Dr. Andrew Fleming described as a "disease of employment." While official regulatory bodies were reluctant to impose health standards on mine companies, particularly small ones, and were capable of blaming ill-health on the weakness of the Mrican worker's constitution, particularly those from north of the Zambezi, Dr. Fleming submitted a report in 1913 in which he acknowledged that the conditions ofmostMrican men's employment were detrimental to their health. In comparing diseases suffered by Europeans with those suffered by Mricans, he found that the former suffered mostly from "climatic diseases" like malaria, while the latter suffered mostly from "diseases of employment."30 The most common of these diseases were pulmonary diseases, scurvy, pneumonia, dysentery, phthisis, syphilis, influenza, and pellagra. 31 Scurvy and pellagra resulted specifically from poor nutrition and the absence of vitamins C and B in workers' diets. Tuberculosis, influenza, syphilis, and dysentery, all infectious diseases, spread rapidly in the overcrowded, poorly insulated, and unsanitary conditions in which the workers were forced to live. 32 The pimples that Joseph detected were probably the product of tertiary syphilis. Before the discovery and wide usage of penicillin after World War II, syphilis sometimes progressed to this stage and its sufferers developed general paralysis of the insane ( GPI) or syphilis of the brain, a serious neurological disorder. Characteristics of this malady included radical personality changes, extravagant and grandiose behavior, delirium, irritability, loss of memory, and gradual dementia. 33 Southern Rhodesian public health authorities were seriously concerned about the dangers of GPI from the first decade of the twentieth century and

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through the 1940s, because they feared that syphilis was widespread among the colony's Mrican population. They believed that Mricans who did have syphilis rarely sought treatment during the primary or secondary stages, known by the Shona as jovela and often treated with traditional medicines. Few Mricans voluntarily sought treatment in the clinics before the appearance of tertiary ulcerations. According to Dr. Fleming's General Annual Report on Syphilis in 1914, tertiary symptoms cleared up rapidly under treatment, "but unfortunately, patients are lost sight of as soon as the grosser skin lesions disappear"; in other words, before the long course of mercury and iodine treatment was concluded. 34 David had left his home, as many men did, to make enough money to pay his taxes and to earn cash for a variety of other needs, old and new. He migrated to the predominantly male world of the mine compounds and, no doubt, shared with other men the women who traveled to the mines seeking income and sometimes selling sex. He may have contracted a "mine marriage" with a young male or a casual mapoto marriage with a woman, but even in these cases where the sex was less casual, the large numbers of males seeking the services of these women and men, 35 and the resultant high turnover rates, constituted distinctly employmentrelated conditions conducive to the spread of syphilis. We do not know how long David had been engaged in the migrant labor economies of central and southern Mrica, nor do we know how much of that time was spent in Southern Rhodesia. Would he have returned to Nyasaland if he had not gone mad? What we do know is that David spent the rest of his life laboring for no pay at Ingutsheni. 36 We can catch a glimpse of this fate, and of David as a socially dead inmate at the asylum, through his hospital file. From 1912 through 1934 his file is devoid of any commentary whatsoever. In 1935, however, Dr. Kenneth Rodger instituted the practice of clinical note taking. As if peeking through a crack in a high wall of concealing silence, we get a glimpse, one single, solitary image, of David from Dr. Rodger's clinical notes. He wrote: "Works well on the sanitary squad. "3 7 During Ingutsheni's early years, Mrican male inmates were almost exclusively migrants like David. Ndiwira was another man from Nyasaland who traveled, along with his brother, to Southern Rhodesia in search of work in the gold mines of northeastern Southern Rhodesia, probably coming through Tete in Portuguese East Mrica just as David had. Unlike David, Ndiwira and his brother were chibaro laborers, contracted by the Rhodesia Native Labor Bureau (RNLB) under a specific term of service. In the hierarchy of labor, they were at the bottom of the heap. They were

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kept in prison-style closed compounds that were surrounded by barbed wire. They lived in corrugated iron sheds that were too hot when it was hot outside, too cold when it was cold outside, and too damp all of the time. Many of the chibaro workers died of pneumonia. 38 Bound to their employers by contracts of service, with very little legal recourse, these men received brutal treatment by white compound managers and black compound police. Their diets were inadequate. On the larger mines, they received an average of three pounds of maize or millet meal per day; one pound of meat, one pound of monkey nuts, and two pounds of beans per week; and one pint of coffee with sugar per shift. 39 On the smaller mines, their rations were even more deficient. Between 1907 and 1908, chibaro laborers in Southern Rhodesia were dying at a rate of 42.68 per thousand. In 1912, the death rate rose to 65.43 per thousand. 4 ° Colonial capitalists, in collusion with members of government, attributed these high death rates to the alleged constitutional weakness of migrants from north of the Zambezi. They argued that the men had not yet become acclimatized to hard work; that the high death rates did not result from insufficient nutrition, damp accommodations, and inadequate health care facilities on the mines, but rather, as in the case of Mrican madness, from the failure of these men to adjust to the demands of civilization. 41 Ndiwira's brother was one of the "northern natives" who died on the Southern Rhodesian mines. Grieving for his brother, Ndiwira feared that he would be the next to be made a muchona (lost man) by death. Not wanting his parents to suffer the loss of two sons on the Southern Rhodesian mines, he deserted his place of employment, desperately seeking to return to his home, if only to die there. The year was 1910. Dependence on chibaro labor was particularly high that year, and the conditions under which they labored were particularly bad. Desertion rates were high and tended to increase in proportion to the contribution made by chibaro recruits to the industry's labor supply. 42 The most common cause of desertion was an individual's desire for better wages and working conditions, and most deserters traveled south for the higher paying positions on the gold mines of the Witwatersrand, 43 but Ndiwira traveled north toward his home. He stopped at Shamva mine, whether to work temporarily, hoping that his status as a deserter would not be discovered, or just briefly in passing through, it is not known. It appears that his grief and fear were so acute that he started to rely on the assuaging effects of dagga (marijuana), losing his focus. According to the RNLB agent who detained him for a contract violation and began to suspect that he was insane, Ndiwira was addicted to dagga. His case was brought to the atten-

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tion of the native commissioner in Darwin who sent him, along with a note, to the medical director in Salisbury. The note read: I have the honor to forward, for your inspection, a Blantyre Native named Ndiwira who is apparently suffering from some mental weakness. I shall be glad if you will take what action you consider necessary in the matter, and if you think the Native fit to be at large, earning his own living, give him a certificate to that effect.

The medical director did not think that he was fit to be at large. Ndiwira was taken to prison and, from there, sent to Ingutsheni. He was not a muchona, however, as he was eventually considered fit for repatriation back to Nyasaland. Not all labor migrants worked on mines. Unlike David and Ndiwira, Morozana, a Tswana man from south of the Limpopo River in Mafeking, was a domestic worker in Salisbury. His employer or "madam," a European named Mrs. Whitehead, told the authorities that Morozana had been "a very good boy before he became queer in the head" and suggested that this transformation in his mental state occurred around the end of October, when she married Mr. Whitehead. Whether her marriage was in any way related to Morozana's mental troubles is not known. No evidence is provided to suggest that he had a crush on her, or would have had reason to be troubled by this development in and of itself. Whatever the trigger, Morozana also felt that something was wrong with him and had begun visiting a "witchdoctor" at Fourth Street near Fife Avenue. His madam found out about his surreptitious visits and reported the matter to the police. The "witchdoctor" was prosecuted under the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 18gg. In the meantime, Mrs. Whitehead arranged for Morozana to visit his relatives in Mafeking, thinking that it would do him good, and that perhaps he would revert to the "very good boy" he had once been. Before she could finalize the arrangements and get him on a train, however, he was arrested for loitering in front of an Indian-owned store. The shop owner stated that Morozana had been loitering there for around a week, and that when he tried to chase him away, he kept returning. Reporting the matter to the police, the shop owner told them that Morozana "has a peculiar look in his eyes. I think he is insane." The arrest set off a chain reaction that led to his admission at Ingutsheni. His was a short stay, however, as Mrs. Whitehead provided the authorities with the address of his relatives in South Mrica. As he was not violent, and Mrs. Whitehead

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seemed to have a high opinion of his family's general moral fiber and was willing to pay the train fare, Morozana was released and sent home. 44 When Morozana's family found out that their son had gone mad while working in Salisbury, they might have felt the way Chikaka's family did when they were told of his attack of madness in Salisbury. They might have blamed the white settler city and culture for their son's downfall. Chikaka was also a domestic worker in Salisbury, but he lived at the nearby Chishawasha mission station run by Jesuits. His mother claimed that he had been in perfect health before he left their home for Salisbury and believed it no coincidence that her great uncle and two great aunts, also residing at Chishawasha, had met similar fates. As soon as Chikaka's parents learned of his attack, they rushed to care for him. His behavior was erratic and out of control and so, with the help of relatives, they tied him up and took him to see a nanga (traditional healer) for treatment. Chikaka broke loose and ran away. The next thing his parents heard, he was in the Salisbury jail. 45 They took a nanga to the jail to see him but were not permitted inside. They were forced to look on helplessly as their son's care fell from their control to that of the colonial system, and to a biomedical logic that privileged rational individualism over familial participation in therapy management and viewed the patient as a self-determining, biologically contrived individual, rather than tied to a collectivity. Within this logic, his disorder was localized to a distinct place within his body and separated from a broader social and psychic environment. 46 When Chikaka's parents protested this reallocation of their son's care into the biomedical framework, they were viewed as testimony to the continued backwardness of the natives. Within the clinician's universe, the persistence of Chikaka's illness was due to his failure to recover, rather than his therapy managers' choices or his clinicians' methodology. "Those who brought me here have not decided yet." These are the words of Poison Lesa after fifteen years at Ingutsheni. Lesa first arrived to Ingutsheni in 194 7, a thirty-five-year-old, married, educated, Christian Bemba man from Mwamba village in Kasama, Northern Rhodesia. His attack of insanity occurred at the Broken Hill zinc mine where he was employed as a "boss boy."47 The occupation of "boss boy" emerged out of the racial political economies on the mines of colonial southern and central Africa, an aspect of the job color bar that mapped white men in skilled and supervisory positions and black men in unskilled or at most semiskilled positions with "boy" in their titles: boss boy, ganger boy, drill boy, and so on. As a position, the role of "boss boy" pitted black men with higher education against other black laborers. Situated between white

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miners who had both racial and supervisory authority over them, and the black rank and file, these men had a reputation for being cruel, for using sjamboks (whips), kicks, punches, and intimidation to get quotas filled, and for lashing out against the workers, all in anticipation of the white supervisors' reactions if quotas were not met. 48 Their roles were thus similar to the black slave drivers in the antebellum southern United States. While there is no way of knowing whether Poison was one of the cruel "boss boys" or not, one can only imagine how stressful his job must have been. Whether this had anything to do with his ending up at Ingutsheni is, of course, unknown. Because Poison's behavior was first observed and defined as mental disorder at the Broken Hill mine hospital, his earliest records were not included in his file at Ingutsheni. What is known is that he was placed on a train and sent to Southern Rhodesia because Northern Rhodesia had no mental hospital of its own. 49 He arrived at Ingutsheni in September 1946. He wore handcuffs as did all new Mrican male admissions, a practice instituted after a bishop saw a suspected lunatic struggling with his captors on a train platform. The bishop suggested that handcuffing suspects would be more humane. 5° As part of the admissions process, Poison was relieved of his clothes and money-one pound and thirteen shillings-before being taken to the male admissions ward. During his examination, the doctor observed that his orientation was fair and that he was able to give a reasonable account of himself, but he said that Poison was also "restless and confused in the ward" and that his body condition was poor. Poison was diagnosed with "Pellagra with psychosis." In other words, even though Poison was a "boss boy" and on a different salary scale than the majority of black workers on the Broken Hill mine, he suffered from a "disease of employment." Pellagra was a nutritional deficiency from which many of Ingutsheni's 1947 admissions suffered. As the next chapter will show, Mrican women from the rural areas of Southern Rhodesia were particularly hard hit by this ailment when the various southern districts suffered from droughts. One can only speculate as to why a relatively privileged man like Poison would suffer from this condition. Poison lived at Ingutsheni from 1947 to 1962, when he died. For the first few years of his confinement there, his file richly documents the struggle waged by his family to regain control over his care. The dialogue took place between Poison's extended family and various officials from different levels ofthe Northern Rhodesian government enlisted to assist them and the doctors at Ingutsheni and dominance of the medical

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metaphor. The therapy managers saw their role as seeking out idioms of treatment to cure their family member. They battled with biomedically trained doctors who believed exclusively in their arsenal of drugs, shock therapies, and psychosurgical treatments, and who placed the onus of recovery on the patient's body, which either responded or failed to respond to treatment. What follows is a series of correspondence between Poison's therapy managers and Ingutsheni's doctors, which sheds considerable light not only on why Poison was sent to Ingutsheni but also on why he never got out again. The first letter was from Jack Makwayo, identified as Poison's brother, in 1947. Makwayo worked in a bicycle repair shop in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia. Dear Sir. I have the honor to write to you again in respect to the above patient [Poison] in your hospital. I should be very grateful if you would inform [me] of Poison Lesa's present condition (illegible). If please you would persuade him to write to me anything despite the fact that what he may write may not be sensible.

Dr. Sonnencher's reply was: [He] sits in a huddled heap all the day taking no interest in his surroundings and not replying to questions. I regret to inform you that he cannot be made to write to anyone although we have asked him to do so.

In 1948, Makwayo wrote: Dear Sir. With reference to your correspondence, I feel that the above person [Poison] does not seem to be improving, and whilst I realize the interest you take in his health improvement I have to ask you if you would accept my request to allow me to come down there and try him some [sic] Mrican medicines. I should be pleased if you would allow me to do so and inform me accordingly. If you accept my coming there, I am prepared to leave Ndola on the 7th of November 1948, so long as you be [sic] kind enough to let me know as soon as possible.

The doctor responsible, Dr. Dawson on this occasion, replied, "I regret that I am not able to accede to your request." Sensing that he might have offended the doctor by asking to try his own medicines, Jack Makwayo took on a more conciliatory tone after that. In his next letter to the doctors at Ingutsheni, Jack framed his question within the doctors' idiom. On December 18, 1948, he asked if his brother "takes any interest in his

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surroundings" or "talks to his friends and answers your questions?" The doctor's response was that Poison was still not fit for discharge. The next step for Poison's family was to enlist the assistance of the local authorities in Northern Rhodesia, including the senior chief at Poison's natal village, ChiefMwamba, who wrote: The man in your hospital still sik [sic]) But sen [sic] him Back [,] his father and mother and brothers they want him very much to come back [.] He will not be well there because the sick[ness] with he hitve [sic] is [an] Mrican sickness. This is the listen [sic] why his father come [sic] to me to let me write a letter to you to let you send that man back to me and I will send him to his father.

In reply, Dr. Dawson stated that Poison was without insight, dull, withdrawn, and unable to make friends. The correspondence went on like this for several years until the letters suddenly stopped. Poison remained at Ingutsheni. While he was considered unfit for discharge to his family's custody, he was not unfit to work on the garden at the hospital superintendent's home. Poison's story illustrates a violent disconnect between his family's conceptualization of the role of therapy providers, and his doctors'. If the doctors at the mental hospital had failed to cure him, his family considered that they should let someone else have a go at it. To the doctors at Ingutsheni, this sentiment was nonsensical. Poison had failed to recover, and he had to recover before they would lei: him out of the closed therapeutic space that could not seem to cure him. He was stuck there.

Guilty but Insane: Murder and Influenza It was not only migration, but also murder and other serious crimes that supplied a steady stream of inmates to Ingutsheni. When men were at home rather than at their places of employment, it was generally an arm of the colonial court apparatus that brought the framework of the state into rural villages. Mental health might not have fallen within the state's orbit had a crime not been committed by a village resident. This is what happened to a man named Hlomani and a village named Makokwe in the southeastern district of Chibi. Hlomani emerged as an object of colonial psychiatric discourse through a combination of factors: he committed a murder, a reportable offense, and his family was terrified of him and sought assistance to restrain him. 5 1 He falls within the 48 out of 151 sam-

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pie Mrican male patients who were not migrant laborers at the time of their arrest. By reviewing testimony and affidavits from the proceedings of Hlomani's murder trial, one is able to glimpse Makokwe village and expose the epistemological differences between Mrican and colonial institutions around the questions of madness, justice, reconciliation, and recovery. The voices of Hlomani's family, along with other witnesses to the suspect's misdeed, give this account its texture and complexity, and reveal how the management of an allegedly insane Mrican was mediated by both Western and Mrican ways of knowing. Hlomani's trial resulted in the verdict of guilty but insane. He was certified insane in 1926 and spent six years at Ingutsheni. It all began one December day in 1926 at Makokwe's kraal in the Chibi district when Hlomani became ill. According to his mother, Chipanga, he began acting strange after he returned to their village from a visit to a nanga about an unspecified ailment. Chipanga did not explain the nature of the ailment, but said only that Hlomani was told that his wife was being unfaithful. His brother, Sengwana, gave a slightly different version of what happened. He said that the nanga told Hlomani that his wife was a witch and had bewitched him. When Hlomani returned with his wife to their kraal, they began to quarrel. He then got a thin stick and assaulted her. Feeling unjustly accused and wanting redress, Hlomani's wife returned to the nanga's village and convinced him to return with her to speak to Hlomani. When they arrived, Hlomani was inconsolable and refused to be treated. At this point, his wife decided to leave for her parents' kraal, leaving both Hlomani and their young daughter behind. Hlomani, already ill, soon became mad, according to his family. On the morning of the fifth day following his wife's departure, Hlomani's daughter awoke and left the hut that she was apparently sharing with her father. She walked to the front of the hut and sat on a stool. Completely naked, her father followed her. He clenched his fists and began to strike his daughter in the face. Chipanga saw what her son was doing and ran over to him, screaming for him to stop. When she attempted to grab the little girl away, Hlomani twisted her arm violently and flung her to the ground. Chipanga got up and ran. By the time she returned with one of Hlomani's brothers, the child was dead. What the child had experienced in that hut during the five days of her mother's absence is not mentioned, but the image of her alone in a hut with the naked and raging Hlomani is troubling, to say the least. Chipanga and the other women prepared the child's body and she was buried that same day. Hlomani remained behind in the village, ranting and raving and setting fire to huts and grain

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bins, his family unable to restrain him. They kept out of his way while awaiting the arrival of yet another nanga whom they hoped would cure him. In the meantime, Hlomani located his daughter's burial site, dug up her body, and flung it into a fast-flowing river. He continued to terrorize the kraal for several days and nights. On the fifth day after the child's burial and the desecration of the grave, Hlomani's brother returned with the nanga. There are two versions of what happened next. Chipanga stated that the doctor got a horn and drew blood from the top of the accused's head. 52 Sengwana described how the doctor rubbed medicines all over Hlomani's body. 5 3 According to mother and brother, it was only after treatment that Hlomani realized what he had done, but he recovered only to become distressed and repentant about having murdered his daughter, and shortly after this, he was arrested and taken to jail. 54 His family had alerted the native commissioner after he killed his daughter, as required by law. They may also have reported him out of desperation, welcoming the assistance that the Europeans might offer in the form of strong sedatives and mechanical restraints. By the time the police arrived, Hlomani was cured, at least as far as his family was concerned, and within the belief in the traditional healer's skills of divination and treatment. To Hlomani's family members, amends had to be made for the murder of the child to their lineage ancestors, not to the colonial state, but things were taken out of their hands. Hlomani was tried for murder within a judicial system whose object was to ascertain his individual guilt or innocence. During the course of the trial, his family made it clear that they attributed his crime to madness, supernaturally caused when he was bewitched. What is more, they considered him to have been cured. No one argued the question of culpability, only the question of responsibility. From the colonial point of view, what needed to be established was whether Hlomani could be held legally responsible for the crime of murder, or whether he was legally insane at the time of its commission. His family asserted that he was mad several days before, during, and several days after the murder, and believed that the responsibility was a collective one, involving the community and the lineage ancestors. Under cross-examination, and after giving the issue much thought, Sengwana provided the court with an alternative theory of causation for his brother's madness. He recalled that, while Hlomani's most recent episode of mental confusion began five days before the murder, his brother had been queer ever since he returned to Makokwe's kraal from a stint of migrant labor at Fort Victoria a few years earlier. This visit co-

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incided with the 1918 influenza epidemic that took a heavy toll in Mrican lives in Southern Rhodesia. As many as 7 percent of all Mrican mine laborers residing in worker compounds lost their lives. 5 5 The mortality rate of Mrican mine employees from all causes for 1917 was 17.39 per thousand in 1917, compared with 107.72 per thousand in 1918. 56 The first affected as the disease spread north from South Mrica were the railway workers in Bulawayo, followed by returning members of the Carrier Corps at the end of World War I. As historian Ian Phimister has pointed out, the spread of infection was directly linked to population density and to factors of mobility. 5 7 Places such as worker compounds, native commissioner and pass offices, schools, and prisons were particularly hard hit. During the months of October and November 1918 alone, seven thousand Mricans caught the virus and died. 5 8 Influenza, while widespread, might accurately be described as another disease of employment in the Southern Rhodesian setting. Hlomani contracted it on the job and fled back to the Chibi Reserve, either to escape the epidemic or to die there. He was one of the thousands who deserted their employment during the epidemic and headed home, spreading the disease further afield. Many died on their way. Contemporary accounts report that it was a common sight to see dead natives lying on the road. Anglican missionary Arthur Shearly Cripps recorded the macabre scenes that filled the landscape, and the horrors of the death cars and mass burials of influenza victims that were reported to him by Mrican witnesses. According to an eyewitness, 'They brought them in a cart, the dead with their stiff feet pushed forth from their blankets.... They cast them out into a great pit ... where none has his own bed, but all lie together and trouble one another and not one of them has rest. "59 The eyewitness described how he and a group of his fellow workers had chosen to flee rather than become just another stiff body in a cart. No doubt, many fled because of the belief that the influenza epidemic was brought to their land by Europeans, and thus workers wanted to get as far away from settler habitations as possible. This was what the people who lived in Manicaland believed. John Chavafambira, the pseudonym given to a migrant/ diviner from Southern Rhodesia who was psychoanalyzed by Wulf Sachs in the 1930s, explained that his uncle, a nanga, told the people that influenza was a disease brought by the whites. He said that the midzimu (ancestors) and Mwari (God) had nothing to do with it. While this may have been his uncle's indirect way of admitting his therapeutic impotence in the face of the disease, it was also a response to the epidemiology of the disease in Southern Rhodesia. Infection rates were highest in places associated with the European economy and its infra-

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structure: prisons, native commissioners' offices, railway sidings, and worker compounds. Chavafambira's uncle attributed the scourge to the unprecedented amount of blood spilled in Africa during World War 1. 60 Another popular theory attributed the disease to the large numbers of restless souls of foreign migrants who died away from home and had not been buried properly. It is not clear how Hlomani interpreted the epidemic of 1918. What is clear is that he decided to desert his place of employment and return home. Segwana said that when Hlomani arrived, he was not wearing any clothes, only a piece of bark cloth around his waist; he left all his things on the path. 61 Hlomani shed all vestiges of the world he had left before he would reenter his village. European medicines had failed to save thousands of his fellow workers, and he did not expect them to save him. He may very well have been correct in this assessment. At the time, the haphazard and desperate assortment of concoctions passing as remedies among employers, missionaries, and doctors included quinine mixed with epsom salts and poultices of paraffin mixed with sugar and axle grease. 62 A nanga treated Hlomani shortly after his return. According to Sengwana, his brother was better for a time. He was never, however, quite the same again and occasionally did strange things, such as yelling for women to get their pots and baskets out of his sight because he could not bear to see them. 63 His eyes were also affected, growing red whenever he had one of his episodes of unusual behavior. During his trial, the prosecutor jumped on the evidence about his red eyes and argued that Hlomani's murderous fit had resulted from excessive consumption of malala wine. According to the prosecutor, this particular wine was known to cause erratic behavior. Segwana, however, became increasingly convinced that his brother's episodic madness was the product of influenza. His theory was supported by Fort Victoria's government medical officer who was called as a witness and admitted that Segwana's theory was plausible and that he himself had encountered numerous cases of mental disorder following and seemingly tied to influenza. He also said that it was possible for symptoms to linger for years. 64 Eight years after the epidemic, Hlomani suffered from a respiratory ailment and, according to Chipanga, often complained of pains on the top of his head and between his shoulders. These symptoms would seem to make the correlation between Hlomani's madness and residual influenza quite plausible. Uncounted others suffered the lingering mental and neurological consequences of this respiratory infection. According to the report com-

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piled by Doctors Shelley and Watson for the neighboring colony ofNyasaland, influenza was a common ailment among inmates at the Zomba mental asylum. Out of their sample of eighty-four patients, influenza was the third most common infirmity, following malaria and hookworm. Influenza preceded pellagra in frequency as an organic cause of mental disorder.65 They found postinfluenza depressive reaction to be associated with transient encephalitis, an inflammatory process involving the brain. 66 While it is safe to say that following an acute illness such as malaria, influenza, or pneumonia, a patient was often confused, disoriented, and restless, and may have suffered from delusions and hallucinations, 67 the lingering effects of such acute ailments remains speculative. However, in the case of Hlomani such a relationship was ultimately accepted, even above the prosecutor's theory about malala wine. Instead of the death sentence or a lengthy stint in prison, Hlomani was sent to Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum. Ironically, at least from his family's point of view, he had already been cured. Back into the colonial establishment he went and there he stayed for the next six years. He was released under an executive order in 1932, after the attorney general was satisfied that he had been fully cured. 68 What is interesting about the Hlomani case is how courtroom deliberations functioned as an extra-therapeutic diagnostic session. This is particularly poignant in the Hlomani example, as his family was actively engaged in their roles as therapy managers even inside the institution of colonial law. Within the courthouse, during cross-examination, one gets the impression that his family felt themselves to be, as they were in fact, entirely instrumental in the developments in this case. Not only were they mediators between their loved one and his therapy, but they were also mediators between their loved one and the law. Ultimately, however, the colonial court's judgment held sway. Hlomani's defense was moving in that it contained a critique of the civilization that had brought so much sickness and murder into communities. In fact, one could argue that colonial civilization and its epistemologies were as much on trial as Hlomani was. Ultimately, however, a colonial judge held the gavel.

Missionary, Prophet, Madman? Matthew Zwimba's route to Ingutsheni was via the colonial missionary establishment and his publicly declared war against it. He was not just another unknown laborer, as were the vast majority of Ingutsheni inmates;

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he was a minor celebrity. A missionary prophet, Zwimba locked horns with a major arm of European civilization in Mrica, the mission church establishment, by challenging their hegemonic control over the dissemination of Christianity in Mrica. Winning Mrican minds to Christ, or winning them to a colonizer-friendly version of Christ that did not attack the temple or rail against the hypocrites, this was the missionary enterprise in Mrica, particularly after the Bible had been translated into various Mrican vernaculars. At that point, Mricans began to claim authority over its translation and assertions of religious independence rose. Missionaries struggled to limit the Mrican converts' biblical exposure to only the pacifying and suppressive elements of the gospel, filtering out the earthly liberation themes, lest these create confusion in the minds of Mricans. They fought to ensure and maintain the white missionary's role as mediator ofthe message. Of course, there were missionaries who promoted a liberation theology, such as the antiracist and socialist Anglican priest and author of Africa for Africans, Arthur Shearly Cripps. Another was joseph Booth, the man who tutored Elliot Kamwena and john Chilembwe, one a leader of the Watch Tower movement that preached the coming of the millennium and the departure of the whites, and the other the founder of an independent church and leader of a rebellion. These missionaries, however, were the exception rather than the rule. Most were like those of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society: threatened when an Mrican convert began to think for himself. The fear of Matthew Zwimba's dangerous black mind led to his admission at Ingutsheni. Matthew had challenged the presentation of Christianity, like civilization, for the benefit of the colonizing project. Mission Christianity was imagined and promoted as a beacon in Mrica's perpetual night, drawing to itself untamed heathen souls and refashioning them into converts of promise, like Matthew Zwimba had been before he turned rebellious. While all the other case studies in this chapter had some background of migrant labor, Matthew did not. He did, however, move from place to place as an itinerant preacher of the gospel. He founded an independent church, the Shiri Chena, or Original Church of the White Bird, in 1915 and, in his refusal to be subjugated, became a well-known example of a small but growing group of religiously independent Mrican men and women who were perceived as highly threatening by the colonial and missionary establishments. During and following World War I in southern and central Mrica, independent Mrican thinkers were both founding churches and igniting new political movements. Mricans were searching

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for new communities capable of representing their changing lives and interests, along with their deepening critique of white supremacy and colonial rule. 69 Matthew Zwimba's story highlights some of the challenges and obstacles that men of his class and education experienced under colonial domination. His admission to Ingutsheni illustrates how proximity to European habitation tended to expose people to observation and the suspicion of being dangerous and disordered. His case also demonstrates how the asylum was sometimes used as a repository for socially and politically dangerous Mrican minds. The Wesleyan missionaries had every reason to believe that young Matthew Zwimba was a good investment, someone likely to become their cultural ambassador among Mricans. He was the son of Chief Chigaga, a loyalist during the 1896 uprising who assisted the British against the Shona rebels and was rewarded, once the country was pacified, by being appointed paramount chief of the Zwimba Reserve. Like other paramount chiefs, Chigaga received his salary and authority from the European conquerors and was expected to provide laborers and taxes in return. The local native commissioner relied on his warnings about anything untoward brewing. Chief Chigaga sent his sons Matthew and Mishek to the local American Methodist Episcopal mission school. He was a forward-looking man and it was clear to him that the era of his grandfathers had passed, and that the victorious European approach was the horse on which to place his bets. He wanted his sons to gain cultural capital by being educated in their ways. Matthew Zwimba was ChiefChigaga's eldest son and seems initially to have wanted the things his father wanted. He showed an aptitude for the mission teachings and became a catechist and teacher at the mission school. Fluent in both English language and European dress, 70 he was en route to a life of success and influence (within the limited frame permitted to Mricans, of course), and sought to use his influence in the interests of his people. As the eldest son of a paramount chief, he expected to be a leader among his people someday. Unlike leaders before him, he sought to accomplish this through Christianity. Around 1912, however, his plans were derailed. The upper administration at the American Methodist Episcopal church, fearing that his influence was too strong, transferred Matthew to Gatooma, a small town in the southwest. To make matters worse, they placed him under the tutelage of a harsh and controlling supervisor who sensed Matthew's penchant for independent thought and attempted to rein him in. As Matthew had his own ideas about the purpose of his education, the two were soon at loggerheads.

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The more he resisted ecclesiastical racism and paternalism, the more determined the missionaries became. Eventually, native administration authorities became involved and sought to still his budding Ethiopianism, the term to describe a combination of religious independence, black nationalism, the desire for an Mrica for Mricans, and the active rejection of white hegemony. He was dismissed from the American Methodist Episcopal church which, in combination with the colonial state, sought to prevent him from gaining an audience among his people. Matthew Zwimba first encountered the Holy Spirit around 1907. His story was typical of a prophet's calling: he became ill one day and was on the verge of death, when the Holy Spirit spoke to him. The spirit directed him to the Shiota Reserve and instructed him to establish his mission there. For reasons unknown, however, Matthew did not heed these instructions immediately. Instead he wandered in exile, through a metaphorical wilderness, like the Old Testament Israelites. He wandered for eight years, taking on odd jobs to support himself, in frequent conflict with the law, and in and out of jail. In his own words, he fell into many temptations.71 Then, one day, he decided that he was ready to obey the Holy Spirit and set out to start his mission. Matthew began his church a year after the prediction by Elliot Kenan Kamwena, the leader of the Watchtower Movement (Kitawala) in Nyasaland, that the world would end and a new one begin, where Mricans would rule themselves. The prospect was so appealing that Kamwana baptized more than ten thousand people in hopeful anticipation of the day when Europeans would leave Mrica. In 1915, Matthew founded Shiri Chena, or the Original Church of the White Bird Mission, the first Shona independent church to be established. Once Matthew accepted his calling, his personality changed. He was more confident, focused, and in his mind, pure. This purity of purpose made him an even greater threat to the authorities and to their perception of social order. He demanded to be treated like other missionaries who were given land for their missions and allowed to preach the gospel and seek converts. He refused to accept the double standard that was being imposed on him and his mission, and engaged in a one-man campaign of protest. Having developed a reputation as an agitator, he fell under the watchful eyes of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), who followed his every move and circulated frequent reports on his actions. The colonial and mission authorities accused Matthew of spreading discontent among Mricans by telling them that their cattle were dying because of the colonizers' forced dipping policies. Not surprisingly, his re-

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quest for legal status as a mission was refused. Moreover, he was told that he could not preach or teach independently. Villagers were warned not to listen to him or attend his gatherings. 72 This emboldened him further, and he predicted thatMricans would soon rise up and run the Europeans out of their country as they had done before. 73 He was referring here to the mythical and ancient white people, perhaps Phoenicians, whom the colonizers credited with building the Zimbabwe Ruins and exploiting their gold reserves, and who had vanished without a trace, according to the claims of Theodore Bent and white Rhodesians. 74 As an educated man, Matthew had heard this popular colonial theory of the ruins' origins. While he did not challenge the premise of white origins, he did place a militant spin on the cause of their departure and then used the mythical expulsion as a historical precedent of things to come. He refused to bow to the authority of the Europeans, stating that God had granted him authority. Matthew wondered out loud if they believed that their power superceded His. But there can be no shepherd without his flock, no missionary without his converts, and the colonial authorities were determined that Zwimba would have no converts. Incensed by the native department's tactics of intimidation, Zwimba wrote to the native commissioner and challenged, Probably you envy me because I want to be a master for myself in so great work, but don't think so, for he that ordained me to do this work is greater than the European supervision that you want me to be under him. God"s spirit can direct me well than a personal direct; even though you despise me, yet he does not, he cares for me, as he cares for some other creatures. He has chosen me out of darkness to be his servant, and a leader of his people in the way of his salvation, truth and to fulfill his ordination, but you want me to please men than God. 75

Becoming more militant by the day, the son of Chief Chigaga compiled a list of rebels killed in the 18g6 uprising that his father had fought against and made them the saints and martyrs of his church. He thus appealed to the precolonial past, displacing European authority as bringers of Christianity, and crafting instead a Christian message that communed with both Mrican tradition and Mrican independence. 76 For this, Matthew was imprisoned for spreading seditious ideas. 77 He escaped, but was redetained every so often for infringements such as refusing to pay his taxes and sending the administration an official declaration of war. A nonconformist, fired-up, and perhaps fanatical, but a madman? The state's constant harassment eventually marginalized Matthew from the

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role he had set for himself. In other words, he was not pursuing his missionary vocation. Between 1917 and the early 1920s, it seems that he got married, started a family, and set .himself up as a storekeeper near Gatooma. The authorities probably thought that they heard the last of him, but his agitation revived and in the mid 1920s he moved to the Shiota Reserve and resumed his missionary activities, gathering some of his old parishioners and seeking new ones. 78 Matthew was a man who simply could not become what Frantz Fanon described as "the colonial type"a docile and domesticated native. 79 As Matthew Zwimba would no doubt have seen it, the Holy Spirit would not let him. While the missionary authorities resumed their efforts to quiet him down through intimidation, isolation, and punishment, Matthew was gaining followers. In 1928, a combination of missionaries and native administrators decided to construct Matthew as both a nuisance and a madman. This tactic began with a letter from Reverend Percy W. Searle of the Waddilove Training Institution. Searle wrote that: Matthew Zwimba visited this Mission Station a few weeks after I took over from Mr. White. It was April 2gth I believe. He caused such a stir among the pupils that I made enquiries about him at once and afterwards ordered him off the station. Although accustomed to European dress, he wore on this occasion a shirt tied by the sleeves about his neck, and a large linen skirt. His chest and back were naked except for the shirt. His conversation with me on this occasion was disjointed, but I put it down to the fact that he understood little English. I have been told since that he understands English well.

A week later, Zwimba returned to Waddilove. Searle was irritated and demanded that Zwimba leave the evangelists' village immediately and claimed that "his visits were not approved of by the best of my people. "80 On another occasion, Zwimba went to the native commissioner's office where he told the guards that he wore a red cloth on his head and kept his body bare, with the exception of a shirt hanging on his back, as an omen that certain things would come to pass. He went on to tell the native commissioner that he had been appointed ruler of the world, both black and white, and that the chief native commissioner had already acknowledged his supremacy. According to the native commissioner, Matthew then complained that "the black people were causing trouble by not acknowledging the Divine Power granted him by God and his injunctions to me were to see that the black people listened to him and [stopped call-

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ing] him mad as some people were doing." He called for the compulsory conversion to Christianity of all men, and for the compulsory "baring of the ears" for all women. Zwimba gave the native commissioner a document that he said the high commissioner had sent to him, and which he was showing to the natives in support of his teachings and arguments. Mter examining the document, the native commissioner stated that he found that it was a pass issued by the jailer of the SalisburyJail to the Pass Officer at Salisbury. 81 Was Matthew delusional, using persuasion, taking advantage of the illiterate, or all of the above? Matthew Zwimba was again taken to the Salisbury jail as he had been many times before, but this time he was also observed for signs of insanity. The warden, Stephanus Helmans Geherdes Kok, watched Zwimba over a period of several weeks and swore before the magistrate that he was a person of unsound mind. Kok claimed that he arrived at this determination after observing the following signs: "He has remained quiet since his admission to gaol and spends most of his time during the day reading a Bible. He rarely speaks to anyone unless spoken to. He talks about his having been made Chief High Commissioner for Southern Rhodesia and that he has changed the name of the town of Salisbury to that ofJerusalem. "82 His claim that God had made him Chief High Commissioner, in other words the highest ranking man in all of British Mrica, meant simply that he was not obligated to obey any white man in Mrica. To claim a 'Jerusalem" was a common feature of independent Zionist churches in Mrica (which is an accurate classification of the Church of the White Bird, with its strongly Ethiopianist leader). 'Jerusalem" conveys a spiritual and ideological link between adherents of his church and the Hebrew Israelites in their flight from Canaan, their years in the wilderness, and what is variously called Zion, the City of God, and the New Jerusalem. Zwimba utilized the Old Testament, particularly the plight and salvation of the Israelites, to make sense of the mixed-up world in which he lived. It seems that the only happy endings that he and many of his Zionist peers were able to dream up at the time were eschatological, but while other Mrican prophets identified their home villages or mission sites as their Zions or their New Jerusalems, Matthew named Salisbury, the capital city and center of the colonizers' government as the Shiri Chena's New Jerusalem. Matthew was examined by Dr. Thomas Dick McLaren of Marandellas and diagnosed as suffering from delusions, specifically the delusion that he had been appointed high commissioner for Rhodesia by a divine message, and that Salisbury was the New Jerusalem and the future seat of his

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government. The doctor stated that this delusion filled Matthew's mind with confused religious ideas, and that he therefore required detention and treatment. A second medical opinion came from Dr. Paton Martin, who basically repeated McLaren's observations. Zwimba was certified insane on July 5, 1928, and admitted to Ingutsheni on July 19, 2928. He had become adept at escaping white attempts to restrain him, and Ingutsheni proved no exception. Shortly after his admission into the hospital, he escaped, and there is no indication of his ever having been readmitted. 83 Matthew Zwimba was rebelling in a different way from other African male admissions at Ingutsheni. There were certainly other men on the wards who had been diagnosed with religious delusions or even religious mania, but few had so persistently and so articulately waged ideological battle against the foundations of white supremacy. Few had publicly appropriated Christian symbols in an attempt at directing their skills and training, their divinely appointed duty in his case, in what they considered to be the interests of their people. The state authorities called him delusional. Perhaps they truly believed that he was. He did make some very wild claims for those not already inhabiting "Last Days" eschatology. However, the missionary and colonial authorities were alarmed less by the bizarre aspects of Matthew's pronouncements than by the social and political critiques and out-and-out nationalism interlaced within them. Even when the colonizers' motives were not as transparent as they were in Zwimba's case, the designation of "delusional" is always contentious in a cross-cultural environment. When da"es a belief become a delusion? 84 Who is to be the judge? Certainly, many beliefs are considered acceptable within the realm of religion that are not acceptable within other contexts. The colonial establishment did sometimes seek to determine whether behaviors or beliefs that seemed strange to them might be consistent with native belief systems. For instance, in Hlomani's case the colonial authorities exhibited a willingness to confer with the suspect's family in determining whether or not his acts were beyond the bounds of normal behavior within his indigenous milieu. 85 Matthew, however, had moved into the realm of European paradigms of logic and reason, outside the realm of the "Native Type" delusion, and his beliefs were not harmless to the colonial social order, nor was his desire to spread those beliefs. Matthew was the predecessor of the many Africans who, rebelling against colonial order in later years, would be presented as sufferers of persecutory delusions. Some colonial observers, no doubt, saw Matthew as a confirmation of the timeworn theory attributing African madness to levels of

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exposure to European civilization. While he was not a migrant laborer, he was the product of the mission and sought to engage with that institution in a way that served his interests. This is when his so-called maladjustment to culture contact and resulting mental unbalance set in. However, Matthew, like Hlomani, would probably consider that, by the time that the state certified him as insane, he had already recovered. Many Mrican men at Ingutsheni suffered from diseases of employment and became mentally confused as a result. Their narratives raise questions about whether they should have been in an asylum at all: because they were rebelling and this, after all, was a sensible thing to do, as in the case of Matthew; because they were already cured, as in the case of Hlomani; because they had not been cured and their therapy managers wanted to seek alternative treatment for them or to at least have them back home, as in the case of Poison Lesa. Each of these cases provides insight into psychic damage caused by Western economic, cultural, and biomedical imperialism, described as "civilization" by the colonizers. All expose colonial life and society and how these related to the creation of madmen for the psychiatric hospital. Gender, race, and the spatial economy of the colony played a major role in the construction of madmen and women in Southern Rhodesia. Mrican men were formally incorporated into the colonial political economy and Mrican women were not; this fact not only affected their relative numbers at the mental hospital, but also the way they got there. This chapter has shown how Mrican men often got to Ingutsheni because of their interactions with the colonial state and its auxiliary institutions and partners. The following chapter will show how Mrican women, on the other hand, were sent to Ingutsheni precisely because they were not party to such institutional relationships and were instead, generally, when seen, constructed as stray or wandering, diseased or disordered.

4· Women Interrupted Traveling Women, Anxious Men, and Ascriptions of Madness

What the "mentally ill" have lost is not their bodily health, nor their virtue, but their reason: their conduct simply does not "make sense." Insanity ascriptions, on this view, are made when behavior does not seem accountable by any plausible motive, or when belief seems to be quite unfounded: they may be ruled out simply by providing a credible motive for action or a reasonable ground for belief. D.

lNGLEBY,

"The Social Construction of Mental Illness," 1982

In the early months of 1937, two policemen patrolling through the Fort Victoria district of Southern Rhodesia saw a young Mrican woman traveling alone. Concerned that she might be a runaway trying to evade parental authority, an offence under the new Native Registration and Accommodation Act of 1936, and knowing that she was not where she belonged, they called for her to stop. She kept on walking. When she started to run, they ran after her, caught her, and placed her in handcuffs. 1 The young woman who did not want to stop was called Matombi. 2 The police guessed her age to be around seventeen years old. They knew nothing more about her, including where or to whom she belonged, because she refused to tell them. That the authorities suspected that something might be wrong with Matombi's state of mind is apparent from the fact that they took her to the hospital for observation, rather than to the prison. Moreover, the policemen told their superiors that they had "found her stranded," which, according to the dictionary, means to be "in an abandoned and isolated or inaccessible position; left behind in difficulties ... without a way out. "3

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They did not say that she had been foiled, stopped, or interrupted on some journey or in pursuit of a goal. Her refusal to cooperate was not ascribed to her defiance or her resistance, but rather to her suspected disability. It did not seem to occur to them that she might have had a plausible motive for leaving home and a reasonable fear of returning. Instead, they assumed that something must have been wrong with her, and that something was within her. Since it was her body's presence that disrupted the colonial agents' sense of order, it (her body) was the source (and site) of disorder. From the perspective of the colonizers of Southern Rhodesia, the word stranded was applicable both to her physical and her mental disposition. This characterization was not created in a vacuum but emerged out of a set of assumptions held by white Southern Rhodesians at that time, a conflation of ideas aboutMrican women's mental capacities and their tenuous relationship to colonial space. Matombi, which may not have been her real name, crossed a line that day. By traveling outside the native reserves and native purchase areas where Mrican women were supposed to remain to reproduce male wage labor power and subsidize capital's wage labor bill, 4 she found herself in the situation that anthropologist Mary Douglas describes as "matter out of place,"5 and literary scholar Gayatri Spivak describes as a "space displaced."6 Her movement into colonial urban space was a movement into terra prohibitio for a single and unescorted black woman, and the catalyst for her body's incorporation into the world of colonial concepts, categories, and biomedical discourse. To borrow from Michel Foucault's theory on the formation of objects of discourse, Matombi emerged on a surface that fell within a "grid of specifications," and the "authorities of delimitation" in Fort Victoria (today's Masvingo) thought that she might have been mad. 7 Once detected, she was like a fly in a spider's web; she found it hard to get out again. Matombi tried hard to get out and resume her journey. She ran away at every opportunity, but she was always "found" again by a state authority, vigilant citizen, 'or obedient subject. At one point, she managed to get a considerable distance from town before a European truck driver "found [her] wandering along the road" and captured her, presumably because she looked out of place, and took her to the police. The government medical officer (GMO) who examined her on her return observed that she seemed miserable "unless roaming alone in the veldt. "8 Rather than the sign of her healthy distaste for captivity, he considered this a sign of possible disorder. The GMO's pathologization of the young, traveling woman resembles the habit of some slave doctors in the Antebellum era

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in the United States who pathologized runaway slaves. Enslaved black men and women who kept running away from confinement in the southern United States were diagnosed with the pathological condition of drapetomania; literally, "flight from home madness."9 The GMO of Fort Victoria "signed the necessary documents" and Matombi was admitted to Ingutsheni. She was one of the ninety-three Mrican women who were admitted to lngutsheni during the year of 1937; and one of the approximately seventy-one women who occupied a grossly overcrowded Mrican female ward that was designed to accommodate fifty at any given time. 10 Along with these women she shared a single bathroom with all of the hospital's black female staff: one bathroom for over eighty women. This ward was notorious for being noisy and unmanageable. Indeed, it was described by hospital and public health authorities as the noisiest and hardest to manage ward at the hospital. But what was the nature of this noise? Was the "noisiness" about which the medical superintendent complained in his annual reports to the medical director due to the women's numerous pleas for help, as their living conditions were so miserable? Was this perception of noise because the colonial doctors refused to disaggregate the women's expressions of distress from each other, transforming them into a cacophonous sound, a loud, ignorable noise? Fortunately for Matombi, she did not stay there for long. Mter only a few months, the hospital's medical superintendent, Dr. Kenneth M. Rodger, and the colony's secretary oflaw, N. A. Devine, decided there was "no satisfactory reason for keeping her [there]." Despite the 1936 Mental Disorders Act's liberal definitions, including provision for the temporary involuntary detention of people with disorders that were "not so serious as to be certifiable, but nonetheless distressing to their social adequacy,"11 Dr. Rodger decided that she was "apparently normal, mentally." The secretary oflaw agreed, stating that "her problems seems to be that she is out of control. "12 The process of defining madness and disorder or distinguishing madness from other forms of social disorder in Mrican women was particularly complicated for the colonial officials in Southern Rhodesia. As Megan Vaughan has observed in her work on ascriptions of madness in colonial Nyasaland (Malawi), the colonial subject was "already Other," 13 and so the colonizer had to determine whether he was observing the normal abnormality of the colonized or the abnormal abnormality of a sick Mrican. Mrican women were particularly tricky for the colonizer because they were the Other's Other and, rarely being employed, had almost no

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access to even the limited fanakalo style of communication that took place between African male workers and their European male and female employers.14 Thus, to the vast majority of settlers and authorities in Southern Rhodesia, African women remained a series of crude stereotypes. As Sander Gilman observes, sexuality and mental ability (or the lack of it) are two of the most common markers of difference within Western discourses.15 As we will see, black women in Southern Rhodesia were usually represented as subnormal or abnormal on both counts. Even though the psychiatrist and a government minister decided that Matombi was "mentally normal," at least by "raw" native female standards, they still believed she posed a problem. To the secretary oflaw, "her real trouble" was that she was "out of control," by which he meant that she was not under the control of a male guardian. Thus, while he did not think that she needed medications or access to the very limited therapeutic treatment facilities at Ingutsheni, he did believe that she needed discipline.16 Matombi was removed from Ingutsheni, but not freed from custody. She was sent back to the Fort Victoria jail where her dance of escape and capture continued until one day "some man claiming to be her father" arrived at the prison and took her away. The native commissioner of Fort Victoria predicted, however, that she would soon be wandering that way again. 17 Matombi is one of the forty-five African women whose psychiatric case files and police records were reviewed for this chapter. All of these women were admitted to the lngutsheni Mental Hospital in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, sometime between the years 1932 and 1954, and all spent anywhere from a few months to the rest of their lives there. The majority of their case files reflect the tension apparent in Matombi's story: that between an African woman's refusal to stay put or to cooperate with other people's restrictions on her body and mobility, and the growing tendency during the 1930s and 1940s for colonial authorities to interpret resistance to order(s) as disorder, and spatial dislocations as symptoms. In twenty-eight of these files, there is clear evidence that the authorities considered most of the women in question to be out of place. Comparing African women's routes to Ingutsheni with those of the African men, discussed in the previous chapter, one finds that, while in both cases, detention was linked to a suspect's mobility and location on the European colonizer's spatial, social, and economic map, there were many differences. While the previous chapter argues that African men were more likely than African women to be admitted to the colonial mental hospital because of their formal incorporation into colonial institu-

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tional frameworks, this chapter argues that Mrican women were admitted for precisely the opposite reason: their lack of incorporation. In the Southern Rhodesian authorities' conceptual landscape of the 1930s, the specter of an Mrican woman traveling on her own incited concern and was increasingly medicalized. Through narrative reconstruction of women's routes to the mental hospital, along with broad thematic discussions, I will explore the ways in which regulatory and disciplinary discourses link up with the mechanisms of colonial boundary enforcement and of racial and patriarchal privilege, converging over the bodies of the Mrican women sent to Ingutsheni. I do not challenge the reality of mental illness in colonial Southern Rhodesia. While Matombi may simply have been "out of control" as the secretary of law suggested, many of the women whose case files I review here probably were mentally and/ or emotionally unstable. Something was certainly tormenting Tafuba, who was admitted to lngutsheni in 1941 as patient number 1464 after she terrorized her village by raving incomprehensibly and burning down huts and grain bins. 18 Nonetheless, the fact is that the vast majority of Mrican women who were actually suffering from mental or emotional disorders, from what the Shona called kupenga and the Ndebele called ukuhlanya, never came within the colonizer's view. They remained in the rural reserves where they were treated by nangas or sangomas. They were treated in the growing number of spirit churches, or they simply wandered through the bush like magandanga, a Shona word for wild men and women. How did the disturbances to the colonial order by Mrican women vary from those of Mrican men, white men, or white women? Which of the tropes of danger were ignited in these cases? When were their movements and behaviors perceived as disabilities and medicalized? What were the triggering events? The answers to these questions are linked to the broader phenomena of colonial industrialization, white and male supremacy, the racial and gendered politics of indirect rule, ideologies of public and private, and black female economic and spatial displacement. Detection of Mrican female insanity was linked to their mobility. Another broad question has to do with who these women were and an even more difficult question is where were they going? Is there any way of accessing their views and objectives, their subjectivities, other than through the colonial doctors' pathologizing clinical notes? Even if one accepts that these women were truly insane, that insane people lack reason, and that reason can be defined and applied cross-culturally, the Mrican women who were detected while mobile and suspected of mad-

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ness had their reasons. To get at these reasons, I draw on Michel de Certeau's discussion of "spaces of enunciation" and the "rhetoric of walking." Accepting his premise that walking appropriates a topography the way speaking appropriates a language, 19 I try to listen to the feet of the subaltern women who appear in the records as voiceless bodies, aimlessly walking from place to place until suspected of madness and taken to the mental hospital. The colonial officials-doctors and police-rarely if ever considered that these women had been on a journey or in pursuit of something, whether tangible or elusive, nor did they imagine that these women might have been actively evading victimization. The women's agency was occluded and their voices excluded in the official recordmaking process. I listen to these women's feet because few bothered to listen to, believe, and record what they said with their voices.

Stereotypes of the Other's Other Mrican women were mapped into the sociospatial world of colonial Zimbabwe as the Other's Other. They were difference to the second power. As a group, they occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder, and if colonial geographic, physical, and ideological spaces are imagined as a series of concentric circles, Mrican women fell in the outermost circle. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that in pre-World War II Southern Rhodesia, Mrican women were not employed, at least, not to any significant degree, even in European homes as domestic servants. When a commission of inquiry was established in 1932 to investigate the advisability of employing Mrican females as domestic servants, the majority of white respondents opposed the idea. Many stated that the women were too "raw" and too backward for such work. In the words of a Salisbury housewife named Mrs. Chataway: "Our girls in Southern Rhodesia are mentally inferior to other natives. They are merely accustomed to being regarded as goods and chattels. It would take a long time to develop sufficient selfrespect to enable them to be employed with safety. "20 Such characterizations of Mrican women as mentally and morally inferior to others, including their men, were common. Mrs. Chataway, however, does seem to have had an agenda. Her reference to Mrican women's lack of "self respect," for the European madams of that time, translated to mean that they could not be trusted to resist effectively the sexual advances of the European madam's husband. 21 Black women were represented as having stronger sexual appetites and weaker sexual restraint and control than

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white women. As scholars like Anne Stoler note, stereotypes of black female sexual difference were central to the operations of colonial power vis-a-vis the construction of racial boundaries and, more particularly, the maintenance of white male supremacy. 22 Stoler argued that the more Europeans perceived the black women as promiscuous, the more they perceived (or at least projected) the white woman as chaste, superior, and in need of protection. For centuries, Europeans extracted benefits from what they perceived, or claimed to perceive, to be Mrican woman's looseness and sexual availability. Consensual sex between white men and black women was not prosecuted and non consensual sex or rape of black women by white men was rarely believed. White males were exempted from the colonial "perils" associated with interracial sex: "Black Peril" and "White Peril." The more popular, "Black Peril," referred to a range of sexual actions and innuendo directed at white women by black men, although the charge was always rape or attempted rape. 23 ''White Peril," according the Sergeant Brundell of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), referred to the consensual sexual relations between white women and black men either commercially or noncommercially. 24 But while sex between European men and Mrican women was not a prohibited interracial sexual interaction, the burden fell on Mrican women whose bodies could be regulated in other ways. 25 By the 1930s, when Southern Rhodesian authorities saw Mrican women out of the control of a male guardian, they assumed that they were loose women. Put differently, when they saw Mrican women unaccompanied by a male guardian, they suspected that they were loose women. Some white male authorities candidly admitted that they saw a value in the presence of single black women, arguing, as did R. Lanning, the superintendent of natives in Bulawayo, "the acknowledged prostitute is somewhat of a safeguard to native men's instincts." 26 In other words, single Mrican women in and near towns, presumed to be prostitutes providing sexual and domestic services to Mrican workers, protected European women from the so-called Black Peril. Lanning argued that any wholesale removal of single Mrican women from the urban areas would thus increase the risk to white women. So, when he was presented with a list of seventy-nine Mrican females said to be in the Bulawayo municipal location without a husband's or other male guardian's consent, he selected seventeen whom he described as "young Matabele girls ... and gave them an order to return to their kraals within a week." The rest, he decided, "should not be interfered with as they had been prostitutes for

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some considerable time, or were on bona fide visits, or continually living with one native only." 27 Other Europeans, particularly the owners of industries, saw these women's presence as stabilizing the Mrican male wage labor force. In perceiving their value to capitalist enterprise, scholars such as Charles Van Onselen present single Mrican women in towns as tools of colonial capitalist interests. Van Onselen describes them as "parasites within the Black working class," "simply one more level of social control" of the black wage labor force, and a "catalyst of conflict among poorer workers" that owed "their only allegiance to the highest bidder. "28 Van Onselen assumed that these single women about whom he wrote were external to the black working-class community, indeed, that they were external to all community, and that since they were beneficial to capital, must be the objects of capital. But these women were responding to the realities of the industrial economy: they were not employed as wage laborers, and the wage labor force living in predominantly male urban spaces created a market for their sexual and domestic services among both black laborers and their white supervisors. Indeed, this latter group, white supervisors and others, were the less acknowledged consumers of the sexual and domestic services that some black women sold in the towns and mine compounds. Moreover, the authorities recognized this too as a safeguard to European women against rape. Examples of European male sexual fraternization with Mrican women are abundant in the Criminal Investigation Department's immorality files, labeled "Secret." One instance involved a European railway worker named Charles and an Mrican "nurse girl" named Hester. According to this and many similar files, the European saw the young Mrican woman and sent "his boy" to proposition her. In this case, Hester is said to have asked her mother's permission and, after Charles promised that he would not deceive her, the two began a sexual relationship. As part of their contractual arrangement, Hester and her mother received money in exchange for the sexual and domestic services provided to Charles. The fact that the sexual encounters between the two required the wearing of certain costumes and the use of props was of particular concern to the CID. In one letter that Hester supplied to the CID, Charles wrote: I hope you haven't broken those corsets yet-but you said you wouldn't wear them. I wonder if you have-don't forget I shall want them when I come in and also the other things ... I wish you were here kiddie but there's nowhere you could live yet. Be a good girl and don't forget I'll be

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along in a few days ... tell me all you have been doing and everything that's happening-don't be afraid to tell me everything you do. Burn this letter and don't show it to anyone.

What is interesting about this case is that once Hester's mother determined that they had earned enough money to purchase a stand on the Bulawayo Location and start anew, she discontinued her relationship with Charles and, it seems, may have even turned him over to the CID. Matombi was not suspected of prostitution. Her demeanor did not lead the patrolmen or the other authorities to this conclusion. The process of deciding what they would do with her would have been much more straightforward had they been operating under this assumption. The authorities could have chosen between two options: chasing her away, out of the colonial town and back toward the reserves, or sending her to the clinic for a venereal disease examination. This practice had become compulsory for Mrican women seeking access to many of the urban spaces of the colony and was known as chibheura, literally, "open up" examinations, by the locals in the Fort Victoria area where Matombi was apprehended. If she had been found to be infected, they might have returned to their earlier option of chasing her away, or they might have sent her to an isolation hospital or lazaretto for treatment. If she was found to be disease free, they might have allowed her to proceed to the urban centers to service working men, periodically checking on her venereal disease status through compulsory examinations. 29 Mobile Mrican women were so defined by their perceived licentious sexuality that mine compounds and various municipalities directed influx regulations at the women's genitals. In other words, instead of passes, or situpa, the women carried certificates of their venereal health. In addition to sexuality, mental capacity was a salient marker of difference within Western societies and their colonial outposts. What was interesting within the colonies of British central Mrica was the degree to which Mrican women were characterized as normally abnormal, as mentally challenged and unbalanced from the start, even without the "civilization" that was needed to unbalance the minds of native men. 30 According to the Southern Rhodesian settlers like Mrs. Chataway, Mrican women had inferior brains as well as inferior self-respect. One native commissioner argued that they were "centuries behind [their men] in civilization," and unfit for "any measure of freedom" as their instincts were "almost purely animal. "31 Another native commissioner opined that the Mrican woman's brain was "not sufficiently balanced to allow her to think

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and act ... for herself." Thus, he felt the state should encourage and assistMrican men, "within all reasonable bounds," to exercise control over their womenfolk. 32 While Mrican women's minds were characterized as inferior, they were at the same time represented as being less susceptible to mental affliction. Indeed, there seemed to be an inverse relationship between mental capacity and mental health where the Mrican woman was concerned. While no one knew the actual incidence or distribution of insanity in Southern Rhodesia, the authorities believed, on the basis of dominant stereotypes, that Mrican women were rarely affected. When evidence was sought to support this assumption, it was obtained by counting the male and female patients incarcerated in the local asylum. For instance, in 1929 the Mrican female population at Ingutsheni was 52, or one-third the size of the Mrican male population of 155 patients. It should be noted that Mrican women were one-sixth the size of the Mrican male population inhabiting urban Southern Rhodesia as migrant laborers. They were, of course, a much higher percentage of the overall Mrican population in the colony, which leads one to suspect that, as for Mrican men, a central factor in the incarceration of Mrican women at Ingutsheni was proximity to places of European habitation. 33 The fact that gender disparities were interpreted as indicating a lower incidence of insanity in black women is evidence of the power of colonial stereotypes. The stereotypical view that Mrican women were too backward to "lose their reason," that one wouldn't be able to tell since they had so little to begin with, and that Mrican men were driven insane because of their greater exposure to the "strains of civilization," is nowhere better illustrated than in a 1936 report on mental illness among Mricans in colonial Nyasaland. Doctors Horace Shelley and W. H. Watson explained the disparity between Mrican men and women at the Zomba asylum in this way: "These women do not come into intimate contact with Europeans, and their minds lack the stimulation which the male mind encounters by such contact. Intellectually they remain unmoved, and they are very conservative."34 The implication was that the low admission rate of Mrican women in the colonial mental hospital could be maintained only if this supposed distance from the strains and stimuli of European civilization was maintained. In other words Mrican women were construed as normally abnormal but generally sane, as long as they remained within accepted bounds. The broader ideological context for this view contained the notion that a loss of control over the Mrican female would mean loss of control over Mrican society in general. 35 This danger

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was often experienced as an infraction against spatial order, a transgression of boundaries, which from the late 1920s on were increasingly articulated through the language of public health.

The Medicalization of Mobile Women The control of space, place, and mobility-through policies and practices of spatial organization and regulation-was a key variable in the project of colonial domination and in the formation of Southern Rhodesian social order. The control of space was also central to the project of gender domination. In a colonial economy premised on black male labor circulation and underpinned, some would say subsidized, by an unpaid black female agricultural and domestic workforce in the rural areas, the colonizers generally perceived black women's mobility as cause for concern. The tendency among Southern Rhodesian authorities to medicalize Mrican women who transgressed spatial boundaries is perhaps no better illustrated than in a 1929 comment by the colony's major medical authority, Dr. Andrew Fleming, who had been Southern Rhodesia's medical director from 1896 to 1926. As a central participant in numerous discussions about the venereal disease problem in the colony, 36 Dr. Fleming opined that the situation would not improve until something was done about the "stray [Mrican] women spreading disease all over the country. "37 "Stray women" was a metaphor for Mrican women's relationship to colonial space when they were anywhere but the rural reserves. To the authorities of Southern Rhodesia, "stray women" were both a public health issue and a sign that Mrican patriarchy needed reinforcement. Fleming's use of the expression "stray women" was consistent with the representation of Mrican women as bestial Other. Their deviations from the "right place" were framed in a similar way to the spatial deviations of farm animals. Thus the "stray" Mrican woman was not described as "leaving" one place to "go" to another; but rather as "roaming" and "wandering" beyond boundaries. Human beings are usually described as going "astray," implying that as social beings, they should know better and can thus be held responsible for their transgressions. But Mrican women were not often credited with the social agency of adult humans. "Stray women" was a metaphor for Mrican women's prescribed relationship to official colonial space, to their relegation to spaces off the map. 38 What was it about Mrican women's relationship to colonial space that

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made agents of colonial power suspect the spatially deviant of being either infectious or insane? Indeed, a sizeable percentage of Mrican women in Southern Rhodesia who were detected and then suspected of insanity were perceived as "stray" women. This is not surprising when one considers that the period under consideration overlaps with a rapid expansion of independent Mrican female migration to the colony's urban centers. For some women, migration was a flight from poverty and patriarchal domination in the rural areas; for others, a movement toward informal economic opportunities, migrant husbands, or lovers in towns; and for many, no doubt, it was all of these. Whatever the reason, single Mrican women's migration was met with much apprehension from both the white settler community and disgruntled Mrican patriarchs in the rural reserves. 39 There was a dramatic increase in the Mrican female population in both the towns and the mental hospital during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Between 1929 and 1935, the number of Mrican women treated annually at Ingutsheni rose from 52 to 92. In 1938, 111 Mrican women were treated at the asylum. 40 By the end of 1956, the number was 286Y The ratio of Mrican women to Mrican men remained steady at one to four. The ratio of Mrican women to the total patient population remained steady at slightly under one to six. 42 To understand the environment from which more and more Mrican women were being admitted to the colony's mental hospital, it is necessary to recall that, during the 1930s, the economic status of the majority of Mricans was in decline. The Mrican reserves were devastated as the colonizers diverted the consequences of the Great Depression onto the Mrican peasant farmer. 43 Mrican access to land, skilled and higher-paying jobs, and agricultural markets was restricted through a series of legislative acts: the Cattle Levy Acts of 1931 and 1934, the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1934, the Maize Control Acts of 1931 and 1934, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930, and the Native Registration and Accommodation Act of 1936. 44 These extra-economic measures resulted in a dramatic increase in maize production by wealthier Mrican farmers and an increased migration to the towns by others. They also intensified the exploitation of female labor in the rural areas, particularly the labor of junior wives in polygamous marriages as they struggled to work the increased acreage under cultivation, in most cases without the benefit of plow oxen. 45 Fathers grew more dependent on the economic value of lobola (bride wealth) for their own financial needs and to supplement the resources of their sons seeking marriage. 46 By the mid-1930s, the average lobola pay-

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ment by prospective grooms to their brides' parents was about £I 7.10. 47 The average male domestic servant received around thirty shillings per month (less than one and a half pounds per month), while agricultural laborers received twelve shillings per month and mine workers received twenty-five. 48 It could take years for a male worker to save enough money to purchase lobola cattle for marriage and some never managed. Women and girls found themselves in a bind. Some husbands, no doubt, began to expect more and more from, and give less and less to, the wives for whose labor and services they paid so dearly. Rural men were more determined than ever to control the labor and sexuality of wives and daughters, and it seems that these wives and daughters were more inclined to flee. 49 There were also problems in the natural world. In 1935 and 1936, an "unprecedented drought" hit the colony, thousands of cattle were lost, and the absence of vegetables in people's diet caused widespread scurvy in areas such as Gwanda, Gatooma, and Que Que. 50 Infant mortality rates soared. These factors no doubt added a degree of desperation to Mrican women's mobilityY The Mrican female population of the municipal Mrican location ofBulawayo grew from an estimated 750women in 1929 to 2,012 in 1944, almost 300 percent. 5 2 The percentage of women in the location's total adult Mrican population increased from 16 percent in 1929 to nearly 30 percent in 1944. 53 Much displeasure accompanied this rising tide of women's migration. The chief native commissioner's annual reports of this period were replete with references to male fears about females getting out of control. In 1932, Chief Native Commissioner Charles Bullock reported that the subject of the "new freedom of women" was "repeatedly brought up at meetings of the district native boards. "54 In one meeting attended by Mr. Bullock in 1932, a delegation of Mfengu notables complained, as reported by one chief native commissioner, that "the results of the emancipation of native women under our laws are not all to the good" and asked for "government control or assistance to enable them to keep their women at home alleging that modern conditions, especially motor transport facilities, are causing a serious increase in immorality. "55 In response, the colonizers developed policies to contain the potential disaffection of native "Big Men." The best way to characterize the discourse around migrating Mrican women at this time is with the concept of collaborative patriarchies: European and Mrican male authority agreeing over the need to control Mrican women's sexuality and mobility. Mrican fathers and husbands complained about their fugitive wives and daughters, and native commissioners and magistrates assisted fathers and husbands tore-

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gain control over these women. 56 Section 51 of the 1930 Native Mfairs Act stated that an Mrican woman could be ordered to return home by her chief or an official of the native department, and if she refused to comply, she could be charged with committing an offense. 57 An example of this act being applied was a 1931 episode in which the husband of a woman named Lezi obtained a letter from the native commissioner of Fort Usher. The letter was addressed to the superintendent of natives and read: "Please order woman Lezi, wife of bearer, not to return to Bulawayo. She was told either to live with her husband or return to her father a couple of weeks ago." 58 In the Native Registration and Accommodation Act of 1936, provisions were made to stave off the "influx of young women who evaded parental control. "59 Other responses were the official and unofficial controls instituted by the colony's various location superintendents. Mr. Collier, superintendent ofBulawayo's native location, for instance, instituted a policy whereby minors whom he suspected of traveling without parental consent were returned to their rural homes. 6 Collier admitted that the policy was largely ineffective since they would simply return, just as the native commissioner of Fort Victoria had predicted Matombi would. 61

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Coinciding with the increased migration of Mrican females was new legislation facilitating the detention of ambiguous cases like Matombi. The new Mental Disorders Act of 1936 contained a provision for the temporary and involuntary detention of the noncertifiably insane. 62 The colony's new psychiatrist, Dr. Kenneth Mann Rodger, applauded this development, claiming that the previous legislation had focused too heavily "on the liberty of the subject," making it difficult to correct the mental disorders which were "not so serious as to be certifiable, but nonetheless distressing to the sufferer, and impairing to his social adequacy. "63 The Mental Disorders Act did not only apply to those incapable of caring for themselves, or to those posing a danger to self and others, as had largely been the case in the earlier Lunacy Ordinance of 1908. The 1936 act included within its purview persons "unable to conform with the ordinary usages of the society in which he moves. "64 The category of "moral imbecile" was also added to the 1936 act, facilitating the merger of the various colonial social agendas with science. 65 Anxieties over the control of mobile Mrican women and girls coincided with the expansion of the social uses ofbiomedical science. During the 1930s and 1940s, more social problems were transferred out of the realm of morality and into the realm of biomedical science. 66 In Southern Rhodesia, as in the United States, one could say that biomedical sci-

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ence became the encompassing idiom through which black women's bodies were policed. 67 Of the forty-five "madwomen" whose narratives are under review here, twenty-eight fell within the spatial and ideological category of "strayness." U top is was one of them. She was "found wandering" in the Sinoia district and, to make matters worse, appeared to be a single mother. At this time, in Europe and the United States as well as in Southern Rhodesia, single motherhood was being reconfigured as a personality disorder. 68 In the case of Great Britain, local authorities enlisted the provisions of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act to detain women and girls with "illegitimate" children in mental hospitals, including those who had been impregnated through rape. 69 In Southern Rhodesia, European girls who "fell pregnant" out of wedlock were placed in institutions like Beit Cottage "for the moral and spiritual regeneration of fallen [European] girls. "7 For Mrican women and girls, no such institutions existed. Interestingly, while much was said about Mrican women's general immorality, little mention was made of single motherhood. In the colonial discourse on traditional Mrican social order, single motherhood was highly unusual. Thus, when such an event did occur, it was interpreted as a reflection of broader problems concerning the maintenance of order through the reinforcement of Mrican patriarchy. The colonial state authorities attempted to minimize the disruptive aspect of this phenomenon by refusing single Mrican women the legal right to raise their children. According to the colonial construction of Mrican customary law, when lobola/roora was paid, custody belonged to the husband's lineage. When lobola/roarawas not paid, custody belonged to the mother's lineage. 71 The agents of colonial order who encountered Utopis must have thought her situation anathema to "native custom." According to the "customary law" as enshrined under colonial rule, Mrican women were perpetual minors and could never have formal custody over children. 72 This may in part explain why, when the authorities were unable to obtain information from Utopis about where and to whom she belonged, they took her child from her and removed it to the Hope Fountain Mission to be raised by Mrican Christians. 73 Utopis was penalized for having a child out of wedlock and being a wayward woman in that way. Christina, admitted to Ingutsheni in 1941 as patient number 4613, was penalized for having children and leaving them behind-no "normal" woman would do that. Both women came under the authorities' gaze because of their physical waywardness. Christina had also been found in the wrong place, but her physical waywardness was compounded by what she failed to evince during her stan-

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dard examination, conducted by a Dr. David Awelrydd of Inyati district, Matabeleland. Doctor Awelrydd asked Christina standard questions about why she had left her home and family. Her response was that she had no specific reason for doing so and that she had no regrets. Doctor Awelrydd concluded that she was not normal. Christina was diagnosed as suffering from confusional psychosis at least in part because her doctors felt that she lacked insight into her true condition. Christina fell outside the colonial realm of black female normal abnormality and she had no one to claim her. For these reasons she was confined at Ingutsheni for the next fifteen years-until she died. 74

Traveling Women Matombi, Utopis, and Christina's traveling bodies stood at the intersection of these various projects and constructions of colonial and patriarchal power. 75 The way that the police responded to these women reflected the ways in which the specter of traveling black women interrupted the reigning systems of social and spatial organization and were, in turn, targeted and interrupted-the women were stopped. Not only the European colonizer's sense of order was challenged by such a presence. The indigenous patriarch's sense of the proper order of things was also disturbed. Reflecting the disapproval of women traveling on their own account is the fact that a Shona word for such women, pfambi, became synonymous with prostitute or mhure. 76 While the term pfambi seems innocuous enough-it literally means a woman who walks-it was imbued with negative meaning. Indeed, Mrican women traveling on their own were considered suspect by both cultures. 77 A fear of mobile women, of women outside of a male-dominated domestic milieu, was certainly not new nor was it limited to Southern Rhodesia. The same fear was a phenomenon in Western societies as well, particularly during industrialization and rapid urbanization. These processes pressed spatial and social relationships into flux and caused tremendous amounts of gender anxiety. The concept of traveling men was not nearly as troubling. In Europe, men traveled from the countryside to the cities in search of employment and liberation from residual feudal relationships, and in the southern United States, black men traveled to escape from Jim Crow and black manhood-preempting social relationships. Women traveled too, but when they did so, on their own account and not as dutiful daughters and wives, when they disengaged from the tight stric-

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tures of domesticity, patriarchies reasserted themselves. Governments, households, churches, and individual men feared their loss of power over the women who experienced "unfettered freedom of movement through space"78 and attempted to regulate these women through stigma and violence. Indeed, the strong association of women's own-account travel with sexual adventurism, sexual immorality, and ultimately, the destruction of community, kept most women in their place. Of course, many women decided to travel anyway. One interesting example of this brand of female defiance in Southern Rhodesia, a defiance that was increasing in frequency during the 1930s and 1940s, was a woman named Misi who is described by the Mrican journalist, Lawrence Vambe, in his book, lll{ated People. Vambe calls Misi "one of the first signs of moral corruption in Mashonganyika." She was both a pfambi and a prostitute, one of those "emancipated ladies" whom husbands feared would negatively influence their wives. Women like Misi were not satisfied with lives of domestic dependence and subordination; they wanted to make their own way and their own decisions. For such women, there were few alternatives to prostitution. Domestic work as a source of employment for Mrican women in Southern Rhodesia did not really become available until after World War II. Generally speaking, black women had little access to "legitimate" employment and were generally confined to the illegal spaces of the urban economy: beer brewing, prostitution, or renting out rooms that they held, illegally, in someone else's name. Misi had married once, unsuccessfully. According to Vambe, her husband worked at the Arcturus mine just outside of Salisbury. He heard from some of his workmates that Misi was cheating on him and took leave from work to confront her. On arrival at their home, he took a spear and attempted to kill his wife. She got hold of the spear and almost killed him instead. A passing police trooper heard the commotion and stopped the fighting couple, pulling the spear out of Misi's hand in the nick of time. The couple was subsequently divorced. Mter the ordeal, Misi decided that she had had enough of domesticity and hit the road, traveling to different towns and worker compounds, plying the trade of a prostitute. While clearly disapproving, Vambe does not hide his grudging admiration for the woman. He confessed that "as a young boy I used to see her from time to time when she returned from her travels. From these farflung outposts of white economic enterprise she came to her parents' home loaded with gifts and the impression she gave to everybody was that she was doing a very lucrative trade." 79 Sometimes women traveled from economic necessity, sometimes to

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look for a wayward husband, and sometimes to regain a sense of self and personhood by leaving a bad situation. In her book on blues women in the United States, Angela Davis argues that women's own-account travel was a common motif in the song lyrics of African-American blues women of the 1920s and 1930s. Blues singer Ma Rainey sang of female adventurers who lived and loved freely, made dangerous choices, and left when they felt they needed to leave. She sang: I'm running away tomorrow, they don't mean me no good I'm running away tomorrow, they don't mean me no good I'm gon' run away, have to leave this neighborhood. 80

When familial and other social relationships were oppressive, when they "don't mean me no good," the protagonists of this genre of blues reserved the right to leave. The women of these songs engaged in self-initiated travel like the "stray women" in Southern Rhodesia did. They challenged prevailing assumptions about women's place in society. 81 Basotho women in South Africa who sang famo songs, like blues women in the United States, challenged most particularly the assumption about travel: men do, women don't. Indeed, Basotho men were stigmatized for not traveling, while the women were stigmatized for not staying still. Women sang defiant lyrics such as: 'They call me a vagabond, but I am not a vagabond; I am taking care of business," expressing their knowledge that they were stigmatized for traveling, but were going just the same. 82 These were songs of determination and conviction and, quite explicitly, of women avoiding victimization. 83 As clearly as the African-American blues women's lyrics, these songs illustrate the ways in which own-account travel was an expression of personal autonomy. Like the blues Davis analyzed, these famo lyrics often indicate "an ability to shun passivity and acquiescence in the face of mistreatment and injustice and to exercise some control over the circumstances of their lives, especially over their sexual lives. "84 While I am unaware of a musical accompaniment for Shona women's choices of mobility, there is narrative evidence of African women moving with full knowledge of the fact that they were acting in defiance of the gendered and racialized status quo in the colony. Just as the colonizers and American slave owners theorized about the incompatibility of so-called black primitives and the freedoms of white civilization, patriarchally minded men theorized about the incompatibility of "nice girls" or respectable women, and own-account female mobil-

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ity. Women's travel and freedom were equated with sexual mobility and freedom, and were viewed as bad. Indeed, many of the appellations applied to "bad women" make reference to women's physical mobility: libertine, loose woman, broad. 85 Like Misi or the female subjects in blues lyrics, Matombi was determined to move anyway. However, her journeying is de-emphasized by the colonizers' description, as is the possibility that she was on a quest or refusing to acquiesce. The choice of language is telling: agency-occludingwords like stray, stranded, loose, and wandering are used to describe the women who walked and who, like Matombi and Utopis, were suspected of madness.

Diseases of Poverty While many of the Mrican men who were sent to Ingutsheni suffered "diseases of employment," which induced neurological symptoms, a large number of Mrican women in this sample had diseases of poverty with similar consequences. Maliya was uninterested in remaining home with her family. A middle-aged Karanga woman from Gutu with a husband and two children, Maliya was admitted to Ingutsheni at the request of her relatives because she kept running away into the bush. When the doctor's interpreter asked her why she did this, she stated that she was not wanted at home. Rather than consider this as a "credible motive for action or a reasonable ground for belief, "86 the European psychiatrist insisted that it was a delusion and diagnosed Maliya a delusional psychotic. 87 A closer look at this inmate's record, however, indicates that she was suffering from pellagra, a disorder resulting from a deficient diet, and on the rise in Southern Rhodesia during the 1940s. 88 Maliya was one of nine pellagrous Mrican women admitted to Ingutsheni during 1941. The symptoms associated with pellagra include dermatitis, gastric disorders, anxiety states, hysteria, neurosis, neurasthenia, shortness of breath, dizziness, loss of appetite, and insomnia. 89 The generally accepted etiology of pellagra is a deficiency of niacin and thiamine combined with general undernourishment. Without additional dietary supplements to maize, the dominant food in the Mrican diet throughout southern and central Mrica, chronic malnutrition was likely. When famine or acute emotional crises compounded this condition, pellagra could result. 90 In other words, pellagra was caused by the interaction of biological, psychological, and social factors. In the Southern Rhodesia of the early 1940s, this com-

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bination of factors existed and was on the increase, leading to a high incidence of pellagra. A similar situation was observed among Mricans in the Natal region of South Mrica and in colonial Kenya during the late 1930s and early 1940s. 91 Judith Gussler has suggested that among the pellagra sufferers in South Mrica, particularly among the Nguni, women predominated. 92 This sample of female inmate files at Ingutsheni reveals a very sickly group of new admissions in 1941. Along with the nine cases of pellagra were four cases of pneumonia, two cases of tuberculosis (one dying within a year), and several suffering from other forms of nutritional deficiency. In addition, Maliya's body showed signs of physical abuse. Other physical abuse cases included two women with recent cuts to their throats. It seems that ecological and environmental factors were also conducive to both women's mobility and to their detention at the mental hospital. In both 1941 and 1942, the rains failed in Southern Rhodesia. According to the chief native commissioner at the time, Charles Bullock, "1942 will be remembered by the Native peoples of the Colony as an nzara or hunger year. "93 The areas worst hit were in the southern portion of the country and the remote Zambezi Valley. It was necessary to send grain from other districts to the Lower Sabi Valley at Melsetter, Gwaai Reserve, Nyamandhlovu District, Gwanda, and Nuanetsi (Chibi) .94 According to the native commissioner of Sebungwe, 1942 was the "worst year in living memory. "95 Not surprisingly, in 1942 the general health of "the natives" was low and declining, and there were high rates of pneumonia, tuberculosis, endemic bilharzia, hookworm infection, and malaria. 96 Each of these disorders and infections has a psychiatric component accompanied by symptoms such as delirium, hysteria, and feeblemindedness. Doctor Rodger did not make these connections. If he had, he would presumably have improved the patients' diet and nutritional intake, with a particular focus on niacin supplements. In Maliya's case, however, he simply prescribed the new radical psychiatric therapies including Azoman, Cardiazol, and electric convulsant therapy (ECT) to quiet her down. 97 Every one of these treatments was inadvisable for pellagra sufferers who were weak constitutionally, although they may have exhibited surprising physical strength; this fact did not discourage him. 98 Social, biological, and psychological factors combined with the spatial and ideological factor of "strayness" to produce a large number of Ingutsheni's Mrican female inmates. The case of Rebecca further illustrates these relationships. Another stray woman with pellagra, Rebecca was admitted in 1941 after being "found" by the police at Plumtree near the

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border with Bechuanaland (Botswana). Doctor Kane examined Rebecca in Gwelo after she was arrested for "wandering" through that town. She was not interested in answering the doctor's questions and told him that he was a nuisance. When he continued to press her for details about where and to whom she belonged, she responded that she knew nothing about having a home, husband, or children. The assistant native commissioner of Gwelo commented: "[She] either does not know or refuses to tell how she came here. ,,gg Whatever her motives were, the authorities decided that they had no recourse but to certify her as insane. In addition to intractable pellagra, Rebecca's body showed many signs of abuse and neglect: she had scars on her upper lip, the left side of her head, and her right scapula. These signs had several possible meanings. They could have meant that she was abused and neglected by her family because she was seen as mentally ill and untreatable. Perhaps her family had been impoverished and, because she was a junior wife, she was cast out and the scars came from abusive encounters subsequent to her increased vulnerability. Finally, the signs of abuse might have resulted from a form of spirit-possession illness which led to her self-neglect and failure to eat or otherwise care for herself. 100 Speculation is inevitable, given the history of noncommunication between the colonizer and Mrican women, in an analysis based largely on what the colonizer chose to record. The poor communications between white men and black women was exacerbated by the tendency for the colonizer to disbelieve what Mrican women said. In the case of "Annie" for example, this colonial habit reached the point of absurdity. Annie was "found wandering" and waylaid by two police officers. She was taken to the hospital for observation. When the examining doctor asked her what her name was, she replied Diwene, and pointed out that Europeans sometimes called her Mary. For some reason, her captors decided to call her Annie, and this is the name that appears on her records. Little of what Diwene said was given credence. Her medical certificate described her as having "a grievance against the police for arresting her," which the doctor considered a "mild persecutory delusion." Interestingly, the authorities appeared to believe her when she told them of her numerous miscarriages and her relationships with different men. 101 She was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with both Cardiazol and ECT. Her abnormal behavior was described as: "negativistic [and she] struggles to remain stubborn and statuesque. "102 Many in the "stray woman" category were found while wandering in

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proximity to places of European habitation. 103 Many were detected by African male employees of Europeans and taken to the authorities: Alice was found wandering at the Ranch Farm in Cashel; Dawendera was "found at Berry's Post Farm wandering about," and another Alice was found "wandering around the town not knowing where she was going." At Koodoovale Farm workers "found" a young woman of about eighteen called Ramwi "walking about aimlessly." The men said something to her and she responded by pelting them with stones. We are not privy to what they may have said, but we do know that they took her to a white British South Africa Police (BSAP) official, Sergeant Coetzee, who petitioned for her admission to Ingutsheni. Ramwi 's file stands out because of the relatively extensive recording of the patient's conversations with the European doctor-all presented as evidence of her abnormality, of course. She told the doctor that she was single and uninterested in marriage. When asked if she had children already, she giggled then replied: "How can I have children as I am too young." She elaborated by stating that men did not even make love to her and that she never cooked. Ramwi said that she came to Bulawayo with others who had enticed her by saying: "let's go and drink beer." In Ramwi's case, the doctor did not feel that she was psychotic. Instead, he diagnosed her as a congenital mental defective. This diagnosis suggests that he perceived her as deficient in the knowledge and experiences that he believed an African female should have had by her age. 104 Ramwi died of pneumonia after a one-year stay at the hospital. It is not known whether she arrived at the asylum with pneumonia, or contracted it there. A range of patients shared the "stray woman" pathway to the asylum. Some were evidently suffering from physical ailments that were likely to have led to their wandering behavior. Some were probably escaping from home environments whose difficulties were exacerbated if not caused by the agricultural decline during the period. Some may very well have been simply misunderstood and, within the very limited possibility of communication, were construed as mad. Another group may have been too difficult for their families to manage, and so were driven out of the rural areas to become what the Shona referred to as magandanga, 105 in which case they were probably detected by patrolling policemen after they wandered onto a main road or European-owned property. 106 When African women were mobile and not under male control, they were suspected of some disorder. While the prostitute was tolerated and taken to be a public health risk that could be regulated, the mobile nonprostitute found outside of male control for no good reason was occa-

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sionally observed for signs of unreason. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility of an acknowledged prostitute being assigned the label of insanity. This happened to a woman named Maruwenbe who was "found by the police in Shabani Mine." According to the police sergeant at Shabani who submitted a report on the woman, she was an "alien native female" from Portuguese East Mrica and a resident of the Aqua Mine compound at Belingwe. The policemen found Maruwenbe after she had strayed onto the grounds ofShabani Mine and reported that she "behaves in an abnormal manner, sings and dances, does not understand when spoken to and will not do as she is told." Her behavior was thus ungovernable. The police sent for a doctor to examine her in jail. Dr. Hofmeyer described Maruwenbe as "emotionally and intellectually disconnected, impulsive [and suffering from] periods of mutism." According to the doctor, she was not in touch with reality. Maruwenbe was transferred to the hospital at Shabani mine and there examined by another doctor, Dr. Ireland, who made similar observations, noting that "unless restrained [she] runs about the hospital from ward to ward." This woman had been admitted into the space of the compound as a seasoned prostitute and was thus of no great concern to the authorities, providing she had no communicable diseases that the workers could contract (Maruwenbe was found to be free ofthese). 107 She fell under the eye of the "experts," however, because she behaved in a manner that made her unsuited to remaining loose even while she provided a valued service.

Out of Their Husbands' Control As with Mrican men, the most important factor in the pre-asylum narratives of Mrican women whose family members sought their admission at Ingutsheni, or brought a person's abnormal behavior to the attention of the police, was uncontrollability. Of course, the notion of uncontrollability is very subjective and certainly gendered. Under this rubric was included inappropriately violent behavior, breaches of social etiquette, inappropriate sexual behavior, and running away into the veldt for no recognized good reason and, for Mrican women, an unnatural dislike or disinterest in children. Generally speaking, these characteristics had to be accompanied by several failed attempts at treatment by the traditional healer or, in some cases, by a prophet of one of the independent Zionist churches with healing ministries. John Chavafambira, the alias given to

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the nanga from Southern Rhodesia who was psychoanalyzed by the South Mrican psychiatrist Wulf Sach in the mid-1930s, describes an example of a madwoman whom he failed to cure: his mother-in-law, Mawa. Mawa's community had endured her violent outbursts for years. Different traditional healers, including Chavafambira, had attempted to cure her using a variety of methodologies. All had failed as, according to Chavafambira, a patient's cooperation was an essential ingredient in most traditional therapies and Mawa would not cooperate. 108 One day she murdered a young girl and the police became involved. Mawa was tried in the colonial courts. Like who murdered his young daughter, she was found guilty but insane and was sent away to an asylum. The European doctors diagnosed her initially as manic-depressive and later as paranoid. Chavafambira's diagnosis was witchcraft poisoning at the hands of her estranged husband and his new wife. 109 Mawa's crime brought her to the attention of the European authorities. It was only then that the uncontrollability was presented as cause for incarceration, and it was only after alternative methods had been attempted. Out-of-control women, like those who "strayed," were a category of disorderly women that both Mrican and European patriarchies wanted domesticated, although, as Chavafambira's mother-in-law and other examples illustrate, Mricans generally involved European authorities only when not doing so brought them into legal jeopardy and when other methods of treatment had failed. In many instances, families tolerated violent and uncontrollable women for years before involving the authorities. In most cases, it seems that they tried an indigenous method of treatment before considering the European methods. This is what happened in the case of Makalala, a married woman and mother. According to the affidavit her husband filed with the court, Makalala had suffered from occasional bouts of madness for aperiod of seven years. Each attack occurred during the month ofFebruary, when she "behaved like a person of unsound mind, chasing her children away, breaking her utensils, disrobing herself and screaming." 110 Her husband and family lived with these occasional episodes until, one fateful day, Makalala strayed into the Turk Mine compound, stripped herself naked, and began to bathe at a tap that was, according to an Mrican policeman who witnessed the event, "in full view of all the European and Native employees." The policeman, a man named Toman, was highly embarrassed by the incident. His affidavit describes how a group of women attempted to cover her, but she hurled stones at them. She was eventually subdued, handcuffed, and taken away, first to prison and then to Ingutsheni. 111

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It is highly probable that many of the uncontrollable and stray women, like several of the men whose narratives were explored in the previous chapter, suffered from an organic illness to which some of their uncontrollable behavior might be attributed. A relatively typical case for the 1930s and 1940s was that of Singumbugumbu, a woman from the Inyati native reserve. Her mother and brother contacted the colonial authorities in 1938 because of a combination of violent and sexually inappropriate behavior. According to her brother and legal guardian Velemtonjeni, she "sings, dances, swears and disrobes herself in front of men, attempts to seize hold of men's private parts and roams about by herself." Her brother also claimed that she became violent when spoken to andrefused to eat with others. 112 Her mother said that she had been "normal" up to three months earlier when she began to behave strangely. Velemtonjeni suspected that his sister had been bewitched, but could not say who had done it, either because he did not know or because he understood the risk of such an accusation, a contravention of the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1899. 11 3 Later, her brother and mother were persuaded by a European doctor that her madness had been caused by syphilis contracted from her husband Kendelani, a foreigner from Nyasaland, who had since abandoned her. Syphilis, like pellagra, was a relatively common ailment among the patient population at Ingutsheni and had been the subject of colonial concern since the beginning of the century. By 1938, when Singumbugumbu was admitted to Ingutsheni, syphilis was considered endemic in many Mrican population groups, with venereal diseases being treated as the major public health problem in the colony. The authorities were particularly alarmed by the rising morbidity and mortality rates due to syphilis among mine laborers. In 1936, for instance, the medical director noted 1,041 cases reported and 26 deaths. This increase from 759 cases and 22 deaths the previous year was attributed directly to the "greater facilities available to the traveling prostitute by the improvement of motor transport." 114 Of course, little mention was made of cases like Singumbugumbu who were infected with the disease by their migrant husbands. Indeed, when native commissioners and COTI?pound inspectors responded to a 1934 government circular asking about the number of syphilitics in their respective domains and the source of infection, they listed all the men as infected by prostitutes, while the women were listed as infected by prostitution or their own immorality, never by a man. Of this sample of forty-five Mrican women, six were suffering from syphilis that may or may not have been the primary cause of their psy-

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chiatric symptoms. Doctor Swaenpoel of Inyati Hospital concurred with Velemtonjeni that the cause of Singumbugumbu's mental symptoms was syphilis. He further noted that Singumbugumbu was both homicidal and suicidal, and required institutional care and control at Ingutsheni. 115 Of the women whose husbands petitioned for their admission to the colonial mental hospital, many were Christians. Indeed, it appears that their Christian beliefs contributed to their delay in seeking treatment for their wives and to their eventually selecting a European clinic rather than a traditional nanga. From the perspective of both Shona and Ndebele traditional healing etiologies, a delay in treatment, particularly if the person's illness was believed to be caused by spirits, could mean that they lost their minds for good. Sakayi was a Seventh Day Adventist in Southern Rhodesia who saw visions of Jesus Christ approaching from a distance. Like all adventist groups, followers in Southern Rhodesia periodically awaited the second advent of Christ and were, on such occasions, disappointed. 116 It is unlikely that the visions were, in and of themselves, extraordinary enough for her husband to seek outside help, as he too was an Adventist. The problem was rather that he could not control his wife; she behaved violently, threw things at people, and ran around the house, screaming. The fact that she and her husband, a mechanic, enjoyed a relatively comfortable urban lifestyle may have prevented them from seeking treatment through a traditional medical practitioner. Within an indigenous etiology of mental illness, this delay may have exacerbated her illness, particularly if it was perceived to have been caused by spiritual forces. It is possible that Sakayi would have remained in her husband's care had she not gone too far one day by attempting to kiss a European constable.U 7 It was after this outrageous act that her husband petitioned, or was persuaded to petition, for his wife's admission to Ingutsheni. Emelia, another Seventh Day Adventist, was described in her case file as a kraal housewife. Her brother was employed as a waiter at the Cranbourne Hostel in Salisbury during World War II. He complained that his sister had been behaving in a peculiar manner for weeks. She constantly attempted to run away and often ran through town naked. Her last attack occurred at the Morgenster Mission in Fort Victoria. Emelia's husband was a constable with the BSAP and a fellow Seventh Day Adventist. It is likely that the persons most often around her, her "therapy management group," were not initially comfortable with consulting a traditional healer because such practitioners were anathema to their Christian beliefs. 118 Emelia accused herself of being wicked and stated that people hated her.

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She was admitted to Ingutsheni. When her father heard about his daughter's fate, he traveled to Bulawayo to request her release. According to Emelia's father, who may or may not have been a Christian, his daughter was suffering from a shave spirit-an alien or ancestral spirit that possesses a human host, sometimes conferring on that host special gifts or talents. Apparently this spirit possessed his daughter on occasion. It is not clear from the case record what kind of shave spirit this was or what the family had done about it in the past. Was her father previously unable to enlist a nanga to find out what kind of spirit his daughter had and what it wanted? He said that he had the means of treating her, probably referring to ceremonies to welcome and honor the shave spirit possessing his daughter. Until such ceremonies were performed, it was believed that the one possessed by the spirit would suffer the symptoms of illness and mental confusion. Indeed, if the recipient's family did not perform the required ceremony to welcome the spirit, the illness could become worse. 119 This ceremony could conceivably have resulted in a renewal of Emelia's interaction within a traditional religious milieu, a daunting prospect for a devout Christian. 120 If she was possessed by a healing spirit, she might have gained the ability to heal and divine herself. Because Emelia and her husband were Seventh Day Adventists, however, they resisted this prospect. In her father's mind, this refusal no doubt caused the persistence of his daughter's illness. Lahliwe's husband took his wife to the Bulawayo Memorial Hospital and then, according to the nursing sister, requested her admission to the mental hospital. According to Lahliwe's medical certificate, completed by Dr. Balachine of Bulawayo, she made irrational and disconnected statements such as: "May the kingdom be yours" and "they said we should drink beer together; we must look at the floor, not at each other." She also tried to slap the nurse's face "for no apparent reason." Her behavior at the hospital was described as "irrational, noisy, and obstreperous." She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and given electric convulsant therapy, which resulted in her being "a bit more alert" and showing some insight. She was aware of her surroundings and said that her head still felt wired up at times. Mter a short time, Lahliwe's sister and brother-in-law came to visit her and requested her discharge, which was granted. 121 The cases of Emelia and Lahliwe are significant because both women were Christians married to Christians, whose agnatic relations collected them from the colony's mental hospital and asserted their therapy-managing roles. Their narratives illustrate Christians' reluctance to perform the ceremonies necessary in an indigenous system to discover the cause

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of illness, their disbelief in traditional etiological systems, and/ or their reluctance to accept a role as a traditional healer as heralded by possession by a shave or ukuthwasa (the Zulu and Ndebele term for ancestral possession illness accompanying the calling to become a healer). These cases highlight the position of women within their connubial households and the frequent necessity for their agnatic relations to intervene on their behalf in situations of illness. There is considerable literature exploring the stranger relationship that women in ancestrally oriented patrilineal societies have with their husband's and children's kin and ancestors while being separated from their own through exogenous marriage-a situation that sometimes has consequences for their health. Another Christian woman named Rashiwe, a member of the small urban African petite bourgeoisie, was confined at Ingutsheni after her husband complained to the authorities that although she had once been "a. very respected woman," she had lately become unmanageable. Rashiwe began to dance all night and to "make indecent advances to other men." This behavior thoroughly challenged their status as upstanding members of the black petite bourgeoisie. The European doctor concurred with the husband, observing her to exhibit "irresponsible, uncontrollable [and] abnormal behavior. "122 In addition, Rashiwe had delusions in which she conversed with Jesus. Beatrice was another Christian housewife whose husband could not control her. Her Reception Order, the official document issued by a magistrate, required for all institutional admissions of persons suspected of insanity, stated that she too was waiting for Jesus. Beatrice's file does not state her religious affiliation, but she might have been a member of one of several millenarian or adventist religions anticipating the second coming of Christ at the time. 123 To understand the factors that led to the construction of African women as "mad" and to their admission at Ingutsheni, it is necessary to look at the point of detection: where the women surfaced. To understand these surfacings and what they meant, one needs to explore the relationship of African women to the dominant social and spatial order, how they were and were not mapped onto the surfaces of the colony; what their lives were like beneath that surface. I argue that women who were "found" in the "wrong place" were the most likely to be suspected of madness. This result occurred because the colonizers understood them so poorly, and because they were not trusted outside of some form of male control. The exceptions to this rule were the women who were thought to facilitate social order in the towns by providing African and European

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men with sexual and domestic services. These women were not suspected of mental disorder merely for being mobile. It was almost as if a certain level of grudging respect was accorded these women for their successful adjustment to civilization; of course, they did not escape the suspicions of sexual pathology and colonial efforts to regulate their bodies in the form of compulsory venereal disease examinations. 124 The most common reason for admitting Mrican women to the colonial mental hospital was "strayness," meaning thatMrican female admissions were generally those who, for one reason or another, were thought to be in the wrong place. They were perceived as odd mainly by virtue of being unaccompanied or uncontrolled in the white- and/ or male-dominated spaces of the colony. The mobile Mrican woman elicited suspicion. Whether she was suspected of insanity or merely immorality required a period of observation. However, the central factors explaining why Mrican women were detected and suspected of insanity within a colonial context were, first, maps and surfaces, and second, the dangerous choices that these women made, the places they went, the things that they said, and the troubles they had seen. The fact that Mrican patriarchy was sometimes complicit in the mobilization of public health institutions and discourses for the purpose of disciplining of Mrican women who were either spatially or ideologically stray must also be emphasized. While, in most cases, a woman's husband, brother, or father wanted her home and sought her release from Ingutsheni, we have seen a few examples where male spouses and family members actively sought the disciplining assistance of the asylum. A recent short story written by the late Yvonne Vera, a Zimbabwean writer, illustrates how, after the end of colonial rule, when white power no longer lingered at Ingutsheni, the following admonition by a husband to his wife, could be easily imagined: Zanele has said she will not touch or see the children. Her husband says that if she continues in this manner, he will take his children from her and place her on 2yd Avenue. He says he will leave her "on 23rd" as though he will dump her in the middle of the road. However, he will leave her at Ingutsheni Hospital. Ingutsheni refers to a blanket. Apparently when each mental patient arrives at this hospital, the patient is wrapped in a grey blanket and then placed in an appropriate ward. Therefore, the hospital keeps many blankets for its inmates. Zanele will be placed in a blanket if she is not careful. 125

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Some husbands may very well have discovered that threatening to send their wives to the place where Lobengula's wives' once lived functioned as a way to exert social control over them. The place that the colonizers had years ago transformed from a site for Ndebele independence and social reproduction to a site for the containment of the unruly from the perspective of colonial social order, where African women were concerned, was sometimes used as a warning for the women who strayed.

5· Psychiatric Modernity in Black and White, 1933-1942 The boundaries that defined and delimited relations between white and black in settler societies were unilateral in origin, but bilateral in effect: they marked the lives of both races. Each was constrained by stereotyped roles and social prohibitions from entering into zones of familiarity with the other. The form and severity of the constraints placed on the Europeans did, to be sure, pale in comparison to those suffered by Mricans. Yet they served an essential purpose nonetheless. Europeans' dominant place in the colonial order faced as ominous a threat from the socially aberrant behavior of some among themselves as it did from the indigenes .... Social sanctions, both informal and institutional, bound the settler populations ... into a straiuacket of conformity, a self-enforced system of pinched choices. DANE KENNEDY,

Islands of White

If the mentally ill and ethnic minorities serve similar social functions, we can expect similarities between them. The "inappropriate affect" of the black or the schizophrenic, exaggerated irony and self-deprecation, are perhaps related, not to their primary difficulties, but to a similar response to a similar situation. ROLAND LITTLEWOOD AND MAURICE LIPSEDGE,

Aliens and Alienists

Many total institutions, most of the time, seem to function merely as storage dumps for inmates, but, ... they usually present themselves to the public as rational organizations designed consciously, through and through, as effective machines for producing a few officially avowed and officially approved ends .... One frequent official objective is the reformation of inmates in the direction of some ideal standard. This contradiction, between what the institution does and what its officials must say it does, forms the basic context of the staff's daily activity. ERVING COFFMAN,

Asylums

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The previous two chapters reconstructed the narratives of the Mrican men and women who became objects of Southern Rhodesian psychiatric discourse and practice, connecting the key characteristics of their relationships to colonial space to their becoming objects of psychiatric discourse. The normalization of the construction of Mrican men as migrants and incorporated into the structures of colonial civilization, and Mrican women as immobile and unincorporated, is an example of what Frantz Fanon referred to as "the social background of the colonial type" in Southern Rhodesia. Most black men were suspected of insanity while already under surveillance inside so-called white spaces, while mostMrican women were suspected of insanity at the perimeters of white spaces. The last two chapters explored how each one of these locations intersected with the monologue of European reason aboutMrican madness. This chapter discusses what one might call the social foreground of the colonial type in Southern Rhodesia, the arena of discourse and the realm of official practice around the question of insanity and how it should be managed. In this chapter, for the official view on whether or not Ingutsheni furthered or hindered the colonial project, we look into the report of an official commission of inquiry into the administration and management of the Ingutsheni Mental Hospital conducted in August 1942. Maintaining social and racial boundaries within a mental hospital was a difficult task because, in many ways, the mental hospital was a great equalizer. The hospital attendants were poor at maintaining their prestige and their status among the sane; and the white patients were poor at maintaining their prestige as members of the ruling white settler class. The 1942 Commission oflnquiry was called to establish whether or not social boundaries were being maintained at Ingutsheni; whether white patients remained white by remaining different and distant from black patients, and whether Dr. Kenneth Mann Rodger, the man who had been Ingutsheni's superintendent since 1933, was the man for the job. Mter a series of scathing articles were published in the Bulawayo Chronicle newspaper about the horrendous conditions, social chaos, and financial mismanagement at Ingutsheni, and after a mutiny among the hospital's staff involving several nurses recently immigrated from Britain and the hospital's assistant superintendent, Dr. David MacKenzie, who accused his boss of all manner of impropriety, the colony's medical director and minister of internal affairs decided to pay a visit to the hospital. 1 They did not like what they saw, and seven months later, even as World War II raged, Governor Alexander Fraser Russell appointed the 1942

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Commission of Inquiry into the Administration and Organization of Ingutsheni Mental Hospital and Other Mental Institutions in the Colony.2 As the appointment of commissions of inquiry were serious business, generally following charges of misconduct involving members of the colonial service, or situations that were considered detrimental to the national interest, it is clear that the administrators of Southern Rhodesia took the events at Ingutsheni quite seriously. 3 The commission was called in response to charges of ethical, moral, and fiduciary misconduct leveled against the hospital's superintendent, Dr. Kenneth Rodger, and the main complainant was his assistant, Dr. David MacKenzie, who accused Rodger of careless and cavalier use of shock therapies. 4 According to MacKenzie, Rodger's overzealous application of the new techniques resulted in numerous bone fractures and deaths. Among Mackenzie's other charges were Rodger's alleged fraternization with his social and professional inferiors, particularly his drinking binges with the hospital secretary, Mr. Teasdale. 5 Moreover, suspecting that Rodger was neglecting his hospital duties at Ingutsheni in favor of his far more remunerative consultancy practice through the Nervous Disorders Hospital, Dr. Mackenzie accused him of abusing his monopoly on specialized mental health care. Doctor MacKenzie was not the only disgruntled member of Dr. Rodger's staff, and the settler public also seemed to give Ingutsheni a vote of no-confidence. I argue, however, that the commission was fundamentally an inquiry into the question of boundaries and colonial whiteness and whether Rodger could adequately maintain these things, rather than any of MacKenzie's charges. By focusing on Ingutsheni during the era of Dr. Rodger, 1933 to 1942 in general, and the 1942 Commission of Inquiry in particular, this chapter illustrates the ways in which the realities of the world within the Ingutsheni Mental Hospital resisted the social binaries of colonial society and required a superintendent who would actively engineer these oppositions and boundaries. The question in this chapter is, was Dr. Rodger their man?

A Prelude to Kenneth Mann Rodger The 1942 Commission of Inquiry investigated a man who had been enthusiastically welcomed to the colony nine years earlier, a man brought to Southern Rhodesia to lead its mental health care facility into the modern era. The commissioners were appointed to determine whether or not

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it was in the national interest to leave Ingutsheni Mental Hospital-a racially and socially heterogeneous institution for the certified insaneunder the control of such a man. While a damning picture emerged, the colony's medical director at the time, Dr. Andrew Martin, cautioned the commissioners not to lose sight of how bad things were before Rodger's arrival. "It must be remembered" he said, "the patients received little treatment" before 1933, "and Ingutsheni Mental Hospital was almost entirely a place for the compulsory detention oflunatics."6 Prior to the early 1930s, the asylum was run on parallel lines with the prison. The caliber of the European staff fell even below that of prison staff because of the stigma attached to asylum work. 7 While titles began to change after the 1920s-for example, the head keeper and under keeper became the less prisonlike assistant superintendent and head attendant-the job descriptions remained basically the same. 8 Very few improvements occurred in either the administration or the care provided before the 1930s. However, a new medical director for Southern Rhodesia was appointed in the early 1930s to replace Andrew Fleming, who had filled that position since 1896Y Doctor R. A. Askins was trained in Dublin and, prior to this appointment, held the positions of director of medical services and medical director of schools in Bristol, England. 10 Askins's project was to modernize health services in Southern Rhodesia, and he expressed a particular interest in mental health care. In his first annual report on the colony's public health, Askins expressed concern about the increase in the colony's certified insane population, particularly on the European side. In his 1931 Report on the Public Health, Askins provided the following table. TABLE 5.1

Patients in Residence during Years 1925-193'

Year

Europeans

Mricans

Total

1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931

43 66 64 75 68 76 82

214 203 231 243 246 283 327

257 269 295 318 314 359 409

Report of the Public Health, 1923, 23.

While these figures do show an increase, it is not a particularly dramatic one.U The significant point is that Askins and other colonial au-

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thorities perceived a rising problem deserving of "grave consideration. "12 Advances in the techniques and status of the psychiatric profession, combined with the expansion of the general European population (from 39,740 in 1926 to 51,570 in 1931) and fear that the population was becoming enfeebled mentally, led Dr. Askins and the colonial administration to decide that it was time for intervention. 13 The first step in this process was the appointment of a "full-time alienist with first-class English experience," Dr. Kenneth Mann Rodger. 14 The first trained alienist (psychiatrist) ever employed in the colony, Dr. Rodger became medical superintendent oflngutsheni in October 1933· Doctor Rodger's arrival signaled the changing of the guard in the sphere of colonial mental health care, a transformation from custodial to scientific management that reflected shifts that were occurring worldwide with the rise of psychiatric modernity and, in the settler colonial world, with the growth of both a sense of Rhodesian-ness and a fear of white degeneration during the Depression years. An increasingly insecure white settler population sought to fortify itself by building up boundaries of protection. 15 Mental health management was one of the fields that the colonial authorities selected in which to fortify their social order.

Psychiatric Modernity and Southern Rhodesia Psychiatric modernity refers to the changing role and outlook of Western psychiatry, generally associated with the interwar years. 16 At this time, the role of the psychiatric profession was extended beyond the asylum and the care and control of psychotics. Infused with the spirit of positivism, the discipline of psychiatry promised to expand infinitely its ability to understand mental illness and the less distinct social maladjustments which, in the language of the time, impaired an individual's "social usefulness. "17 Advances in clinical treatments, combined with advances in psychoanalysis-for example, the discovery of the unconscious-gave rise to a new enthusiasm for the early treatment of mental disorders. 18 New legislation drafted during this period allowed for certain classes of "involuntary patients" to be treated without the stigma of certification. In 1930, England and Wales passed the Mental Treatment Act to "strengthen cooperation between medicine and psychiatry" and to make it easier for sufferers of mental disorders to receive treatment at the earliest possible time. 19 There was, of course, a down side to this new enthusiasm. For one thing, faith in the efficacy of early treatment led to a

1 34

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willingness on the part of lawmakers to overlook certain concerns for the rights of the individual patient, liberalize laws concerning the detention ofpatients, 20 and disregard protections that had been championed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West. 21 The gist of all of these new developments was that the realm and grasp of psychiatry expanded. As its prestige and power grew during the 1930s, so did its role in the policing of social boundaries. 22 It is little wonder then that Southern Rhodesia chose to jump onto the metaphorical bandwagon of psychiatric modernism at a time of tremendous faith in the efficacy of medicine in general to cure a wide array of physical and social dysfunction. Additional factors specific to the colony's social, cultural, and political condition no doubt contributed to the shift as well. The transformation to modern psychiatric services coincided with Southern Rhodesia's reinvention as a modern, self-governing settler society. However, in addition to euphoric expectation, this social transformation was accompanied by a considerable degree of fear and anxiety. In his work on settler colonial cultures, Dane Kennedy uses the phrase "states of depression" as a double entendre connoting the economic depression of the early 1930s, and the colonial state of mind during that period. 23 Central to settler mentality during the Depression was the desire to erect boundaries between the white community itself, and what it perceived to be a pernicious African environment. One of the dangers that the colonizers feared was that if they "let their sides down," lost their ability to "keep up appearances" by maintaining an appropriate position in the racialized social order, they would lose their minds. This fear is poignantly illustrated in many novels on settler colonial societies, most notably in Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing. 24 Equating life in the colonies with the dangers of madness was common during this period. 25 In his autobiography a settler by the name of Rawdon Hoare wrote that, when making up his mind whether or not to leave England for Southern Rhodesia, he asked himself if the pursuit of fortune was worth the risk to his mental stability. 26 While the colonies provided immigrant settlers with a second chance financially, settlers' relationship with the colony remained a contentious one. They developed various boundaries between themselves and what was perceived to be a hostile environment, fearing that if they did not guard their interactions with something as basic as the African sun, they could go mad. It was believed that exposure of pale skin to the African sun's rays would lead to restlessness, loss of appetite, insomnia, loss of weight, irritability, lassitude, and mental inertia. These symptoms were known as neuras-

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thenia. 27 Thus, Europeans were admonished by public health officials to wear protective headgear when out of doors. 28 In 1929, Southern Rhodesia's inspector of schools warned parents to clothe their children in red, yellow, and green fabrics as these colors would not be penetrated by the sun's ultraviolet rays. 29 Key to the decision to modernize in the early 1930s was the concern that European vulnerability to madness was at an all-time high. Poor whites would presumably experience more exposure to the sun's dangerous rays, to the Mrican wilderness, and to the reputed sexual promiscuity of the Mrican, than would middle-class whites. Tendencies toward alcohol abuse and excessive worry brought on by financial insecurity led to a rise in the fear, if not the reality, of madness among settlers. Hoare described an example of the kind of European undesirable that everyone feared becoming, and for whom an increasing barrage of legislative and social welfare programs was being initiated. Having car trouble far from home one evening, Hoare stopped to ask for assistance from the epitome of the white undesirable. This man had lost his money during the collapse of the tobacco market in the late 1920s, was on the verge of bankruptcy, did not command the respect of "his Natives," and perhaps most transgressive and damning of all from the point of view of the colonial order, was reputed to cohabit with an Mrican woman. Appalled, Hoare left the man's home and traveled up the road to the home of the "right sort" of European couple, where the wife explained to Hoare: ''The whole trouble is men shouldn't be left out here without money. Let them be taken home [England] where, if they want to go under, it's their funeral. But out here things are different. There are too many pitfalls and the natives become involved." To emphasize the moral of this story, Hoare noted "how few people in England realize the danger of a man 'going native' in a distant land." 30 One of the tasks of modern psychiatry in an Mrican colony was to assist in enforcing what Kennedy aptly calle9 the "strai9acket of conformity" among the white settler populace, to prevent such developments.

Doctor Rodger, the Modernizer Doctor Rodger was a "mental disease specialist" imported into Southern Rhodesia like many specialists during the 1930s, primarily for the benefit and social fortification of the colony's expanding settler population. He was, no doubt, expected to use his knowledge of the most up-to-date

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methods to strengthen the protective boundaries that the settler community had erected around itself. While Dr. Kenneth Mann Rodger was no Philippe Pinel, he did expose the country's psychiatric institution to the modern "medical gaze."31 He introduced new methods for the treatment of mental patients, initiated the maintenance of individual case records, established stricter supervision over the medical treatment of patients, saw that patients were provided with rudimentary dental services, and consulted with outside practitioners and surgeons when necessary. 32 Rodger also oversaw the improvement of patients' diets by increasing the supply of fresh fruit. 33 Prior to Rodger's arrival, the hospital's files were themselves a disorder. Patient histories were nonexistent, and a patient's folder consisted mainly of legal documents associated with their certification and admission to the asylum, rarely anything clinical. Rodger introduced new record-keeping procedures, which aided Ingutsheni's transformation into a place where cure was at least on the agenda. Rodger instituted a new documentation system as well. The Mental State of Admission Form (Form 1) contained the doctor's psychiatric assessment of the patient after an initial observation period: the patient's expression, sense of time and space, perception and ideation, emotional state, moral sense, insight, attention span, and level of self control. The doctor also gave a short description of any hallucinations or delusions that the patient exhibited and wrote a short assessment of the patient's general conduct. On the reverse of Form 1 was Form 2, the Bodily State on Admission Form, where the doctor indicated any wounds, scars, or indications of physical ill-health. Form 3, Clinical Notes, was arguably the most important and, depending on the conscientiousness of the medical staff and the duration of the patient's hospital stay, also the most extensive section. 34 In theory, this form contained the doctor's notes of all diagnoses and treatment, and summaries of his periodic interviews with the patient. If regularly updated, the forms kept the various practitioners and nursing staff abreast of what each other was doing, as well as of the patient's medical and mental progress. During his first two years, Rodger made a few minor improvements in the staff as well. He replaced the old matron, whom he described as "completely insane, "35 with Eileen 0' Connor, a matron with "first class English experience" like his own. Two occupational therapists were added to the hospital staff as well. Rodger set up an outpatient clinic at Bulawayo's Memorial Hospital so that people suffering from mental disorders could receive help without certification and incarceration at the asylum.

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Because Askins, as the colony's medical director, was also very interested in the progress oflngutsheni's modernization, it is not clear which of the two launched many of these new initiatives. Both Askins and Rodger had previously worked in England: Rodger as a resident psychiatrist, and Askins as a public health official and inspector of schools. Both had experienced the implementation of Britain's new Mental Treatment Act of 1930, and both sought to adapt that legislation to Southern Rhodesia. They held different opinions around the issue of occupational therapy. Rodger initially expressed skepticism about its intrinsic value. In an attempt to change Rodger's mind, Askins sent him a book on a breakthrough in occupational therapy in the Netherlands, which Rodger, still a skeptic, pronounced interesting "as much for its omissions as for its contents." He criticized the book for not mentioning that "the new methods as opposed to the older forms of employment have made no difference to recovery rates." Moreover, according to Rodger, the book "neglected to point out just how the Dutch managed to get their patients to work." 36 While Rodger was in favor of patients working, he felt less enthusiasm for activities that did not increase the hospital's revenue and argued that certain groups of patients were constitutionally incapable of benefiting from the more common forms of "modern" therapy like handicraft. Mter less than one year in Southern Rhodesia, Rodger confidently asserted that Mrican women could not learn handicraft, explaining: "Apparently these women can only work with the materials to which they have been accustomed since childhood, and are not adaptable." 37 Rodger did give in finally, at Dr. Askins's insistence, and hired Jacoba Coetzee as an occupational instructor in 1934. Her qualifications were that she was an "efficient seamstress and dressmaker, courteous and well behaved."38 However, in Rodger's mind occupational therapy remained of dubious value, particularly where Mrican patients were concerned. In 1935, Dr. Askins died returning from a trip to England, leaving Rodger as spokesperson for legislative reform. In 1936, Rodger explained to the Southern Rhodesian Legislative Council that the purpose of a proposed mental treatment act was "to strengthen the cooperation between medicine and psychology; to make the benefits of psychiatric medicine freely available to sufferers of mental disorder at the earliest possible point; and to allow for the reception of voluntary patients and thus bypass the stigma of certification."39 Echoing the dominant sentiment of the Western psychiatric establishment, he stated that "mental disease is a definite disease just as is tuber-

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culosis or influenza." In his mind, the greatest impediment to diagnosis and treatment was the social stigma applied to the label of mental illness. He argued that the only reason that legal intervention had become necessary in the first place was because sufferers and their families were reluctant to seek help. Noting "an immense impetus to research into mental disorder of all sorts," thanks to the new methods introduced by Freud andjung in particular, Rodger pointed out that there was, for the first time, a recognition by the medical profession and by the public that "there are many conditions leading to mental disease which, taken in time, can be cured." He pointed out that he was not only speaking ofthe major mental disorders but that, with advances in the discipline, minor mental disorders "not so serious as to be certifiable, but nonetheless distressing to the sufferer, and impairing to his social adequacy" were also treatable. 40 The point was sold to the members of Southern Rhodesia's Legislative Council and in 1936 they passed the Mental Disorders Act. The 1936 act applied to the person "unable to conform with the ordinary usages of the society in which he moves. "41 The category of "moral imbecile" was also added to the 1936 nomenclature. All in all, the merging of various colonial social agendas with science was facilitated. 42 Section 47 ofthe 1936law established a Mental Hospitals Board composed of prominent members of the white community. One of the duties of the board was to check the powers of the medical superintendent, a measure considered necessary in light of the expanded power being accorded him by the new law. To assist this process, Rodger was required to present monthly reports to the board. 43 The board's responsibilities were to visit the hospital once every month when, in theory, they would inspect wards, kitchens, and places of work; interview all patients admitted since their previous visit to the hospital; and give patients the opportunity to air their complaints. They were also empowered to discharge noncriminal patients if they saw fit. The evidence suggests, however, that they tended to defer to Rodger's judgment, as the only specialist in town. 44 A review of their monthly reports between 1936 and 1941 indicates that board members were most responsive to issues related to the maintenance of "civilized standards" among the hospital's European inhabitants. Thus, they were quick to react to Elizabeth M's complaint that the piano in the European patients' recreational area was out of tune, or to John H's complaint that social distinctions were inadequately upheld at the asylum. 45 The Mental Health Board saw to it that European women patients had the opportunity to have their hair done by arranging for beauticians from a Bulawayo salon to visit regularly. 46 European women

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who utilized this service were viewed as moving on the path toward recovery. The investment of the colonial society in "keeping up appearances" is illustrated by the expressions of anxiety by various elements in the white settler community, such as the 1942 commissioners' concern that the position of the exercise yard left European females "open to the gaze" of the African male attendants who worked nearby, or Hoare's reporting the observations of a white settler woman of a white man "going native." The comedy of this concern and consequent effort is best illustrated by analogy with the BBC comedy Keeping Up Appearances;4 7 the tragedy is that this particular effort-maintaining a mythical European superiority-was one of the aims of white supremacy in the colonial setting. The other, equally specious aim of white supremacy was the domestication of the native. The regime of treatment at Ingutsheni was recruited to these various efforts.

The Madness of Modernity The year 1937 seems to have been a turning point for Dr. Rodger and hence for Ingutsheni; at least, this is what the members of the 1942 commission believed. The commissioners divided Rodger's career at Ingutsheni into two eras: the period before he went to England to learn the latest "modern curative methods" in psychiatry, and that following his return.48 In 1937, Rodger went to England to learn the newest technique in Western psychiatric practice, convulsant shock therapy, employing Cardiazol (known as Metrazol in the United States), which was first introduced by a Hungarian psychiatrist, Ladislaus von Meduna, in 1935. 49 The treatment was developed under the assumption, common for some time among Western physical psychiatrists, that epilepsy could offer clues to the treatment of schizophrenia (know then as dementia praecox). It was thought that epileptics enjoyed a period of increased lucidity following seizures, and thus it stood to reason that the creation of convulsions would benefit certain categories of psychotic patients. 5° The policy in Southern Rhodesia was to wait until new treatments had been "proved by experience" in Great Britain before applying them in the colony. 5 1 In the case of shock therapies such as Cardiazol, British hospitals had only recently begun the regular use of this treatment. Indeed, in the area of psychiatry, Southern Rhodesia did not apparently allow itself to lag too far behind what was current "at Home."

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Rodger wasted no time in applying this new method. As a therapeutic technique, it was recommended for schizophrenic patients in their first eighteen months of hospital care. While its efficacy with older patients was considered questionable, Rodger performed the treatment on all resident diagnosed schizophrenics admitted to Ingutsheni between 1932 and 1938. This amounted to 205 of the 701 patients admitted during that period. 52 The doctor admitted that the treatment was drastic and alarming to watch. 53 Deep comas were induced through the intravenous injection ofCardiazol into the patient's blood stream. The needle was kept in the patient's vein until a major seizure occurred. It was reinjected if there was no seizure and, according to Rodger, a patient could receive anywhere from three to twenty-six injections before "recovery."54 The period between the injection and the convulsion was terrifYing to patients, as it apparently created the sensation of impending death, when the patient became pale and coughed frequently. Mter this violent episode, he or she lost consciousness and fell into a comatose state. If the treatment worked successfully, he or she emerged with greater mental clarity. 55 Results from studies conducted during the late 1930s in the United States, however, were not encouraging. In addition to low recovery rates, Cardiazol had the disadvantage of causing fractures and injuries. 56 However, Rodger had nothing but praise for the new treatment. Not only was it the newest thing in physical psychiatry, but he was also able to claim a dramatic increase in Ingutsheni's "recovery rates." In 1938, for instance, Rodger cites a whopping 83 percent recovery rate among Mricans and 76 percent among Europeans. This was the highest recovery rate recorded at Ingutsheni, and to Rodger, it spelled success. Indeed, Rodger boasted that his rates demonstrated convincingly that "mental hospitals are now, for the m;oyority, places of hope and cure."57 He went on in self·congratulatory fashion to refer to schizophrenia as the cancer of mental illness. The treatment had "proved 100 percent safe for Europeans," Rodger exclaimed. However, the doctor had to add that, "with the native it is different."58 In fact, seventy-nine Mrican patients died in 1938, a very high number, even for Ingutsheni. Many of these deaths were linked directly or indirectly to the Cardiazol treatment. 59 Rodger's response when challenged was that, while he regretted the loss of Mrican lives, he felt that the loss of these patients was "more than offset" by the tremendous increase in recovery rates. Moreover, he argued that the new treatment "helped to reduce the number of chronic patients in the hospital." He didn't specifY whether this was due to death or recovery. What is more,

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Cardiazol "improved the condition of many of those remaining in the hospital. "60 Whatever the actual effects of this new therapy, it did succeed in enhancing Rodger's reputation and his consultancy practice "went up with a leap."61 In late 1939, the first wing of the new Nervous Disorders Hospital for Europeans suffering from noncertifiable "mental and nervous complaints" opened in Bulawayo. 62 There had been agitation for such an institution for "borderline" European patients for some time and, unlike when Ingutsheni first opened in 1908, there was much self-congratulation at its opening. 63 Doctor Rodger was asked to assess the new institution and what it meant for Southern Rhodesia. Rodger's reply was that, "with this new weapon, I hope to get every recoverable case [read European case] out of Ingutsheni, treated and cured here. "64 Modernity thus brought increased hope to the families of white patients suffering from mental maladies. It also facilitated greater separation between groups: neurosis sufferers versus psychosis sufferers, black and colored patients versus white patients, and so on. Rodger's remarks were met by applause from the audience of Europeans equally caught up in his positivist enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Rodger became less and less interested in his work at Ingutsheni. His visits to the institution became even less frequent and tended to be limited to patrolling the wards for dischargeable patients, with the result that Ingutsheni was rapidly reverting to the psychiatric backwater of hopelessness that it had been in the past. Numerous historians of psychiatry have noted the tendency among Western-trained psychiatrists of this era to neglect those patients whom they perceived to be chronically ill. Gerald Grob, a prominent scholar of American psychiatric history, explains that this was due, in part, to psychiatrists' obsession with competing with the successes of scientific medicine, meaning that they wanted to be able to cure their sick. So-called incurable patients, by definition, did not provide such prospects. Governments were more inclined to devote resources to curative rather than custodial institutions. All of these shifts contributed to the growing invisibility of chronic patients and the preference for outpatient services. 65 Doctor Rodger fits Grab's characterization perfectly. Electric convulsant therapy (ECT) further enhanced Dr. Rodger's consulting career. Introduced into Southern Rhodesia in 1941, ECT had been developed a few years earlier in Italy, and came into extensive use at English hospitals by early 1940. 66 Rodger prescribed the treatment extensively at both Ingutsheni and the Nervous Disorders Hospitals, for

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everything from "neurasthenia" .and other nervous complaints, to the equally vague modern diagnosis of schizophrenia. ECT rapidly became the most common form of treatment at either hospital. It was found to be less likely than Cardiazol to result in fractures. 67 Like convulsant shock therapy, ECT was a radical somatic therapy that involved placing electrodes on either side of the patient's forehead and passing a current of between 70 and 130 volts of electricity through her or his brain. 68 Patients remained awake, without anesthetic of any kind, until the currents were triggered. One European patient from the Rhodesia Air Force recalled his experience of ECT some years later: "A large box about 15" high is used, and something like earphones over your head, and pads of wet cotton wool ... and then I suppose the current is switched on. I believe they test your response first of all, and then you don't know anything more. On the first occasion I think I was out about ten minutes, and the second time I came to almost immediately. "69 While the treatment was generally popular among Europeans, a brief scandal ensued when three European servicemen suffered fractured vertebrae as a result of ECT. 70 Publicity around these mishaps served to focus a growing sense of unease and even resentment about Dr. Rodger and his treatments.

Prelude to an Inquiry By the time four trained psychiatric nurses arrived from England in 1941, Dr. Rodger had greatly reduced his hours at Ingutsheni. At the same time, the patient population there was rising: between 1940 and 1941, for instance, the population grew from 643 to 727 patients. 71 Ingutsheni was seriously overcrowded and its staff was commensurately inadequate. 72 Doctor Rodger's absence and the lack of authority of his deputy superintendent, Dr. David MacKenzie, who had been hired in 1938 to assist Rodger in his clinical duties at the hospital, left the asylum in near chaos. 73 Doctor MacKenzie's lack of official authority created a stressful situation for himself, and an insubordinate environment at the hospital. He found it almost impossible to get the secretary, Mr. Teasdale, to cooperate with him. 74 What is more, the European staff at the hospital was divided into two camps, the "home born" and the "colonial born." Being "home born" himself, MacKenzie was at a distinct disadvantage without Rodger's backing. By 1941, Ingutsheni was on the verge of imploding.

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Despite the financial constraints caused by the war, the colonial authorities backed a plan to import four new male nurses from England. A problem arose, however, when the four men refused to blend into their new environment or, in the more affable language of the hospital matron, Eileen O'Connor, when they took a while to become "acclimatized."75 These men displayed an open loathing for the older European staff, whom they viewed as inferior to themselves. Their presence thus exacerbated the various antagonisms already existing within the asylum. One of the new nurses aired his displeasure publicly. N.J. Killoran wrote a letter to the Bulawayo Chronicle describing filthy and vermin-ridden rooms, and complaining of cobwebs, torn mosquito nets, rubbish in drawers, torn pillowcases, no electric lights or curtains, and chipped furniture and crockery. He wrote of "very foul smelling native patients" serving food in the European dining rooms, and of old fish paste pots being used as salt containers. As for the terms of service, Killoran felt that the hours of work were too long, his salary too low considering Southern Rhodesia's high cost of living, and his chances for promotion virtually niP 6 G. Hicklin, another of the new nurses, complained that the position had been misrepresented to him by the Southern Rhodesian High Commission in London. He had been assured that Ingutsheni was a modern facility. He explained that by "modern" he meant a wellequipped and adequately staffed hospital. In his estimation, Ingutsheni was neither. 77 These were very serious charges in a self-conscious settler society, a direct affront to the colonizers' image of themselves. Bad publicity was considered potentially disastrous because it might discourage white immigration to the colony at a time when the settlers strongly desired to increase their numbers. In addition, the administrators had every reason to fear that the demands on Southern Rhodesia's mental health facilities would continue to increase. With the outbreak of World War II, Southern Rhodesia became a training center for the Royal Air Force and accommodated thousands of military personnel from Britain. 78 The colonizers feared that their reputation within the empire would suffer tremendously if they were not able to meet this challenge. By July 3, 1942, Governor Russell had had enough. Complaints about Ingutsheni were coming from every direction, and it was time to appoint a commission of experts to look into the situation and suggest improvements. The complaints were numerous, but all could be subsumed under the general question of whether or not Dr. Rodger was a suitable superintendent of the colony's mental hospital. The commission of in-

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quiry centered round interviews with staff in which they were asked various questions about the organization of the hospital and about other staff members, and observations of these staff members by the commissioners. The commissioners conducted their own tours of the mental health facility and elicited additional testimony from members of the Mental Hospital Board and various other outside societies involved with Ingutsheni. The first line of business was to assess the general quality of the hospital staff. For this purpose, the commissioners made their own observations and also elicited the testimony of those among the staff that they considered capable of making informed judgments: Dr. Rodger, Dr. MacKenzie, and Matron O'Connor. This is what Rodger had to say about the staff generally: 'They are inclined to think too much like their patients. They did [sic] not get the idea that though they had to be friendly and pleasant, they were a little different from them. "79 The idea that mental illness is somehow contagious is not uncommon in Western popular thought. As Fleming had done earlier, Rodger characterized the untrained white staff of Ingutsheni as generally poorly educated men and women who were "mainly of the agricultural Dutch type-the farmer's son for whom there was no room on the farm. The girls we get are just girls who drift from one job to another-very much the casual labor type." According to Rodger, this was inevitable in a colonial situation due to what he called "the artificial conditions ... which allow young men to take a gamble." Numerous "opportunities of making what looks like easy money" kept strong candidates away. Thus, the mental hospital was generally only able to attract the "Poor Whites" with low levels of initiative and skill. The commissioners agreed with Rodger's characterization of the untrained asylum staff. In an interview with one ofthe asylum's attendants, the commissioners were appalled at how he described his duties. The attendant said that he thought of himself as a guard and little else, employed to prevent patients from running away. His other duties included waiting on white patients in the dining room, preventing patients from quarrelling, and supplying them with matches for the cigarettes provided by the Mental Hospital Board. 80 The commissioners suspected this particular attendant and others on the staff of being defective and abnormal themselves. This assessment was, at least in part, a product of the prejudice against poor whites prevalent in the British Mrican colonies and Britain itself. 81 A fascinating characteristic of the 1942 commission was the idiom of

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mental hygiene that the commissioners employed to rank the hospital staff, in a similar manner to the way the staff ranked the patients. One possible reason is that one of the commissioners was Dr. William Russell, himself a superintendent of the Pretoria Mental Hospital and a previous commissioner of mental hygiene for the Union of South Africa. 82 The older nursing staff received a higher grade than the attendants, but just barely. J.P. Fouries was among this group. In fact, Fouries was one of the reasons given for the commission of inquiry, as he had been accused of abusing British patients. The commissioners concluded that the combination of his being an Afrikaner and holding unpopular political ideas was probably the root of these charges. He was not, however, highly rated on the intelligence scale. In the words of one of the commissioners, "he gave us the impression for being dull. "83 Another of the male nurses,]. P. ·Reilly, was described by Dr. MacKenzie as having 'just missed being feeble minded." According to MacKenzie, the man was always willing to cooperate, but simply "has no idea. "84 Another member of the old staff (that is, pre-1941) was the charge male nurse, J. E. Standing, who was assessed as suffering from "impaired efficiency" and was described as always appearing "in a highly nervous state."85 The four new English nurses were responsible for much of the tremendously negative publicity that Ingutsheni received. These men were L. E. and N.J. Killoran, G. P. Hicklin, and V. E. Jackson. Matron O'Connor was asked by the commission to give her assessment of the new men. While she was part of the "old" nursing staff, she was also from Britain where she had worked as a matron at the Isle of Wright and Fareholm mental hospitals. 86 Doctor MacKenzie suggested that O'Connor would be better suited as matron of the Gwelo Women's Prison, but the commissioners considered her opinion valuable. 'That chap Killoran," she informed them, "looks at one in such a funny way." All the new nurses were described as hostile. According to O'Connor, they had a tendency to look at a person "as if they would like to kill. "87 The conflicts among the European staff were thus further exacerbated, making any esprit de corps extremely unlikely. Doctor Rodger brought an air of scientific precision to his character assessment; he dismissed G. Hicklin's complaints, remarking that the man was conceited and constantly tried to impress others. While he considered him to be a fair worker, Rodger felt that Hicklin spoiled this merit by talking too much. When asked about his level of intelligence, Rodger said, "he writes a reasonable letter for his type," 88 and seemed determined to maintain his status as the sole specialist by making disparaging

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remarks about his critic. His summary remarks about Hicklin were: "This man appears to find it a grievance that there are natives in this country. "89 The commissioners made few negative comments about Hicklin, although Russell did ask Matron 0' Connor if she didn't think he had a peculiar manner about him. When one considers that only weeks earlier Hicklin had been accused of sexually molesting a boy, this is indeed surprising. Even though Hicklin was not charged, one would expect some stigma to have attached to him, but the authorities managed to discredit the boy, Basil, so successfully that this was not the case. At nine years of age, Basil had been an inmate at Ingutsheni for four years. Diagnosed as a congenital mental defective (CMD), he had an entire life of confinement ahead of him. Doctor MacKenzie classified Basil as morally delinquent as well as mentally deficient, having "no control over his lower or primitive instincts." Because of his sexual precociousness, Basil was kept in a private room in the European male ward rather than the European female ward where children were normally kept. 90 According to Dr. MacKenzie, children like Basil could be "surprisingly cunning."91 When the commissioners interviewed Hicklin about the charge that he had raped Basil, they felt that "he gave the impression of telling the truth" and did not pursue the issue further. Generally speaking, the commissioners felt that the new staff members were far superior to the old, and this view was supported by the Mental Hospitals Board. According to one of its most vocal members, Mrs. Greenshields, the patients looked much more comfortable since the new nurses arrived. 92 The commissioners decided to retain these new men but decided that, in future, efforts would be made to recruit trained nurses from the Union of South Mrica, "in view of the similarity of conditions. 93 The commissioners said very little on the subject of the Mrican staff except that the males were of a generally higher standard and the females were not. According to the commissioners, "the standard of Natives [read male] employed is fairly good owing to the fact that there is keen competition for the post of attendant, thus enabling the most suitable applicants to be chosen." There were twenty-eight such men who, for all their qualifications, were each paid only £2 per month. No account was taken of their respective positions; an ordinary attendant received the same as a head attendant or interpreter. This was a point of contention for Tyson Simonda, a well-educated Mrican attendant/interpreter at the hospital. He wrote a letter asking "whether the Commission thinks that the services of Native Interpreter

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at an Institution like Ingutsheni with an accommodation of over three hundred Natives of different tribes and languages, is not required at all?" He made the point that, since he worked as both a native attendant and a native interpreter at Ingutsheni, he should be paid more for his services. If messengers "got remunerations or allowances for using their bicycles on Public Service," he felt that he should be compensated for using his knowledge of languages. Mter all, he wrote, "education is also a private tool, every-body knows that. "94 The commissioners agreed that Tyson should be paid an additional amount for his services and generally favored the establishment of some form of hierarchy among the Mrican staff. The Mrican female staff was considered to be "mainly of the prostitute type" who did not stay long. The commissioners and Matron O'Connor all thought that it would be better to recruit women from missions. The problem was that women with the option ofliving elsewhere generally did so, rather than squeezing into small living spaces and sharing a single bathing facility with ninety-six psychiatric patients. As with the European staff, the commissioner proposed some effort, by way of better pay scales and conditions, to attract a better quality of applicant. As far as the specialist staff was concerned, the commissioners had to deal with Dr. MacKenzie's charges against Dr. Rodger. Among MacKenzie's long list of complaints about Rodger's administration was his charge that the patient death rate had increased as a result of convulsive shock therapy by Caridazol, and later, ECT. MacKenzie alleged that Rodger used electric shock on Mrican patients who were suffering from general paralysis of the insane, tuberculosis, and pellagra, a nutritional deficiency disorder accompanied by debility. In all cases, the patients were weak in body and would have been more appropriately treated with other methods. MacKenzie accused Rodger of not reading the clinical notes in the patient files that he was responsible for instituting. He was thus, according to MacKenzie, poorly informed about the patients' suitability for specific treatments. The commissioners were not particularly sympathetic toward Dr. MacKenzie, nor were they particularly concerned with his charges against Rodger. They described MacKenzie's description of the wrongful treatment of three Mrican men as "unsolicited statements." The commissioners were referring to this piece of evidence provided by MacKenzie: "Last year there were three Native boys who were very poor and I kept them off treatment for quite a long time, then I went down south and when I came back I found that these three boys were either dead or dy-

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ing because they had been given treatment when I was away." The "treatment" was ECT. When asked by the commissioners if this treatment was not in fact very successful in calming patients down, his response was that it was: "I have seen them quiet down so much that they have been removed in the trolley to the mortuary. "95 Among the other patients whom MacKenzie accused Rodger of giving ECT inappropriately was a European man named Fraser who was suffering from malaria. 96 The commissioners decided that MacKenzie had not convinced them that Rodger had been seriously negligent. They pointed to the fact that the death rate did not show a steady increase since shock therapies had been introduced, and thus that no direct correlation between the treatment and patient death rates could be made. 97 Doctor MacKenzie charged that, in addition to recklessly endangering patients' lives, Dr. Rodger was driven by the desire "to show that his recovery rate is the highest in the world. "98 While the commission accepted that Dr. Rodger's attitude toward Ingutsheni was on the casual side, they generally held a high opinion of him and shared his belief that recovery rates did not lie. Indeed, even when acknowledging that Rodger had probably lied to them on several points about his responsibility for certain cases of negligence, they attributed it to his astuteness. In their opinion, "He has a very quick brain and was obviously able to see not only the meaning of a question asked him, but all the implications arising from it." Doctor MacKenzie, on the other hand, "is obviously not a quick thinker. '>99 However, the commission did recognize that things could not continue as they were. They noted that while Rodger had done much to modernize the hospital on the clinical side, "he concerned himself primarily with this aspect of his work, with the result that the administrative side did not receive from him the attention it needed." 100 The result was a staff at war with itself and, more perilous still, disorder in the social organization of the institution. For insight into the latter, the commission relied heavily on the evidence provided by members of the Mental Hospitals Board: the settler community's perspective on the mental hospital. In their testimony during the 1942 commission, board members were primarily concerned that reforms to the organization of the hospital improved the condition and dignity of the white patients, and maintained the markers of distance and difference between them and the native patients. They wanted better uniforms for the European men, full-length mirrors for the European women, and special wards built to segregate colored patients from the Mricans. When the commissioners tried to elicit the board's response to the

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conditions of the African wards and their impression of how African patients were being treated, they had to plead ignorance. Mrs. Greenshields, who had been a member of this board since its inception in 1936, indicated that she rarely visited the African sections of the hospital. When asked how then Africans benefited from the board's work, she mentioned that "they [African men] get tobacco and cinemas." When the commissioners asked about African women, she stated that "they also smoke at times." 101 About African complaints, Greenshields stated: "I do not think the natives have ever complained. They have no complaint except wanting to go home." When asked if she had seen the African kitchens or the native wards during their last inspection, she admitted that she had not. Greenshields became more informative when the commissioners changed the subject back to European patients. When asked if she shared their concern about the close proximity of different groups and classes of patients, they rekindled their common bond as white settlers in black Africa. Mrs. Greenshields's response was yes, "the coloureds certainly need new quarters." Both the board and the commission thought it highly undesirable that the male African and European wards were so close to one another and were equally appalled when they found out that Africans and Europeans used the same room to view films, though not at the same times. General laxity at Ingutsheni worried the commissioners when it came to issues such as maintaining social distances and distinctions. Commissioner Dr. William Russell was particularly concerned with the position of the yard for chronic European female patients, as it was accessible to the view of African male attendants. The hospital staff, on the other hand, was more concerned about the cost of keeping chronic European women out of view. Matron O'Connor told the commissioners that she disliked the idea of keeping European women hidden in an en.closed exercise yard because of its isolation and lack of view. She told them that when she had first arrived at Ingutsheni, the European patients were allowed to sit under trees and walk around the grounds but, since white visitors "didn't like to see obviously insane people about," they had to fence the women in. When Russell tried to get her to admit that it was undesirable for European women to be seen by passing African men, O'Connor agreed in principle but said that there were advantages since, if these men could see the women, they could also see if they tried to escape. She further attempted to assure the commissioners that any patient found attempting to undress herself was detained inside the wards and taken out for supervised walks only until she could be trusted again. 102 The fear of "Black Peril" far outweighed the expediencies set forth by

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O'Connor. Other members of the hospital staff held similar views. They found it difficult to maintain the kind of distinctions that the white public craved within an institution with perennial staff shortages. That arm of white supremacy defined here as "keeping up appearances" was virtually untenable under these conditions. Further, the very act of "keeping up appearances" impaired treatment. Doctor Rodger felt that the white patients suffered because of all the public squeamishness. He told them that "half the men who are here sitting idle in the yard would at Home be wheeling a barrow but if I were to do that here, the visitors would set up a howl about putting white men on to degrading Native labour." 103 This lack of commitment to upholding the colonial order was perhaps what convinced the commission that Rodger was not the right man to superintend the colony's heterogeneous mental hospital. On the other hand, they were not convinced that he was not a valuable psychiatrist and well suited for his practice among whites. They recommended that Rodger retain his position as superintendent of the Nervous Disorders Hospital while his role at Ingutsheni be reduced to a supervisory role until a new full-time medical superintendent could be appointed. The showdown of the 1942 commission was, in large part, between the technocrat, Rodger, and the social engineers. In future, the administrators of Southern Rhodesia's public health would seek superintendents more capable of combining both roles: the ideal colonial doctor. In 1944, MacKenzie retired and the administration appointed Dr. Dawson as SU" perintendent. Dawson was transferred from Valkenberg Mental Hospital in Pretoria, South Africa, where he had been physician superintendent.104 In 1946 they appointed an additional psychiatrist, Major Dr. Higgs, who was also transferred from South Africa. Higgs had a strong interest in questions of genetically based differences between African and European psychology and it was believed that he would fit well into Southern Rhodesia's social fabric. 105 In fact, for the next decade, all new appointments to Ingutsheni's supervisory staff had South African or other colonial experience: candidates more likely to have the appropriate commitment to "keeping up appearances." The 1942 commission was conducted as if the success or failure of Ingutsheni reflected the success or failure of colonial order in general. Was Southern Rhodesia able to be a successfully modern and self-governing British colony? It was hurtful to the colonials when their brothers from "Home" condemned them so mercilessly. It also made them fearful to hear that the administration of the insane was carried out in a rather

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lackadaisical fashion, with chronic white female patients prone to disrobe themselves cavorting in close proximity to Mrican male attendants. While impressed with Dr. Rodger's scientific credentials and, no doubt, comfortable with his arrogant demeanor, they had ultimately to question his competency as superintendent oflngutsheni. Once the question arose as to whether Rodger was a suitable guardian of colonial codes and boundaries, the commission was challenged to define just what type of superintendent would be right for Ingutsheni. It seems the colonizers wanted a superintendent who was both a modernizer and good at maintaining the colonial social order. Rodger performed his modernizing role adequately. He had overseen the transformation of Ingutsheni from a purely custodial institution for the compulsory confinement of the insane into an institution that provided treatment for mental patients. During Rodger's tenure as superintendent, Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum had become Ingutsheni Mental Hospital. Rodger introduced the practice of keeping individual case records and generally behaved like a "modern" psychiatrist, meaning that he bridged the gap between psychiatry and clinical medicine. 106 However, while succeeding in this sphere, he fell short in the area of maintaining the social order, or being what Frantz Fanon might have termed a successful "colonial doctor." According to Fanon, himself a psychiatrist in the French colony of Algeria, the "colonial doctor" was first and foremost a colonizer, a man with ulterior motives. "Behind the man who heals the wounds of humanity [italics mine]," wrote Fanon, was "a member of the dominant society [who enjoyed] an incomparably higher standard ofliving than that of his metropolitan colleague." The relatively luxurious lifestyle afforded him by the colonial situation rapidly transformed the immigrant doctor into an integral part of the processes of colonial domination and exploitation. Whether or not most colonial doctors could be characterized this way, Fanon proposed that this was a paradigm for the good colonial doctor, from the point of view of colonial power. How were these men and women, particularly those in the civil service, being inscribed into the social landscape of the settler colony? Southern Rhodesia's prime minister at the time, Dr. Godfrey Huggins, provided perhaps the best model. 107 Doctor Huggins immigrated to Southern Rhodesia and developed a thriving and financially rewarding medical practice. 108 Moreover, he was the architect of Southern Rhodesia's version of apartheid, its 'Two Pyramid Policy" of social segregation and separate development. 109 Doctor

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Huggins maintained the ideal balance between the desire to be a modernizer and the desire to maintain white supremacy: white supremacy always came first. Doctor Rodger did not come close to measuring up to these standards. He failed on the second part ofFanon's paradigm; he failed to facilitate the colonial order. He failed to implement the twin efforts of white supremacy: "keeping up appearances" and domestication of the native. This is not to say that Rodger was not an elitist, a social climber, and an extremely acquisitive settler; he was all of these things. His problem was that he did not extend his personal desire for wealth and power within the colonial system into the desire to maintain that system. He lacked the proclivities of a social engineer. The 1942 commission was an inquisition into all that did not live up to Southern Rhodesian colonial ideals of European prestige and dominance, all that failed to respect the premium placed on distance between social and racial groups. Indeed, the commission's report reads more like a check on the maintenance of social segregation within the asylum than a check on the abuses and incompetence of hospital practice. The institution and its staff were penalized if they did not meet the standards of a colonial situation. While Ingutsheni's inmates had been expelled from the society, Ingutsheni, as an institution, was expected to reimpose that society's boundaries and hierarchies within its gates.

6. The Africans Do Not Complain The Monologue of Reason about Madness at Ingutsheni, 1942-1968

[Great strides are being made with the use of] modern methods of treatment-including insulin, electrical shock, and injections with the new wonder drugs. DR. CHARLES HENRY DAWSON, quoted in the Bulawayo Chronicle, October 6, 1955· It is a great tribute to the fortitude and pertinacy [sic] of the Mrican in his desire to benefit from western treatment that he accepts the conditions with very little complaint.

SouTHERN RHoDESIA, Report on the Public Health, 1949. This is the place of boiling people. "WINNIE," patient at Ingutsheni Mental Hospital Can I come down there [to Ingutsheni] and try some of my medicines? JACK MAKWAYO, letter to Medical Superintendent of Ingutsheni, October 10, 1948. [The patient] spits across the table at the examining doctor and says the doctor is King George. Observations about a patient at Ingutsheni Mental Hospital, 1945.

By the 1940s and rgsos, the psychopharmacopoeia, the psychosurgeries, the multiple methods of shocking and inducing comas in psychiatric pa-

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tients, all in the name of affecting recovery, or perhaps more aptly, of increasing recovery rates, were being used at Ingutsheni. Doctor Charles Dawson, the man who succeeded Dr. Kenneth Mann Rodger as the medical superintendent of Ingutsheni in 1944, 1 believed, like Dr. Rodger, that the truth resided in that which is visible and measurable. The truth of the psychiatric hospital were those methodologies, enacted on the muted bodies of patients, that succeeded, or seemed to succeed, in increasing "recovery" and discharge rates: the "insulin, electric shock, and injections ... the new wonder drugs." Doctor Dawson did not place any more store in what his patients said than Rodger had. Beyond the limited and heavily proscribed interviews, which were essentially opportunities for patients to show whether or not they had any "insight" into the true nature of their condition, in other words, to show that they knew that they were mad and that they were at the psychiatric hospital for that reason, very little of what the psychiatric patient said was heard. Most of what they said became part of the disaggregated utterances that formed the acoustic backdrop on the psychiatric wards, which the doctors and nursing staff most often described merely as noise. As a colonial doctor par excellence, if one accepts Frantz Fanon's characterization of such beings, Dawson was rather uninterested in what his Mrican patients had to say and placed little store in the psychiatric interview, believing that the native patient's "body would be more eloquent." 2 So the Mrican patient who entered the psychiatric hospital, like the Mrican patient who entered the clinic, entered with some diffidence as, according to psychologist and Frantz Fanon biographer, Hussein Bulhan, "the visit to the doctor was always an ordeal to the colonized. "3 Mter all, according to Alexander Butchart in his work that looks at the European construction of the Mrican body, the colonial doctor most often perceived the Mrican patient as a "passive corporeal container of pathology," as a mute body that occasionally made noise. Such a doctor had no interest in, for instance, what the patient had seen, experienced, wanted, or desired. These things, to the colonial doctor, were either immaterial or symptomatic of the patient's psychosis. 4 One generally has only the occasional utterances that managed to get onto the pages of the doctors' clinical notes and things like the registers of patient escapes to gauge the Mrican patients' perspectives on the colonial psychiatrist and the psychiatric hospital. Although the quote cited above in the epigraphs, authored by Dr. Dawson, states that Mrican patients at Ingutsheni did not complain much, that they too believed in the truth of biomedical practice, the final three quotes in the epigraphs bespeak

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something else. The third quote is from a woman named Winnie, the same Winnie who, in the first chapter, failed to call the psychiatric hospital by the name Ingutsheni and instead called it Enhlanyeni-the place where insane people live Winnie struggled between being understood and trying to understand her circumstances, on the one hand, and simply trying to figure out what it was that she needed to say to please the white doctors so that she could leave the hospital, on the other. So, when she was asked on another occasion where she was, she told the doctors that she was at "the place of boiling people." Perhaps this was a poor translation; whether she was referring to the excessive heat of the wards, the sensations that she felt during therapy: electric shock, prefrontalleucotomy, or her utter terror that she might indeed be boiled and eaten in that strange institution is not clear. What is abundantly clear, however, is that she was not expressing a complacent acceptance or an abiding faith in the biomedical treatments that Dawson so raved about. Indeed, her words relayed a sense of horror. The positivist pronouncements and resistive utterances above, express two radically opposing viewpoints of the colonial psychiatric hospital and its methodologies. On the one hand, Dr. Charles Dawson expressed his pleasure with and total faith in the advances of modern science and technologies of the body: the pills to induce chemical reactions, the various shocking methods that did seem to have some success, as if the doctor's deliberate inducement of shocks, convulsions, and comas in the patient helped him or her overcome whatever reasonable or delusional fears they may have had, once they realized that anything was better than that. He suggested that the Mricans willingly suffered because they too believed. This statement might lead some to believe that Mrican patients arrived at Ingutsheni voluntarily, due to their faith in the efficacy of the white man's psychiatric treatments. But nothing could have been further from the truth. The vast majority of Ingutsheni's Mrican patients were compulsorily confined there under Urgency Orders. 5 Indeed, as the previous chapters indicate, very few of them would have been at the hospital had they not come into view and into the realm of agents of the colonial state. While the tones of the patients' utterances were completely at odds with his assessment, Dr. Dawson, like most psychiatrists of his day, was quite adept at ascribing voices of dissent to the realm of irrationality or mere nonsense. The ideological armory of the colonial doctor was quite powerful. He had the prestige of his profession, the backing of his state, and the comfort of his Eurocentric conception of reality to fortify him. It is because of this armory that Dawson was able to dismiss the protests of his

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Mrican patient, and even render them as praise. The separate planets of his remarks and those of the patients' did not even orbit in the same universe. This chapter argues that these seemingly different universes represented different perspectives on the modern psychiatric and therapeutic regime at Ingutsheni between 1944-1968. Doctor Dawson was a colonial man through and through. 6 He was born in Cape Town, South Mrica, and educated at the University of Witwatersrand Medical School. His previous positions included the role of Physician Superintendent at Valkenberg Mental Hospital in Cape Town, an asylum that had loomed large in Southern Rhodesia's pre-Ingutsheni past. South Mrican training institutions were capable and committed to preparing doctors for the social and political requirements of a white supremacist colonial environment. British training hospitals were not quite as effective in this regard; at least this is what the authorities concluded at the 1942 Commission of Inquiry. 7 Dawson was appealing because he was both a modern scientific man and a doctor with demonstrated experience working in a racially segregated colonial psychiatric environment. The reign of Dawson at Ingutsheni closely coincides with the period I examine in this chapter, the post-World War II period from 1945 to 1968. These years represent a high point in psychiatric modernism; aperiod when ECT and other physical therapies such as insulin therapy, leucotomy operations (lobotomies), and new tranquilizing "wonder drugs" such as Largactil, the British trade name for the anti-psychotic drug, Chlorpromazine (known as Thorazine in the United States), was widely used. It was a period in the West and in its colonies when biomedicine was thought to have the answer to almost everything related to the social and the corporal human. By the late 1950s, Ingutsheni's identity as an institution for Mricans and chronically ill Europeans was firmly entrenched. Mental health care for white colonials became increasingly decentralized: the Nervous Disorders Hospital for European patients at the "early stages of mental disease" opened in Bulawayo; the psychiatric ward at Princess Margaret Hospital (today's Parinrinyatwa Hospital) was established in Salisbury for acute European psychiatric cases; the Hopelands Trust was established for mentally retarded Europeans; St. Francis Home was established for European "ineducables," and Asbourne House was established for European female "chronic inebriates"8 Another change that altered the picture of psychiatric care somewhat was an increased focus on community and district hospitals and clinics for the treatment of Mricans following the Second World War. This development was facilitated by access to a

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growing psychopharmacopoeia and according to Dawson, by the 'judicious use" of antipsychotic drugs, like the popular phenothiazines, especially Chlorpromazine. 9 All these new developments created alternatives to confinement at Ingutsheni Mental Hospital, the expansion of out-patient treatment, and more rapid discharge rates. Why then did Ingutsheni maintain its chronic overcrowdedness? One explanation is that the number of psychiatric admissions continued to rise. Between january 1945 and March 1946 for example, the in-residence African patient population rose from 653 to 8o8. 10 What is more, these figures represent the patients left in the hospital at the end of the year and do not necessarily reflect the full extent of patients treated during these years. 11 While the new admissions figures for 1947 was 345, the So deaths (66 of whom were Africans) and 219 discharges ( 109 of whom were Europeans) mitigated against any extraordinarily large increase in the hospital's end of year population. 12 A similar situation occurred in 1948 when there were 99 deaths (81 of them African), 186 discharges as cured, and 17 2 African and European probations. 13 The trend toward heightened discharge rates led the authorities to claim that the post-World War II expansion of the inmate population was leveling off in the mid-1950s. The authorities assumed that the establishment of a new psychiatric facility at Zomba, Nyasaland, in 1955 would alleviate the overcrowding at Ingutsheni because more of the mental patients from Nyasaland would be sent there. But, they were wrong about the Ingutsheni inmate population stabilization. In 1955, for instance, there were a whooping 646 new admissions. Interestingly, the end of the year increase for that year was only 140. This relatively modest figure was due to the following: 572 discharges some of whom were sent to the new Zomba Mental Hospital, 84 deaths, and 322 patients away on probation.14 But even with the continued increases in discharge and probation rates, and the continued high death rates, Ingutsheni's end of the year patient population rose to 1,400 by the end of 1959 and there were an estimated 1,ooo new admissions each year. 15 The space of the asylum did not expand to accommodate the reality of a continually growing patient population. According to Benny Goldberg of the new Federal Health Ministry (which was established following the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland in 1954), Ingutsheni patients at the time were "packed in a 'hospital' built to take 525." 16 Such overcrowdedness had to exacerbate the discomfort and suffering among patients who remained in the facility. However, as his earlier quote attests,

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the hospital's superintendent somehow managed to perceive the situation as positive and, for the most part, therapeutic. 17 Doctor Dawson enjoyed a tunnel vision. This feature allowed him to overlook the misery of the majority of the hospital inhabitants and to revel in the well-being of the few-a very colonial way of seeing. For instance, in a 1945 article in the Bulawayo Chronicle entitled, "Big Improvements at Ingutsheni," Dawson stated that "apart from the native section of the hospital and the women's [read white women's] block, which is also to be rebuilt, there is little about Ingutsheni today which distinguishes it from an ordinary hospital except the fact that but few of the patients are in bed. "18 Such a rosy picture was possible only after the doctor excluded a full five-sixths of the hospital's patient population from consideration. 19 A less selective representation of the hospital, coming only a few months after Dawson's, painted a very different picture. Doctor Morris, the colony's medical director from 1946 until196o, 20 had this to say about the state of Ingutsheni: I was horrified to find, in what I can only call one of the dungeons of the building, a female native patient lying dying, stark naked on the floor. The nature of her condition demanded that the shutters should be closed and the room was lit and ventilated only by the light and air which entered through the door from a narrow corridor scarcely five feet in width. Frankly, the conditions were appalling and pitiful. 21

Even the European women's wards were reportedly overcrowded at this time as eighty women inhabited a space designed for only fifty. 22 Of course, their conditions were in no way comparable to the dungeons in which noisy African females were confined, or the overcrowded wards in which African women slept cramped together on floor mats. Yet, it is interesting to note that, in I946, only the European males were sufficiently housed. Moreover, the new European women's block that Dr. Dawson had alluded to, was not actually built until the end of I949· This delay was due to an issue that plagued municipal works projects in Southern Rhodesia and other racialist societies like it: the pressure to select contractors who employed white labor. Such race-based hiring drove up construction costs and often resulted in delayed project completions. 23 By the end of I96o, the patient population at Ingutsheni soared to I,784. 24 Thus, between I945 and I96o, Ingutsheni's population rose from 9II to I, 784, an almost I oo percent increase. When one keeps in mind the high discharge and probation rates, the decentralization of ser-

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vices, and the opening of the Zomba Mental Hospital, one begins to see that the "problem of madness" continued to increase. Still, incidence cannot be inferred since the increase in the patient population was more related to issues of proximity to the European gaze, and distance from indigenous therapy management groups than the reality of mental illness. As late as 1969, a critic of the institution claimed that one could still find "cell block accommodation" there. 25 Yet, throughout his tenure Dawson continued to revel in the hospital's modernness.

Ingutsheni Routines At 6:oo A.M. the patients were awakened, fed, and checked out of their wards. Those Mricans, male and female, physically able to work were organized into squads often, each one under the supervision oftwoMrican attendants. 26 Because escapes and attempted escapes were so common, attendants were instructed to keep a special watch on criminal patients and patients who had a history of escape attempts. Abraham was such a patient. Abraham was a criminal patient, originally incarcerated for burning down his own hut. He was sent to Ingutsheni when his behavior and reasoning caused the authorities to question his sanity. Apparently, when the authorities asked him why he burnt down his hut, he said it was because his father had refused to give him beer. Abraham became an Ingutsheni patient in 1943. That same year, he escaped from the hospital yard while on a work squad. In the inquiry that followed, the asylum, public health, and public order officials discovered that instead of watching patients like Abraham, the Mrican and Coloreds attendants frequently engaged in gambling, and sometimes even allowed the patients to join them. 27 Patients like Abraham took advantage of the lax security and the thick brush surrounding the hospital to make their escape. Zwiripi was another escapee over whom attendants had to keep a close watch. Zwiripi's clinical record is replete with reports of what the doctor described as "constant silly attempts to escape." During one of her partially successful flights from Ingutsheni, Zwiripi managed to leave the hospital grounds undetected. She got as far as the neighboring area of Hillside. She was recaptured, but not before she had acquired two loaves ofbread which she carried back with her to Ingutsheni. 28 Parenthetically, the diet of Mrican mental patients did not include bread. Indeed, according to the matron of the women's sections of the hospital, Eileen O'Connor, the European nursing staff looked askance at any Mrican

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patients who requested bread, thinking that they were merely showing off or acting spoiled. 29 Did Zwiripi take these matters into her own hands? A third example is Shadreck who, like Abraham and Zwiripi, escaped while out on his work squad. These squads sometimes traveled some distance from the hospital. Shadreck's squad was working in a spot over a half mile from the Mrican male wards. Although his escape attempt was detected, his pursuers were unable to capture him because of the thick and tall brush cover of the adjacent terrain. Shadreck was eventually recaptured by the police and returned to the hospital. In response to this and to other episodes, the hospital administrators decided to get tough with the Mrican staff, threatening to dismiss or fire those who lost patients during their shifts. 30 Of course, these escape attempts were not understood by the hospital authorities as rational responses to detention the way, perhaps, the escape attempts of a prisoner would be. As Lawrence Fisher has noted for "colonial" Barbados, if a mental patient wanted to be successful, to be discharged, he or she had to learn how to behave in ways "defined by the institution as appropriate for recovery. "31 This meant learning to "get along" but avoiding becoming too institutionalized. This was a hard balance to maintain, and it is no wonder that many Mrican patients attempted to escape. Of course, European patients, like white mental patients in Western countries, were also vulnerable and subject to the whims of the doctors with little or no reciprocity. 32 And, as with the Mrican patients, all resistance to the hospital routine was viewed as abnormal behavior or a mental symptom. 33 In Southern Rhodesia, the road to recovery for the mental patient was a work-oriented road. Patient work at the psychiatric institution, including the work squads, was called occupational therapy (OT). Doctor Dawson, like the superintendents before him, believed that the utilization of free Mrican patient labor was justified since the Mrican patients were "of farming stock." He considered agricultural labor "good occupational therapy for the rank and file. "34 The more advanced patients were placed in other jobs, including shoe repair, mattress or iron furniture manufacture-each a profit-making enterprise. Other forms of OT for Mricans included work on the hospital wards, in the laundry, with the dairy herd, and at the homes of the white hospital staff. The medical superintendent's home was the largest recipient of such labor. Men like Zosi, Poison, and Shadreck worked there for many years. In fact, while Poison had been deemed unfit to be discharged in his family's custody, he was a prized garden worker at Ingutsheni. 35

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Work was such a central feature of the psychiatric hospital routine that many patients, when asked why they were at the hospital, replied that they had been sent there to work. 36 To the doctor, of course, such statements were considered signs of the patient's lack of insight and orientation. Dr. Dawson had difficulty finding suitable OTwork for Mrican women. Like Rodger, he believed these women incapable of all but the most rudimentary and repetitive of tasks. Whether Dawson arrived at this attitude on his own, or inherited it from previous doctors, whether there was some truth to it-for example, thatMrican female patients really would not cooperate-is not known. What is known is that Mrican women's OT was premised on the assumption that they were only capable of doing those tasks which they were accustomed to doing. This translated into the majority of Mrican females who were deemed "able bodied" performing "the seasonal reaping of crops" and weeding, while only a very small group of so-called "higher grades" were allowed to try their hands at knitting and basketry. 37 Occupational therapy for European women was "for obvious reasons," according to Dr. Dawson at least, "of a more advanced nature." The "obvious reasons" were that they were deemed to be superior to Mrican women who were in the greatest relational distance from the white, male normative self. As members of an allegedly superior ruling class of people, their therapeutic activities had to reflect that superiority, to uphold the distance between themselves and their Mrican counterparts. Thus European women made "fancy" items of embroidery and tapestry. Most refused to perform institutional work, for instance, sewing for the hospital or any form of domestic work. This attitude was reinforced by visiting family members and by other European visitors to the hospital. Thus even European women like Ann, who was willing to perform "ornamental," or nonfood gardening work, were provided with Mrican "picannins" to dig and bend for them. 38 Recovery was often determined by whether or not a patient advanced in the race- and gender-specific fields of hospital industry and diversion and on how well they performed class-specific occupations. 39 In addition to chore work, the "higher grade" European patients were provided with "diversional therapies" such as cinema and circus, pantomime and band performances. European female patients were given their own hair salon, The Fair Lady, which allowed European women to have, as Dr. Dawson put it, all "the usual things that women [read white women] have done to their hair." 40 European female patients were encouraged to take pride in them-

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selves and in their appearance. This point was clearly reflected in the European female patient files where the doctors' words express how central their appearance was to their perceived progress toward recovery. One example was a European women named Deborah who was diagnosed with delusional insanity and would later become one of the unfortunate recipients of the prefrontal leucotomy wave that struck Ingutsheni in 1946-47. The doctor marked Deborah's disorder through her looks. He recorded that she dressed and applied her makeup in an extravagant and eccentric manner. 41 The Mental Hospital Board had come up with the idea of establishing a hair salon on the hospital premises in 1943. But what began as an extra, an example of how the colonizers could pamper their women, even the insane ones, became an expectation. Not taking advantage of the new facility became viewed as a symptom of the patient's disorder. While one could argue that this salon was of dubious comfort to many of the European women at Ingutsheni, it is striking just how removed the reality of these women was to that of the Mrican women at the hospital. The Mental Hospital Board also made sure that European male and female patients had access to a working piano, tennis courts, a bowling green, a library, and weekly church services. 42 Mrican male patients were provided a ball for their soccer matches, which became a sort of amusement for themselves as well as crowds of Europeans who made recreational visits to the hospital on Sundays. 43 According to one European spectator, these matches had such appeal because they were unorthodox "forty-a-side games played to rules certainly never approved by the Football Association." 44 The only structured diversion provided the Mrican female patients were church services and even these had to be fought for. Apparently Mrican inmates had for some time complained that they were not provided with church services at Ingutsheni. When the Mental Hospital Board approached a minister from the Dutch Reformed Church about the matter, they were told that he did not minister to blacks and that they would have to find someone who did. Further, the Board was warned against exposing the Mrican patients to "any services that would appeal particularly to the emotion as this might have an adverse effect on many patients. "45 Eventually, a minister was found. Mter work and play, patients at Ingutsheni were fed a late afternoon meal and, at least in the case of the Mrican women's block, they were put to bed by 6:oo P.M. 46 At night, the patients were counted in various dormitories by European staff to make sure that there were no escapes, and

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then the doors to their wards were locked. The white staff members on night duty paid periodic visits to the wards during the night, and the Mrican attendants took turns sleeping on the premises inside the patient wards. 47 Troublesome patients, and those liable to escape, were kept alone in single rooms. The more the patient worked, took care of his or her appearance, showed evidence of restored insight by realizing that he or she had been mad, the more likely it was that the patient would be discharged. Those patients closer to achieving this dischargeable state, or the better behaved though perhaps not dischargeable patients, were ranked by a system of wards and privileges. In addition to the social hierarchy of white men, white women, black men, and black women (in that order), there was the hierarchy based on the patient's behavior and his or her ability to get along. In essence, there was a hierarchy of mental and social ability that determined into which ward a patient was assigned, that is, whether he or she was confined to the back wards for the "low-grade" patients, allowed to reside in the "open wards," allowed out on probation, or discharged as recovered.

"Insight" and the Psychiatric Interview A principal theme in the patient files at Ingutsheni was the question of insight; whether or not the patient had any in the eyes of the doctor. 48 Insight was and remains an interesting concept. It is also relative to the worldview of the one doing the assessing who, in the case of Ingutsheni, was always a white, middleclass male from aJudeo-Christian background and a Western rationalist tradition. A standard definition of insight used by psychiatrists during the period in question is found in the 1959 edition of the American Handbook of Psychiatry. Insight is defined as "the patient's understanding of his situation, including the main facts of his illness. It includes his concept both of his condition and of his circumstances. Some patients do not know that they are ill. Others know they are ill but do not know in what way. Still others know something about how they are ill but accept no responsibility for the illness, which they may blame entirely on other people." 49 In other words, the attribute of insight was very much contingent on the Mrican patient's knowledge of the value system and etiological reference points of his or her European interviewer.50 More specifically, the concept expressed the values of individual responsibility and self-knowledge.

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As stated previously, the cross-cultural psychiatric interview was inher-

ently conflictual. Whether or not a patient was ill is not in question here. What is in some dispute, however, is whether or not a Western-trained psychiatrist would be capable of determining something as culturally specific as insight. While he had extensive South African hospital experience, Dawson lacked knowledge of the African patient's cosmological system and etiological reference points and language. This meant that the therapeutic relationship between Dawson and the African patient was usually confined to treating the body, or alleviating suffering in the patient caused by a somatic ailment such as pellagra, tuberculosis or syphilis. 5 1 Doctor Michael Gelfand, who was not on Ingutsheni's medical staff but was one of Southern Rhodesia's more prominent post-World War II general practitioners, became well-versed in Shona medical and religious thought and practice. Yet, even Gelfand seemed to conform to Fanon's image of the colonial doctor at least in this respect, as he too thought it wise for the European doctor in Africa to pay less attention to the patient history and interview than to the patient's body: blood, stools, and cerebral spinal fluid. 5 2 But the quest for insight continued and was the principle factor used in the measure of patient recovery. Doctor Dawson, like other psychiatrists at the tim.e, prescribed his treatment with the objective of facilitating the restoration of insight and in an effort to maintain manageability in the meantime. Insight was the criterion used for all mental patients at Ingutsheni, white, black, male, and female. But the relational distance between the doctor and the patient in terms of culture had a decisive effect on the patient's ability to perform in the interview situation to the doctor's satisfaction. 53 The contrast between the Western biomedical model and the African (Shona) therapeutic model is striking. The Western model involves the near exclusive focus on the patient's body and individual performance; attention is directed at how he or she describes his or her state of mind. Within an African cultural environment, for instance, Shona, Ndebele, or Bemba, however, when an individual is recognized as afflicted with a mental disorder, the standard approach involves the mobilization of a constellation of persons, what John Janzen has termed the therapy management group (TMG). These persons are charged with the afflicted person's care. 54 Rather than "the sick role" being consigned solely to the actual sufferer, the sick role is collective, rooted in the lineage. It is a way of "defining and mobilizing rights and duties within a community"

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among the persons who take responsibility from the sufferer and mediate the relationships between the sufferer and the specialists. 55 Illness is not conceived of as a fundamentally individual pathology within a Shona idiom of health and disease. For instance, an illness can befall an individual for some offence committed by his or her grandfather. As a result, sickness and health are largely family affairs. 5 6 The goal of Shona therapeutics, at least on the theoretical level, is thus to repair and reinforce lineal and extralineal relationships, to reestablish a social and spiritual harmony. The TMG plays the prominent role of mediating the relationship between patient and healer(s). By the 1940s and 1950s, many Southern Rhodesian Mricans were operating in a pluralistic therapeutic environment. 5 7 This environment involved a kind of juggling operation whereby the TMG in consultation with the healer would determine whether or not the illness was of Mrican/ spiritual or natural/ environmental etiology. 5 8 Of course, labor migrancy and the general increased mobility among populations meant that the TMG was not always able to function, or that others-for instance, members of the same tribe-would function as therapy mediators in the absence of family. The pluralistic environment meant that, if the patient's symptoms were thought to have a natural/ environmental etiology, the TMG might decide to consult a European practitioner at a clinic or hospital. If the ailment was deemed to have an unnatural/ spiritual etiology-witchcraft (kuroiwa), the displeasure of an ancestral spirit (mudzimu), a nonancestral spirit ( ngozi), or a foreign spirit (shave)-help would be sought from a traditional healer. 5 9 If the disorder was thought to be caused by spirit possession or witchcraft, as in most mental afflictions recognized within the "traditional" Shona therapeutic idiom, ideally the afflicted person's family would consult the appropriate healer to determine what the possessing spirit wanted, or in the case of witchcraft, to determine the source and develop a treatment to counteract its power. In many cases, several therapeutic idioms were invoked by the patient and/ or his or her therapy managers for the same affliction. 5° Once within the European facility however, the patient was subject to the biomedical model of psychiatric care. European medical practice did not seek out environmental factors, nor explore the possible social etiology of the patient's illness. They focused on the individual and left the social and spiritual context of the illness alone. 61 As stated previously, the notion of insight is a prime example of this tendency in Western psychiatric medicine. The core of the concept of insight is the high value placed

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on the patient's ability and willingness to take responsibility for her own problems. When an African patient attributed her illness to an external force, she was considered delusional and without insight by the European practitioner. More than a few mental patients at Ingutsheni told the doctor that they had been bewitched, or that they were witches themselves. An African woman patient named 'Tumuwe" was admitted in 1954 because she was reported to have wandered from place to place attacking people. According to the doctor who had to follow her around the hospital wards in order to examine her, she claimed to have been bewitched. She also complained of snakes in her abdomen. She was diagnosed with "senile psychosis."62 Another male patient mentioned earlier as an escapee, claimed that he had been bewitched by his wife who had put muti (bad medicine) in his porridge. This patient also claimed to be married to Jesus Christ. His diagnosis was epilepsy with psychosis. 63 Even more patients complained of hearing voices, which the Western-trained doctors could not hear and thus labeled as hallucinations. Many patients, like Tumuwe, complained of having snakes and other animals in different parts of their anatomy. Within a Western idiom, none of these claims could be taken seriously and were simply read as one more sign of disorder. A traditional healer, however, might have responded to these complaints by literally or metaphorically removing a snake or animal from the patient's body. 64 As Leith Mullings and others have argued, the modern Western scientific therapeutic idiom emerged from a particular social and historical context as did African therapeutic idioms. 65 Within the Western idiom, responsibility for the cause and cure rested, in large part, within the individual. According to the European scientific doctor, a high level of insight meant that the patient was willing and able to use his or her knowledge of their situation, and of the values and conventions of the world they inhabited, to recover. 66

Diagnostic Interview, European-style When a patient arrived at Ingutsheni, he was mentally and physically examined, ideally within three to ten days ofadmission. 67 Since the Mental Disorders Act passed in 1936, a clinical history was required on every patient.68 This history began with an admissions examination that assessed the patient's mental and bodily state on admission. After the examina-

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tion confirmed the patient as sick and diagnosed the nature of that sickness, the patient was admitted and placed into one of the wards of the hospital. The patient was supposed to receive visits from the doctor once a week during his or her first month, once a month for the remainder of the first year, once every six months for the next five years and then once every five years after that. In addition, notes were to be kept at other times when any bodily illness occurred, when the patient received one of the more of the physical therapies or was placed on a special diet or drug treatment, when the patient was placed under restraint, or when his or her status changed, for example, through discharge, escape, or death. 69 A curious situation existed in the mental examination. On the one hand, the doctor was probably skeptical of the value of his interviews with the patient. He was aware of his inability to communicate directly with his Mrican patients and his dependence of an Mrican interpreter who, oftentimes, was interpreting a language in which he was not fluent. 70 And, while this did not necessarily make the European doctor self-critical, it did make him question the value of the patient interview. Generally speaking, however, the onus was placed on the patient; it was his or her inability to communicate that was highlighted and the doctor's notes frequently viewed his Mrican patient's utterances as irrelevant noise. In addition to feeling that the burden fell on the patient to make himself understood, the medical specialist believed that his methods were best and was unaccustomed to having his expertise challenged. The doctor's "expertise" was not well represented on the admissions examination forms. His responses to questions were often unscientifically worded statements or observations such as the following notes on the Mental State form of one patient. The doctor used these adjectives to describe the patient: "dull, stupid, imbecilic and unorientated." 71 The doctors frequently used adjectives like "stupid" and "idiotic" to described the expressions on patient's faces or, "foolish" and "fatuous" to describe the mannerisms, and "apelike" to describe their gaits. On one occasion when filling out a patient's Bodily State form, a doctor wrote: "thick lips and flat nose" under the section entitled: Stigmata. 72 Many patients were described as disorientated for time and place because the doctors were unable to discover where they had come from. When one patient was asked where he was from, his response was, "the Mount where the Europeans are eating. "73 There was no question of analyzing these statements in context; of exploring why, for instance, a "rational" Mrican man in a society dominated by Europeans, might claim places inhabited by Europeans as his home.

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From the time the Mrican psychiatric patient arrived at the mental hospital, his "recovery" depended on his learning how to respond to the questions asked him in a manner that the examining doctor felt appropriate. He was generally brought to the hospital under police custody, usually in handcuffs. He was not often accompanied by a relative or anyone who had knowledge of the history of his symptoms. The combination of the language barrier, the doctor's arrogance, and the patient's diffidence, no doubt, made the interview a prime example of a communication failure. Mrican women were the most poorly served in the interview situation and the most difficult for European doctors to assess. The colonial mental hospital marginalized Mrican women for three major reasons. First was language. Also marginalizing was the social economy of colonial capitalism and segregation, which made being in certain spaces illegal for Mrican women and thus made women unlikely to be forthcoming when the authorities asked them why they were where they were. Last, and perhaps most important, Mrican women were marginalized by the likelihood that they would have less interaction with the colonizer's institutions than a black male or a white person, male or female. 74 Thus, the psychiatric encounter, the process of collecting the history of a patient, would seem all the more foreign to Mrican women. In addition to the social differences that hampered effective communication, there were the cultural differences, particularly around "the sick role." The "traditional" Mrican divination and diagnostic procedures, for example, were family affairs and very little was required of the patient beyond her reasonable cooperation. It was the patient's family's job to represent her. The role of the family in the therapeutic process has been discussed elsewhere; however, the Western model of the "sick role" whereby the individual was viewed as containing the illness within himor herself was a product of Western cultural history and not at all a view held by most southern or central Mrican peoples. Indeed, one of the chief agents of mental illness within Mrican therapeutic systems, spirit possession, was viewed as indication of displeasure or as a message being sent out from the supernatural world of ancestral or foreign spirits. If such an etiology was attached to an illness, the healer would, according to a contemporary Shona nanga,' ask the ngozi (angered spirit) what it wanted. According to this same nanga, the mantra of the traditional healer is: 'The dirt must be cleaned," and this dirt cleaning operation is a family affair. 75 But, the European doctor focused on the individual, and what is more,

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he focused on that body of the individual. Cyril Smartt, who was a specialist psychiatrist at Mirembe Hospital in Dodoma, Tanganyika, noticed that a reliable Mrican patient case history was rarely obtainable on the colonial admissions wards. He attributed this to the fact that, as in Southern Rhodesia, most Mrican patients arrived at the hospital with only the briefest description of their illness, generally recorded by the police or the medical officers who hastily examined them in the prison or hospital. And, because the majority of these patients were compulsorily confined, they were very rarely accompanied by family members or friends who could assist in a historical reconstruction. Smartt also thought that the vocabularies of the primarily rural Mricans were inadequate in describing their mental symptoms to the Western practitioner's satisfaction. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Smartt or, indeed, many other Western doctors in Mrica, that perhaps his vocabulary was inadequate. Additionally Smartt complained that leading questions were of no use because the rural Mrican, when in doubt, simply agreed with anything suggested by the European. 76 Thus Smartt admitted that his diagnosis of mental illness in colonial Tanganyika was mainly dependent on the general appearance, conduct, and behavior of the patient in the hospital, that "a systematic verbal analysis to determine the adjustment of the personality to its environment as practiced in modern psychiatry [could] rarely, if ever, be attempted." This practice of psychiatric assessments through very superficial observation, was common in Western contexts as well, particularly when the patient was a member of a different ethnic or racial group than the practitioner. 77 These points will be illustrated in the followed example of an Mrican female patient's Mental State Examination. The woman's named was given as "Zwiripi." In common with many forms filled out on behalf of Mrican patients, Zwiripi's was only partially completed.

Mental State on Admission Expression: Miserable. Orientation for time and space: Poorly orientated, can give no account of her past. Perceptions and Ideation: Perception poor, ideation apparently absent. Emotional state: Speech: Details of Hallucinations: Hears vague voices talking to her. Details of Delusions: Has an inyoka (snake).

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Details of Illusions: Insight: nil Attention power: poor Self control: defective Moral sense: General Conduct: Eats well, sleeps badly. Restless and quarrelsome and will · not employ herself.

It is not clear how the doctor interpreted Zwiripi's miserable expression, whether it was considered normal within the abnormal conditions of the mental hospital, or whether as Erving Coffman has argued in the American example, once the patient was in the hospital, the doctor recorded observations that confirmed the notion of the patient as ill. 78 It is difficult to imagine how a mentally healthy patient might look in a similar situationafter having been kept in prison in Salisbury and then transferred to the colony's mental hospital some six hundred kilometers away in Bulawayo, or after spending much of his or her time in some form of restraint while she watched the doctor and the policemen converse with one another. If she was frustrated from her inability to communicate effectively, or get her ideas across clearly, a miserable expression could be expected. The doctor asked Zwiripi a variety of questions in an attempt to determine whether or not she was correctly orientated for time and place. A standard question for the mental patient was, "Where are you?" Possible correct answers to that question were: "I am at a mental hospital" or "I am at Ingutsheni." Based on the doctor's notes on Zwiripi, she did not give any of the possible correct answers. I am not suggesting that Zwiripi was not ill. Her behavior on her admission was disorderly. She had dirty habits, urinated on the floor, and crawled around like a baby. But, again, the question is not whether or not the patient was truly sick, the question is what did the colonizers' discourse and practice around mental illness reveal about the nature of colonial social order? Colonial psychiatry was a form of cultural imperialism. Zwiripi's Mental State form illustrates the existence of a real clash between different idioms of mental illness, different ways of perceiving the world. Zwiripi's form described her as suffering from hallucination. This diagnosis seems to have resulted when she claimed that she had an inyoka (snake) inside her body. While most medical idioms would have treated such claims as indicative of a problem, not all would have considered the problem a hallucination. In fact, within a Shona therapeutic idiom, the snake might

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have been interpreted as a sign of witchcraft, or as the form taken by a possessing spirit. A snake in a person's abdomen, throat, or stomach can also represent a site of the patient's pain. Both Shona and Ndebele practitioners commonly claim the ability to remove snakes from their patients. Indeed, like the ability to cure madness, the ability to remove snakes is a specialization among some contemporary Zimbabwean traditional healers. Western-trained practitioners in Africa, however, interpreted a patient's claims about snakes as hallucinations. According to South African psychiatrist, B. J. F. Laubscher, who was a staff psychiatrist at Queenstown Mental Hospital in South Africa during the mid-1g3os, such "tactile hallucinations" were particularly common among African female schizophrenic patients. Laubscher gathered a sample of sixty African female patients and found that many actively hallucinated that they had snakes in some part of their bodies, usually their throats, abdomens, and vaginas. 79 According to Laubscher, the inyoka and other mythical creatures such as the tikoloshe and impundulu, were phallic symbols. Of course, Laubscher was not alone in interpreting the snake in this manner. It does not appear to be the major signification among the Shona, Ndebele, and related groups in Central and Southern Africa, however.

Naming the Pain: The Confusion of Schizophrenia Numerous studies of Western psychiatric practice in the second half of the twentieth century have noted that certain groups have been disproportionately diagnosed with serious psychoses such as schizophrenia. 80 Maurice Lipsedge and Roland Littlewood have argued that the different ways in which the psychiatrists perceived patients of different racial and ethnic backgrounds had a direct bearing on their psychiatric diagnosis. This even applied to the difference between English and Irish patients. For instance, it was found that when symptoms of schizophrenia and alcoholic psychosis were both present, the English doctor was much more likely to diagnose an Irish patient with alcoholic psychosis because this was consistent with English stereotypes of the Irish. 81 A white English man or woman was twice as likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia as with an affective disorder (severe mood disturbance like mania or manic-depression) and West Indians immigrants were six times as likely. 82 According the two members of the East African school of colonial psychiatrists, J. C. Carothers and H. Gordon of colonial Kenya, schizophrenia was the African madness par excellence. 83

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Elaine Showalter has, moreover, argued that "schizophrenia offers an example of the Western cultural conflation of femininity and insanity." This is illustrated by the ways in which most of the popular representations ofthe Western schizophrenics have been women. 84 Based on these arguments, one might expect to find Mrican women the most highly represented group under this most extreme and least understood of diagnoses. But before attempting to apply this hypothesis to the Southern Rhodesian case, it would be useful to select a working definition of this poorly defined disorder. According to a World Health Organization definition from the 1950s, schizophrenia is a thought disorder with the following symptom profile: auditory hallucinations, delusions, and episodes of passivity in which the individual feels his or her thoughts or impulses to be under external control. 85 Schizophrenia was the chief diagnosis assigned to mental patients in Southern Rhodesia during its modern era, the period after 1933, as it was in the rest of the Western and Western-dominated world. In Southern Rhodesia, schizophrenia was followed in frequency by manic depressive psychosis, congenital mental defectiveness, acute mania, depression, delusional insanity (which presumably overlapped with schizophrenia as it was not often diagnosed after 1945), general paralysis of the insane/ cerebral syphilis, delusional mania (also likely to have been conflated with schizophrenia), psychopathic personality, epilepsy, and pellagra with psychosis. What is striking is the distribution of these diagnoses, particularly the discrepancies between the Mrican female wards, and the European male wards with reference to the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Based on a sample of 240 case records of patients admitted between 1933 and 1954, the distribution of the schizophrenia diagnosis, that is, the percentage of the total number of diagnoses for a particular group, is as follows: Mrican female inmates: 6o percent Mrican male inmates: 53 percent European female inmates: 44 percent European male inmates: 22 percent For each group, schizophrenia was the most common single diagnosis. For white males, however, it was only slightly more highly represented than psychopathic personality which came second at 16 percent. Next in line were confusional psychosis, persecution mania, and congenital mental defective (CMD) tied for third place, and epilepsy came fourth. For Mrican

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women the diagnoses were, in descending order: schizophrenia, confusional psychosis, epilepsy and CMD tied at third, and dementia. Senile psychosis and melancholia were tied for fourth. Mrican men fell in this order: schizophrenia, epilepsy, CMD, delusional insanity and dementia tied at third, general paralysis of the insane and hallucinated and acute mania tied for fifth. Finally, white women's diagnoses were distributed as follows: schizophrenia, delusional mania and CMD tied for second, manic-depressive psychosis, and tied for fourth, alcoholism and hysteria. The high percentage of Mrican women diagnosed as schizophrenics was not merely the result of fashion or tradition. One can see from the observations made by the white doctors that these women were often relegated to this particular label because they were the least comprehensible to the European doctor. In essence, anything inconsistent with the examiner's notions of causality and possibility could be symptomatic of schizophrenia. Doctor B. J. F. Laubscher of South Mrica, explicitly included spirit mediumship in his definition of schizophrenic psychosis. He considered ukuthwasa, the prelude to becoming a traditional healer among many Nguni groups, a psychotic condition. According to Laubscher, ukuthwasa in Western scientific language could be summed up as "delusions and hallucinations concerning the power to cure disease, to find the mysterious herbs having magic power and to hear the voices of departed spirits giving them instructions."86 But delusions and hallucinations are culturally specific. What is key is whether or not the expressed beliefs were consistent or not with the collective representations "normally" held by the patient's group.R 7 Ivan Sow argues that many Mrican explanatory systems accept that a person in his or her physical, mental, and social substance is subject to destructive attacks from certain spirits or individuals through the agency of sorcerers and/ or spirits. "Persecution [by supernatural forces]" he writes, "becomes the explanation for everything that disturbs order, disrupts relations, attacks the individual in his physical, mental, or social being and [it] is realistic in many situations. "88 While schizophrenia was often the classification given to the most sick at Ingutsheni, it was similarly attributed to the least understood among the hospital's Mrican inmates.

Radical Treatment Like labeling, treatment reflected relational distances between doctors and patients. According to numerous Western studies, women, racial mi-

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norities, and lower-class Europeans were most likely to be treated with radical physical therapies like ECT, leucotomy operations, and insulin therapy. Elaine Showalter explains this by stating that women, minorities, and poor people were thought to require their intellectual faculties less and were not necessarily considered damaged by the increased passivity or docility that sometimes resulted from these treatments. Indeed, according to Showalter, this may have been the objective in some cases. 89

Electric Convulsant Therapy There is little evidence to support a claim that Mrican women at Ingutsheni, the furthest removed from the colonial doctor and the lowest on the social totem pole, were treated with ECT more often than others, nor, necessarily, that they were given higher voltages or more rounds of that therapy. This, however, does not preclude either or these as possibilities. If Mrican women were overrepresented among the treatment's recipients, however, it was not a dramatic overrepresentation. ECT was simply the most popular treatment used in the psychiatric hospital among all patient groups. In 1947, ECT was the most extensively utilized at Ingutsheni, and Dr. Dawson praised it for its "gratifYing results."90 European patients were provided with an extra amount of protection against overzealous doctors with the requirement that their kin or guardians should grant consent for the use of ECT and other physical therapies. If this was theoretically applied to Mrican patients as well, there is no indication from the patients files that this consent was often obtained. It seems more likely that they were simply required to notifY the Mrican patient's official guardian, her Curator ad Litem. Doctor Dawson's views about the gratifYing results obtained through ECT appear to have been commonly held among colonial and metropolitan psychiatric practitioner circles. 91 Psychiatric patients, however, appear to have viewed the treatment as a form of punishment. Lawrence Fisher provides a poignant example of how patients viewed the treatment as a cruel and punishing ritual in one particular Barbadian hospital. Fisher quotes one patient as saying: 'We saw them setting up the bed this morning and we were all scared, wondering who the electrodes would fall on. "92 It is likely that a similar apprehension existed among the Mrican patients at Ingutsheni or among anyone who did not buy into the mystique of Euro-American scientific omniscience. Moreover, it is tempting to believe that ECT was treated by the authorities as a way to make space

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in the perpetually overcrowded psychiatric wards through the rapid discharge of those temporarily improved after treatment. There is no direct evidence from Ingutsheni that the doctors intentionally used ECT as a form of punishment for the patient, though it is very understandable that a patient might perceive this treatment as such. ECT was a radical physical intervention that involved placing of electrodes on each side of the patient's forehead and passing a current of electricity through her brain. The voltage used at Ingutsheni ranged from 1 oo and 140 volts; the standard in America during this period was between 70 and 130 volts. 93 Patients were awake until the currents were triggered. In Southern Rhodesia, up to independence, Mrican patients were not anesthetized. They did seem to receive some form of muscle relaxant to prevent fractures, however. And, if the patient was lucky, the electrodes were covered with cotton pads that had been dampened with a bicarbonate solution. This procedure reduced the chance of burning the skin. 94 If the various comments made by Ingutsheni patients bear any relationship to reality, it would appear that the practice was a horrendous one for its recipients. The Mrican patient's comment at the opening of this chapter describing Ingutsheni as the "place for boiling people" was more than likely her assessment of the institution based on her experiences as a recipient of ECT. Winnie received twenty rounds of ECT over a period of three years, 1948 to 1951. 95 Several ECT recipients, includingJames V, described their heads as being all "wired up."96 James received fifteen rounds of ECT, spread out over a period of two and a half weeks at a very high dosage, between 130 and 140 volts. When the currents were applied, James' body was still weak from a bout with dysentery. His condition got noticeably worse following ECT and he died. The case of Guido, an Italian prisoner of war who had spent two years at Ingutsheni, also had a tragic ending. The doctor described his state of mind by listing his "delusions." He was considered deluded with ideas of persecution for claiming that the people at the internment camp were against him because they transferred electricity through his body, which affected the left side of his face. 97 The doctors at Ingutsheni ignored these complaints as delusional, even though ECT was used at the internment and prisoner of war camps in the colony. 98 Giudo was given six more rounds of ECT at Ingutsheni. He later committed suicide. 99 Perhaps the most extreme ECT case was that of criminal patient "Maduviko" who received a total of forty-one rounds ofECT. Maduviko's clinical history included adjectives like "impulsive, aggressive, and deluded." He had been originally arrested for breaking into a hut "in which two women were alone." He was

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diagnosed as a schizophrenic and said to suffer both grandiose and persecutory delusions. Unfortunately, the doctor did not bother to include any of these delusions in the patient's file. 100

Prefrontal Leucotomies Apparently, the African female wards were not as quiescent as Dr. Dawson's article to the Bulawayo Chronicle had suggested. Or perhaps another way of viewing the situation is that, by the time Dr. Dawson wrote his 1949 article, some of the women's complaints had been temporarily taken out of them. Before leucotomies were introduced at Ingutsheni in 1946, Dr. Dawson and the rest of the medical staff at Ingutsheni complained bitterly about the problems in the African female sections at the hospital. Of the case records reviewed for this chapter, the more frequently cited behavioral "problems" of African female sufferers of mental disorder were noisiness, resistiveness, obstreperousness, stubbornness, and aggressiveness. Indeed, frequent mention is made in the annual Report on the Public Health and in the notes of visitors of how noisy and agitated the native female wards were. This reputation, no doubt, contributed to the selection of patients from these wards as the first recipients of the new operative treatment. The preferential selection of female patients was evident in Europe and North America as well. A 1946 study conducted to monitor the progress of one hundred recipients of the prefrontalleucotomy at the Lancashire Mental Hospital in England, for instance, listed the patients who had received this procedure as one hundred women. 101 Because some Western scientists believed that insight was an actual physical entity localized in the frontal region of the brain, many doctors rationalized the use of leucotomies as a scientifically based attempt at restoring insight. 102 The operation involved the use of an ice-pick-like instrument (a steelleucome) to severe the frontal lobe and thalamus regions of the brain. The goal of the operation was to modify the disordered behavior of psychotic and neurotic patients suffering from prolonged illness, and for whom electric shock therapy had been unsuccessful. 103 Doctor Dawson was very happy with the results from the first year's use of the new surgery. He claimed that the leucotomization of the first twenty patients resulted in "greatly reducing the nursing difficulties of the native female wards." 104 Note that Dawson made no mention of improved recovery or discharge rates; indeed, it appears that the sole pur-

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pose of the leucotomy operation was manageability. In the following year, an additional fifty more patients were leucotomized. Again, Dawson expressed his pleasure with the results. One of Southern Rhodesia's first leucotomy patients was Zwiripi. She was among the first group of twenty, primarily if not solely Mrican females, to be sent to Memorial Hospital and operated on by Dr. Bannon. Immediately following the operation, Zwiripi's behavior was described as restless; but after a few days, she is said to have settled down. Dawson was pleased because she had become "more quiet and more behaved." He added that she had also shown "some superficial appreciation of her surroundings. "105 But Zwiripi continued to have what the European physician described as both hallucinations and delusions. She complained of hearing "imaginary voices [speaking about] maize" and, when asked for more details, told the doctor: "It is dark, I cannot see them." One can only speculate on how a contemporary nanga might have treated her illness. Perhaps he or she would have attributed the woman's suffering to some form of spirit possession, either by vadzimu (more than one ancestral spirit), chipoko (ghosts), or mashave (more than one foreign spirit). Unfortunately, Zwiripi had no familial advocates to provide information about her history or attempt to retrieve her from the clutches of the European psychiatric hospital. 106 Whatever the traditional explanation may have been, Zwiripi was kept in the colonizer's hospital until 1971-that is, for thirty-eight years. As she was by this time an old lady, the authorities must have considered her safe to return into the controlled community of a mission. She was sent to the Nyadiri Mission to live out the rest of her life. The only white male leucotomy patient file reviewed here belongs to a man named Aubrey Aubrey, who was diagnosed as a psychopathic personality, a diagnostic category assigned, almost exclusively, to white males within the social and clinical contexts of Southern Rhodesia of the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps this was because a certain level of intelligence was often associated with the psychopath, who was typically felt to use his intelligence to rationalize rather than control his behavior. Hence, the underlying assumption was that such persons were capable of knowing right from wrong, but refused to do right. According to the definition of a noted criminal psychologist of South Mrica during this period, Dr. Louis Freed, the psychopath was likely to engage in the following behaviors: larceny, theft, forgery, homosexual and heterosexual promiscuity, and even murder and assassination. 107 The more passive variety of psychopathic behavior involved alcoholism, abandonment of home and family, and suicide. 108 A discussion of what this label meant in the case of

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Aubrey will shed some light on the significance of the doctor's choice of Aubrey, a white male, for this operative procedure that was only infrequently applied to white males. Aubrey arrived at Ingutsheni with a substantial history of crime that was transmitted to the medical staff through his two medical certificates and a variety of legal documents. He had a list of misdemeanors dating back to childhood. A diagnosis as a psychopath meant that the medical and legal experts decided that he could not be held mentally responsible for his misdeeds. According to one of the doctors who submitted a medical certificate on his behalf, underlying Aubrey's criminal history was a desire to attract attention. Another medical examiner stated, "Closer examination reveals that he is an extremely active homosexual and that his efforts in this direction are behind his petty thefts. "109 Aubrey was one of the few, if not the only, European men recommended for a leucotomy in 1947 and it is interesting the note that he was a homosexual. When the model of relational distance is applied to this case, one might conjecture that his homosexuality displaced the proximity established by his white maleness. Even without the homosexuality, the label of psychopath was imbued with the notion of transgressing white male role expectations by seriously failing in the role of the colonizer male. Mter his leucotomy, Aubrey was said to have become "quiet, well behaved, and cooperative." This outcome may have pleased the state authorities, but it is unlikely that Aubrey interpreted the operation this way, as he developed what the doctors described as a "rare complication" from the leucotomy, a traumatic form of epilepsy. 110 This is a fascinating and rare example of when Mrican women and European men might be perceived by a colonizer doctor as equally incomprehensible. Or, perhaps it is more useful to look at the recipients of leucotomies in terms of their usefulness potential. Risks could be taken with those who rated low on the scale of potential usefulness to the colonial enterprise, black women and homosexual white males, for example. This chapter explored the interactions between colonial stereotypes, biomedical practice, and the body, mind, and soul of the inmate during the heyday of psychiatric modernism. There was, without a doubt, a corresponding relationship between the distance that separated the doctor and the patient on the social and cultural level, and the nature of that patient's therapeutic experience. At least as significant as the type of therapy prescribed to the patient were the ways in which the patient experienced those therapies. This experience was affected by the way that patient was mapped into, and/ or alienated from, the larger colonial social and cultural order.

Epilogue Civilizing Mental Health Care: A Postcolonial Moment

This book has explored colonial lives and a colonial order through the prism of a psychiatric hospital and the reconstructed narratives of psychiatric patients. It has discussed how changing economic, social, and environmental conditions, options, and trajectories affected the lives of colonial subjects. You read about how people navigated the geographies of their daily lives and how different discourses circumscribed the myriad boundaries marking where they could go and what they could think and say out loud. You read of some of the strategies employed by the wielders of power, and by those who con tested that power, and about how conflicts and misunderstandings inherent in these interactions were the chief purveyors of inmates at Ingutsheni. One of the central tensions in this book has been the tension between competing medical ideologies: between European biopower, where illness, health, healing, and recovery resided in the body of the patient; and indigenous therapeutics, where the social, spiritual, and environmental factored into diagnoses, and therapy managers brokered different therapeutic modalities as they advocated on behalf of sufferers. If 1go8, the year that Ingutsheni was opened, inaugurated the monologue of European reason about Mrican madness in colonial Zimbabwe, the occlusion of Mrican voices, and the hegemony of the biomedical approach to madness, then 1g68, the concluding year in the study, represents the beginning of the end of that hegemony. While this book is about the making of a colonial order, the epilogue brings us to the postcolonial moment of unmaking that colonial order, a moment of a genuine state-directed commitment to revolutionizing health care. While only partially success-

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ful (it didn't last), this postcolonial moment is a very effective indicator of the way in which psychiatry and mental health care powerfully signified the bad old days of colonialism to the newly liberated citizens of Zimbabwe and how they experienced colonialism as antithetical to health and health care. This is certainly true when we define health, as the World Health Organization has, as "the state of physical, mental and social wellbeing and not just the absence of disease;" 1 or, when we define health care as, at a minimum, inclusive of caring about whether people live or die. 2 Mental health care in colonial Zimbabwe reflected what Negritude poet, playwright, and essayist Aime Cesaire called the "principal lie that is the source of all others"-that colonialism brought civilization to the uncivilized. 3 In other words, colonial mental health policy served as a powerful indictment against the colonizer's civilizing claim.

Colonial Psychiatry: The Last Days The radical disconnect between what Europeans thought of as reasonable, and the reasons given by Mrican patients at Ingutsheni for being one place and not in their "right place" persisted throughout the 1g6os, the decade associated with Mrican decolonization. While the United Nations designated 1g6o as "the year of Mrica" and British prime minister Harold Macmillan announced that "the winds of change" were billowing through the continent, and while seventeen Mrican countries gained their independence from their colonial overlords in 1g6o alone, these changes largely bypassed Southern Rhodesia. Instead, like the neighboring colonies of Mozambique and South Mrica, Southern Rhodesia was violently repressing Mrican resistance, banning Mrican nationalist parties at every opportunity. On November 11, 1965, a year after Southern Rhodesia's ex-federation partners Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland gained their independence and became Zambia and Malawi (Southern Rhodesia became Rhodesia), the ruling Rhodesia Front Party led by Ian Smith issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Great Britain-a desperate effort to stave off the coming of black majority rule. By this time, countries like Nigeria and Senegal were already experimenting with village-based therapeutic practices, integrating traditional healing methodologies into official mental health policy. The World Health Organization (WHO) was conducting and funding research projects into indigenous Mrican mental health knowledge and therapeutics.

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While a growing number of medical practitioners in Rhodesia, such as Michael Gelfand, were immersed in studying traditional African therapeutics, including psychotherapeutics, at the government mental hospital in Rhodesia, business progressed as usual. As in the political arena, the approach of the psychiatric establishment was one of defiant continuity. Even when changes were allowed-like the establishment in 1970 of the first integrated political party in Rhodesian history, the Center Party, with elected African representatives, for instance, or the arrival of Mark Nyathi, the first black psychiatric nurse at Ingutsheni in 1968-efforts were made to prevent these small changes from unsettling the racist status quo. Try as the settler authorities might to prevent it, however, change did come, it just took a little longer than in other places. Ingutsheni continued to be an overcrowded institution with 1,400 patients residing there at the beginning of 1960 even though, according to Benny Goldberg, then the director of the Ministry of Health for the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland (1953-1963), the hospital was only built to accommodate 535· Goldberg likened the situation to sardines in a can. 4 By the end of 1960, the patient population had swollen to 1,784, nearly a 100 percent increase from the 1945 figure of 911. 5 Even though authorities constructed a 2oo-bed mental hospital in Northern Rhodesia in 1962, reducing the burden at Ingutsheni to some extent, a 1964 report from the secretary of health shows that there were 1,004 new admissions ( 833 Africans) that year and an average daily in-residence patient population of 1,190 (945 Africans), 6 leading one critic to describe lngutsheni as an overcrowded "cell block accommodation. "7 While the world inside Ingutsheni stubbornly persisted in its discriminatory, African-humanity-occluding ways, revolution was fomenting in the world outside. Hearing about the transformations occurring in other parts of Africa and experiencing few of them at home, African political parties grew more militant and the African masses less willing to wait for change. Onjanuary 1, 1960, following the banning ofthe Southern Rhodesia African National Congress, the National Democratic Party (NDP) was formed to take its place, and the government responded, as it had previously to African political parties, by arresting the NDP leadership. This act of state repression served as a catalyst for what became known as the Zhii riots in Salisbury and Bulawayo, the colony's major towns, beginning as a peaceful protest by NDP supporters in the capital of Salisbury. The protest turned violent only after a government airplane dropped leaflets on the demonstrators, denouncing the NDP leadership. A few days later, when NDP members were denied a permit to assemble

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in Bulawayo, similar violent protests broke out there and the protesters destroyed anything that seemed to represent the state, including government buildings, beer halls and bus stops. They shouted zhii, a word that is the antithesis of peace, meaning to crush something until it is reduced to powder, to bring total devastation, as they moved through the city streets. Eighteen people were killed and hundreds more were wounded. Although less well known than the Sharpeville massacre that occurred the same year in South Mrica, when the police murdered sixtynine people assembled for a peaceful protest against the pass laws in that country, the zhii riots have been described by Julie Frederikse as the "incipient stage of [the] guerrilla war, before it was led by actual combatants. "8 Unlike those protesters at Sharpeville, the Zhii protesters were not peaceful. This was a fierce and angry protest by people who had had enough. As Mrican resistance intensified, so too did government repression. In 1966, the guerrilla war waged by the Zimbabwe Peoples Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) and the Zimbabwe Mrican National Liberation Army (ZANLA) began, as did the Rhodesia Front's (RF) brutal repression and counterinsurgency campaign. While the RF government vehemently resisted the change that would lead to Mrican self-government, expediency required that they at least gesture toward reform. The gradualist approach to change may have been acceptable before, but by the late 1g6os, it most certainly was not.

Ingutsheni and the Liberation Era When Mark Nyathi returned to Bulawayo from studying psychiatric nursing and tropical medicine in Scotland and England to become the first and only Mrican on Ingutsheni's staff with formal psychiatric training, he confronted what he describes as "racialism at its best." Not only did the Mrican patients at Ingutsheni live under separate and grossly unequal conditions to those of the white patients, sleeping on the floor for instance, and receiving electric convulsive therapy (ECT) without general anesthesia, but Nyathi himself encountered open resistance from the white hospital staff. He was not allowed to treat European patients, despite being one of the best-trained nurses at the hospital. He describes feelings of powerlessness and depression at having received advanced training only to find himself in an "organized shambles." Previously, the Mrican voice at Ingutsheni was virtually absent. What they said was often simply treated like noise. But, by the early 1970s, Mark

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Nyathi had determined that he would become the African voice, or rather, a voice for the Africans at Ingutsheni. In 1971, Nyathi took action. He contacted Micah Bhebe, one of the black members of parliament (MPs) in the newly formed Center Party, who had a reputation of championing the rights of workers and hospital patients. Nyathi arranged for Bhebe to visit Ingutsheni clandestinely one night. What the MP for Ntshonalanga in Matabeleland saw that night so disturbed him that he exposed conditions at the next meeting of the House of Assembly. He told his fellow parliamentarians that the conditions at Ingutsheni were worse than those in a prison, and that he would rather be sent to a prison than to Ingutsheni. 9 He reported that the black patients at the hospital were forced to sleep on the floor with only thin, felt mats and in filthy, overcrowded, and poorly ventilated rooms. He described how several hundred patients were forced to share four "squat toilets" and had no toilet paper at all. Not only did African patients have to do their own laundry, Bhebe told the other parliamentarians that they washed the laundry of the white patients as well. A summary of his comments was published in the local newspaper under the heading: "African Quarters at Bulawayo's Ingutsheni Mental Hospital Are Worse than Those in a Pigsty." This article was followed by the publication of a letter from the minister of health, Ian McLean, headed: "Criticism of Ingutsheni 'Exaggerated.'" McLean's apologia stated that the hospital wards were difficult to keep clean because of the inmates' habits and added that overcrowding had been reduced. All patients had to work, he said, and the work was therapeutic. 10 In Rhodesia, as in much of the world at the time, public suspicion of psychiatric hospitals in general was on the rise, and after 1966, when L. Ron Hubbard brought the Church of Scientology to the colony, more Rhodesians, black and white, were exposed to the growing anti psychiatry movement. At least two individuals, Mrs. Jane Chari and Mr. David Musara, who would later become traditional healers (one specializing in the treatment of mental illness), tell of how they were first exposed to the horrors of psychiatric medicine by the church. In a letter to the editor of the Bulawayo Chronicle entitled "Reform in Psychiatry is Wanted," a scientologist blasted the conditions at Ingutsheni, reserving the strongest condemnation for the use of shock therapy, saying that it should be abolished. The letter-writer cited scholars and antipsychiatry activists such as Thomas Szasz, Erving Coffman, and Richard Kune in support of this position and signed the letter, "Reform Needed, Bulawayo."11 Just as Micah Bhebe had made the conditions at Ingutsheni a political and, indeed, an

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African nationalist issue, the Church of Scientology made them a human rights issue. According to Mark Nyathi, the administration of Ingutsheni was "white, top to bottom." For six years, he faced an uphill struggle trying to treat African inmates at Ingutsheni like patients while every day seeing others treat them like animals. It was during this period that he repeatedly fell ill, with symptoms beyond the diagnostic reach of Western, biomedically oriented doctors at Bulawayo's Mpilo Hospital, where he was taken. After accepting that he was possessed by a spirit, and that he would become a sangoma, Nyathi went to train to become a traditional healer, as described in the introduction of this book. When he returned to Ingutsheni in 197 4, he kept the fact that he was a sangoma a secret from his white colleagues and continued to struggle to create change at the hospital from within. The anticolonial guerrilla war escalated in the 1970s. Mozambique won its independence from the Portuguese in 1975 and opened its borders to the African liberation fighters from Rhodesia. Doctor Herbert Ushewokunze was appointed the overall commander of the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front's (ZANU-PF) medical corps. An international economic embargo was imposed on Rhodesia and, although many nations violated it, the regime's status as an illegal pariah state must have had a great impact. The intensity of African resistance certainly did. In 1979, a cease-fire was called and a constitutional conference was held at Lancaster House in England. When Zimbabwe became a new nation in April 1980, Dr. U shewokunze emerged from years in the bush camps with large numbers of traumatized men and women, and declared his intention to revolutionize the nation's health care system by transforming it into a system that actually cared about the majority's overall health and well-being. On july 12, 1980, Dr. Ushewokunze co-founded the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association (ZINATHA) with Gordon Chavunduka. In September, the first congress of the new body was held at the Highfield Stadium in Mbare (just outside of Harare), and more than three thousand traditional healers attended. 12 The mobilization of traditional healers, and the effort to establish regulatable standards among them, arose partly from the desire to decolonize health care in Zimbabwe and end the marginalization of indigenous medical knowledge. It also originated out of concern for the demobilizing combatants of the liberation war-men and women returning to Zimbabwe from military bases in Mozambique suffering from trauma and other psychological ailments.

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185

Mter 1980, Ushewokunze waged his anticolonial war in the arena of health in Zimbabwe. Doctor Ushewokunze visited the Ingutsheni Mental Hospital in July 1g8o. His scathing indictment of the institution was published in the Bulawayo Chronicle newspaper under the heading "System Needs Change Says Minister." The country's new minister of health was quoted as saying: "The whole system needs overhauling. One would not have thought that a so-called Christian government would run such a diabolic system." He detailed the gross inequalities that he had witnessed between the treatment of white and black patients, noting that the black patients had horrible food, walked about barefoot, even into the filthy toilets, and were "indiscriminately mixed up, regardless of their type of mental illness." Moreover, he complained, "the white patients had more facilities than their numbers warranted." Their lives were comfortable and homelike, he said. "Black patients who were approaching normality were used to carry out chores on the white side of the hospital. "13 While basically repeating what Bhebe had said eight years earlier, Ushewokunze, unlike Bhebe, was actually able to put an end to many of the inequities. Mark Nyathi, who witnessed all these changes, admits that Ushewokunze, in his enthusiasm, sometimes made poor decisions. For instance, when he discontinued patient farm labor because it was segregated, he did not, according to Mr. Nyathi, provide an adequate therapeutic replacement. Similarly, rather than order that fish meat be added to the soup that he saw brewing in the Mrican kitchen, he simply had the soup discontinued altogether. While Ushewokunze was noisily making changes in the country's health care system and infrastructure, and receiving much, often-negative, press about it, the recently elected ruling party, the Zimbabwe Mrican National Union (ZANU) was officiating over the unchaining of a so-called madman, News Hurufu. 14 This man had spent an estimated ten years of his life chained to a tree in his own village, held captive not by the agents of a colonial state, but by his own father, who apparently could find no one to cure him. This and other acts of literal unchaining were metaphorical inaugurations of a new era for Zimbabwean psychiatry and for the Zimbabwean nation. They call to mind the unchaining of the insane at the Bicetre in late-eighteenth-century France, which came to signify the dawn of the Enlightenment and the end of the ancien regime in Europe. Although this comparison may seem exaggerated, the story of News Hurufu's unchaining has had an enduring significance. The story is apparently recounted in a book read by thousands of Zimbabwean

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Fig. E.l Photograph of Mrs. jane Chari and daughte r taken in the Highfie ld high-density area of Harare, Zimbabwe. Photograph taken by author.

schoolchildren. The liberation of the country brought about the liberation of News Hurufu from madness-at least, that is the way Mrs. Chari, the nanga who treated him, tells the story. 15 Years earlier, Mrs. Chari had been a devout Christian. She h eard about the Church of Scien to logy from a friend and began going to its meetings. It was there that she became interested in the mentally ill. Falling ill one day, after the birth of her youngest daughter, she was told that she had a healing shave spirit and subsequently became a healer, specializing in mental illness. About a year after h er celebrated healing of News Hurufu, Mrs. Chari appeared in the newspaper wearing a white nurse's uniform, surrounded by patients seated on the ground around her. The caption read, "Healer Appeals for Help. "16 As one of the traditional healers who had been selected by the ZANU government to treat many of the returning ex-combatants suffering from mental illness, by 1982 Mrs. Chari had forty-nine patients crowded into five rooms and asked the governmentfor help to build and supply a hospital. She told reporters that Ushewokunze's immediate successor, Dr. Simon Mazorodze, h ad told her "to

EPILOGUE

treat ex-combatants free of charge, and he said his ministry would help with other facilities for me, but I have got nothing .... I have cured nineteen comrades and am now treating another two." Mrs. Chari never received the government assistance promised, but with the help of her sons and daughters-in-law, the profits from sales of her small bottle store, and with occasional support from ZINATHA, she has managed to continue providing care to the mentally ill at her "hospitals" in Highfield (Harare) and Chivhu. 17 Many of her patients had been treated at psychiatric clinics before hearing about her or being brought to her by family members. These patients, particularly those who had received ECT at the hospital, she says, are very hard to treat. After independence, traditional healing came "out of the closet," and the official monologue of European reason about African madness was interrupted, perhaps even ended for good. This monologue arrived in Zimbabwe with colonial conquest and was enacted at Ingutsheni over a period of seventy-two years, from June 1go8, when Ingutsheni was opened on the outskirts of Bulawayo, to July 1980, when Ushewokunze stormed down its hallways. As I stated in the introduction, the history of psychiatry in Zimbabwe was characterized by struggle: of the colonial state to impose and police a new social, political, economic, ideological, and. spatial order; and of some colonial subjects to resist this order and the ways in which they were being mapped within it. This history of psychiatry in Southern Rhodesia includes struggles for mobility, justice, cultural integrity, and self-determination-in short, struggles to be heard. Each chapter in this book is an exploration into one or several of these struggles. A major theme of this book is the mis/ missed communication between the different actors in this story of mental health care, the violence of acts of institutionalized occlusion, even when those voices belonged to suspects of insanity-people suspected of having lost their reason. Like Mrs. Tanner about whom I refer in the introduction to this book, even without their reason, they had their reasons. They were responding to some aspect of their worlds and, as such, can shed light on what it was like to be a person like them during the period under analysis-a black woman or man, a colonial subject. Mapping the sites of their transgression, or what Mark Nyathi, and now I, referred to as "surfacing up," exposes a conflict between the reigning colonial (and sometimes African) infrastructures and superstructures on the one hand, and the prepatient's subjectivity on the other. Really, Surfacing Up is about the processes of colonization and resistance, which coincide at the point of the patient's body.

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This book began with a postcolonial moment, with the first Mrican minister of health's crusade against the colonial legacy in mental health care, during which he directed attention to the fact that Ingutsheni mattered to the newly independent nation at a time when it was busy reinventing itself. Ingutsheni was a signifier of colonial oppression; it was a microcosm of an oppressive social order. Frantz Fan on argued that colonialism should be brought to trial as a "fertile purveyor for psychiatric hospitals." The psychiatric patients who were admitted to Ingutsheni during the years explored in this book, primarily between 1908 and 1968, were key witnesses to the crime, the most blatant of which Herbert Ushewokunze and his successor ministers of health sought to undo. Each chapter in this book explores a component of the crime of colonialism and the ways in which psychiatry and psychiatrists, while often well intentioned, aided and abetted colonial domination. The naming of the region's first asylum Ingutsheni was a slap in the face of the precolonial social order, signifying, as it did, an appropriation of both space and meaning by European conquerors. Ingubo no longer cared for the Ndebele nation or for the wives of King Lobengula, but rather cared for the new colonial social order, providing a repository for those who the new socio- and bio-logic considered disorderly and dangerous. As a custodial institution, Ingutsheni was merely a holding station for an unruliness that, while perceived in biomedical terms, was treated in custodial terms-locked up. There were clear connections between the reorganization of space and the regulation of population influx by gender and race on the one hand, and the construction of colonial madness on the other hand. In other words, the world outside Ingutsheni was reflected in the patterns of admission to the asylum. There was no "Great Confinement" in Southern Rhodesia, not in the Foucauldian sense at least. The fact that there was rarely enough space in the asylum from year to year to accommodate patient demand exposes the tension between the need for Mrican proximity as laborers in European homes and industry on the one hand, and the desire for distance on the other; or the tension between feelings of superior civilization through medical knowledge and the reluctance to apply this strength to the subject population. I have paid considerable attention to the routes to the asylum traveled by black men and black women. The two chapters devoted to this topic exposed the gendered nature of what I call narratives of detection and detention. These narratives were related to the colonial political economy and to the racial and gendered configurations of space and power.

EPILOGUE

t8g

We found that each of the African male prepatient narratives was ensconced in at least one major constituent of the colonizer's "civilization" and that, by exploring the route to the asylum traveled by these and other African men, one develops an outline of the black man's experience in colonial Southern Rhodesia. We found that African women's prepatient stories represented the intersection of their supramarginal status and mobility. The simple fact of mobility and coming into view could turn African women into suspects of disorder and pathology. In combination with ready-made stereotypes of African women as brutalized, agencyless, and normally abnormal, what might have been read as rebellion in another person was relegated to the realm of unreason and disability in African women, who may have had their reasons for being in the "wrong" place, or for having left one place and been on route to another when their journey was interrupted. The chapter devoted to recounting and analyzing the 1942 commission of inquiry into Ingutsheni exposes the ways that colonial authorities perceived Ingutsheni's role in the larger colonial sociopolitical context. The need to "keep up appearances" took precedence over the provision of care to any patients. The price of whiteness, its maintenance in an institution full of social and spatial transgressors, people who were, perhaps constitutionally, unable or unwilling to conform to the boundaries of colonial society, was high. The arrival of Mark Nyathi, the psychiatric nurse/ traditional healer from whom I derived the title of this book, signifies the beginning of the end of both of these forces in Zimbabwean society.

Mental Health and ESAP The remainder of this epilogue will discuss what has happened at Ingutsheni in particular and in health care policy in general since independence in tg8o. The monologue of reason about madness that characterized psychiatry in colonial Zimbabwe was broken. In other words, biomedicine lost its hegemony, and health care policy in general began to reflect a new official concern for a public health inclusive of the majority of black people, many of whom resided in the rural areas and were poor. The newly independent state of Zimbabwe, during a truly revolutionary moment, roughly the first decade following independence, not only cared about whether the majority of its newly enfranchised black citizens lived or died, but also about their psychic well-being. The new nation's health care pol-

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icy was, in effect, a critique of a colonial health care system that did not adequately care about the general well-being of the majority black population. It was, according to Ushewokunze, a health care system that was "profoundly discriminatory in character, discriminatory in geographical, financial and social terms." 18 Moreover, the minister stated that he considered it a compliment when he was accused of destroying the health system of the country, because "the destruction of a discriminatory, archaic and undeniably imbalanced service would be an act of great service to the people of Zimbabwe. "19 The official health care policy adopted by the newly independent nation was the policy of "Equity in Health," a radical departure from the previous system. The post-revolution Ministry of Health shifted national resources from an urban-centered colonial orientation to a rural-centered orientation, and from a focus on curative services to a focus on preventative services. This meant that the postcolonial health care policy orientation was, according to Zimbabwean economic historian Aloise Mlambo, "pro-people," offering "improved, accessible, and acceptable free healthcare ... to the poor." 20 Zimbabwe received international accolades for its achievements in the arena of health during the 1g8os. Indeed, Zimbabwe experienced some of the most rapid improvements in health national product (HNP) indicators in all of sub-Saharan Mrica. Its infant mortality indicators went down from 110 per thousand in 1g8o to 53 per thousand in 1988. In 1985, the WHO named Zimbabwe Mrica's best health service provider because of its efficient health delivery system. This all changed in the early 1ggos when Zimbabwe adopted the Economic Structural Adjustment Program (ESAP) and was advised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to cut its health and education budgets and to pass the costs of these and others services over to the consumers. The state's pro-people orientation and free health care for the poor were replaced with what are euphemistically called "cost recovery fees," and the early 1ggos brought a reversal of the gains made in the previous decade. Today, Zimbabwe is internationally known as one of the world's least healthy countries. 21 But, while the state's commitment to health equity had died down by the early 1ggos, the commitment at Ingutsheni to change from an environment of arrogant misperception, from what Megan Vaughn describes as "ordered non-communication" characterized by the occlusion of Mrican patients' voices, stories, and personal pain, persisted. The changes in health care brought about during the 1g8os generally ameliorated the more alienating aspects of institutionalized medical care and

EPILOGUE

bridged the gulf between Mrican patients, their therapy managers, and hospital personnel. Mrican patients and their families were more often listened to and traditional healers came openly on to the premises. Indeed, Mark Nyathi, a sangoma, remained on the hospital staff until 2001. While Ingutsheni continues to be biomedically oriented institution that employs a wide array of drugs and, like mental hospitals around the world, continues to apply ECT to its patients, the conditions at the hospital have changed significantly. One no longer perceives horror while walking through the wards. Patients run toward you and grab you. Some seem unaware, some appear dazed, and some look you straight in the eye as if they know something that you don't know. The older staff, those who have been at the institution for many years such as Nurse's Aide Winnie Mutasa, are rightly proud of how far they have come in the postcolonial era. In 1997, Ingutsheni won a second-prize award for the best-run hospital in Zimbabwe and its medical superintendent, Dr. Juliet Dube-Ndebele, also received accolades. 22 Postcolonial mental health care policy began as a critique of colonial mental health care policy. The racist, classist, and biocentric orientation under colonial rule ebbed as the state financed the democratization of health care. With the arrival ofESAP into Zimbabwe in 1991, this state support was ruptured. The overall national strategy of "Growth with Equity," and the more particular strategy of "Equity in Health," ended with ESAP. As during the colonial period, money and profit for the few now trumped health for the many in the age of neoliberalism, government repression, and corruption. It would be interesting to know what stories the psychiatric patients in a post postcolonial Zimbabwe might tell us today about the world in which they live.

TOGETHER LET US BUILD AMENTALLY HEALTHY NATION

TREE OF MENTAL HEALTH Fig. E.2 First of three in a series of educational posters produced by the Ingutsheni Central Hospital in •gg6. T h ese posters were produced as part of a community education campaign initiated by then medical superintendent and award-winning hospital administrator, Dr. Juliet Dube-Ndebele.

1 93

ENSURE 1\ THOROUGH PHYSICAL EXAMINATION TO ALL PATIENTS

TAKE THOROUGH HISTORY FROM PI\TIENT 1\NO RELATIVES

E.3 Educational poste r produced by Ingutsheni Central H ospital in 1996

1 94

E.4 Educational poster produced by Ingutsheni Central Hospital in 1996

Notes

Introduction 1. The surname Tanner is a pseudonym that I have chosen to protect the privacy of the woman, now deceased, whom I knew in my childhood. 2. "Mugabe Sacks Ushewokunze," Zimbabwe Mrican News Agency (ZANA News), October 13, 1981. 3· Interviews with Mark Nyathi, lngutsheni, August 31, 1998, and Anthony Reeler, AMANI Trust, Harare, September 14, 1998. 4· National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ), Bulawayo, B 7 I 1/8R, Box. 4342. Meeting of the Mental Hospital Board, November 23, 1959 . . Michelle Faul, "Years of Neglect Leave a Legacy of Despair," ZANA News, February 21, 1980. See also Government of Zimbabwe, Planning for Equity in Health, 1984, 15. 6. Ushewokunze was infamous for his altercations with whites in the Zimbabwean parliament and other institutional settings, and often referred to these men and their views as "relics." During one parliamentary discussion about the plan to change the name of the Andrew Fleming Hospital, named after the colony of Southern Rhodesia's first minister of health, to Parinrenyatwa, a heated debate ensued in which he stated, "All colonial relics should be removed." To this, one Rhodesia Front member of parliament, a Mr. Goddard, responded "Take your clothes off ... " See "Row Erupts Over Hospital Name Change," ZANA News, September 9, 1981. 7· Southern Rhodesia became Rhodesia in 1965 with that settler colony's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Great Britain under Ian Smith's Rhodesia Front government. 8. Interview with Mark Nyathi, Bulawayo, May 12, 1991. g. Interviews with Matron Msimanga, Ingutsheni, March 18, 1992, and Winnie Mutasa, lngutsheni, May 12, 1991. 10. Government of Zimbabwe, Department of Information Press Statement, "Government to Develop Programs on Mentally Ill," October 29, 1983. 1 1. See, for example, Steven Feierman, "Struggles for Control: The Social Roots of Health and Healing in Modern Mrica," African Studies Review 28, no. 2/3 ( 1985): 73-145. 12 . .J. P.R. Wallis, ed., TheMatabelejournalsofRobert Moffat, 1829-186o (National Archives of Rhodesia, 1945), vol. 2, 247. 13. Ngwabi Bhebe, Christianity and Traditional Religion in Western Zimbabwe, r889-I923 (London: Longman, 1979), 106. 14. Statute Law of Southern Rhodesia, Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1899, Section 3· 15. Karen E. Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton, N J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 76.

196

NoTES TO PAGES 7-12

16. For more work critical of colonial witchcraft ordinances. see F. H. Melland, "Ethical and Political Aspects of Mrican Witchcraft," Africa 8 (1935): 493-501. For a brilliant review of the politics of colonial witchcraft legislation, see Karen E. Fields, "Political Contingencies of Witchcraft in Colonial Central Mrica: Culture and the State in Marxist Theory," Canadian journal of African Studies 16 (1982): 567-593· 17. David Hammond-Tooke, Rituals and Medicines: Indigenous Healing in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1989), 103. 18. Ibid., 104. 19. Leith Mullings, Therapy, Ideology, and Social Change: Mental Healing in Urban Ghana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), l. 20. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 109. 2 1. The term antipsychiatry was coined by David Cooper in his book Psychiatry and Antipsychiatry (London: Tavist Books, 1967). Key proponents of the movement are Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing: Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), and The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), and R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine, 1967). 22. For an extensive discussion of the links between psychiatry and Nazi racial theory, see Thomas Roder, Psychiatrists: The Men behind Hitler (Los Angeles: Freedom, 1994). 23. Steven Humphries, Secret World of Sex, Forbidden Fruit: The British Experience I900-I9JO (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1988), 63-65. 24. For the story of Frances Farmer's tragic life and institutionalization, see Frances Farmer and Jean Ratcliffe, Will There Really Be a Morninlf. (New York: Dell, 1972), and William Arnold, Frances Farmer, Shadowland (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978). 25. One F'lew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, directed by Milos Forman (Hollywood: Warner Studios, 1975). 26. Roland Littlewood and Maurice Lipsedge, Aliens and Alienists: Ethnic Minorities and Psychiatry (New York: Routledge, 1993), 249· 27. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Penguin, 1963), 250-251. 28. A. T. Bryant, Zulu English Dictionary (Pinetown: Marianhill Mission Press, 1go6). 29. H.J. Simon, "Mental Disease in Mricans,"journal of Mental Science 104 (1958): 385. 30. R. W. S. Cheetham and]. A. Griffiths, 'The Traditional Healer /Diviner as Psychotherapist," South African Medical journal (December 12, 1982): 957· For a detailed discussion of the symptoms and function of ukuthwasa within the broader framework of healing and ritual in Southern Mrica, see David Hammond-Tooke, Rituals and Medicines, 105-120. 31. Hammond-Tooke, Rituals and Medicines, 105. 32. Interview with Mark Nyathi, Bulawayo, May 12, 1991. 33· This phenomenon is discussed throughout Foucault's work, particularly in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1975) and The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 34· Steven Feierman and John Janzen, eds., The Social Basis ofHealth and Healing in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 17. 35· Gordon Chavunduka, Traditional Healers and the Shona Patient (Gwelo: Mambo Press, 1978), 78. 36. Francis Chinemana, "Attitudes towards Psychiatric Illness Amongst the Shona," September 1983, 4· Unpublished paper supplied by author. 37· Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books), 96. 38. Michel de Certeau, Practices ofEveryday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xiv. 39· Ibid., 97-98.

NoTES To PAGES 12-24

1

97

40. John Janzen, The ()}test for Therapy: Medical Pluralism in Lower Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, I978), 3· 4I. Frantz Fanon, "Concerning Violence," in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, I963), 35-106. 42. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, I99I), II8. 43· Jock McCulloch, Colonia/Psychiatry and the African Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I995), 7. 44· Ibid., I8. 45·Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, I999). 46. Sally Swartz, "The Black Insane in the Cape, I89I-I92o,"]ournal of Southern African Studies 2I, no. 3 (I995): 399-4I5. 4 7. Leland Bell, Mental and Social Disorder in SulJ.Saharan Africa: The Case of Sierra Leone, r787-I990 (New York: Greenwood Press, I99I). 48. Shula Marks, Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Wort¢s of Three South African Women (Durban: Killie Campbell Mricana Library, I987). 49· Robert Edgar and Hilary Sapire, African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000). 1.

"Lobengula's Wives Lived Here"

I. "Winnie's" name initially appears within quotation marks to call attention to the fact that the accuracy of her name is in doubt. The accuracy of the names listed on Mrican patient files is often in doubt. This is because of numerous instances whereby authorities select a name for the person suspected of insanity because they do not trust the individual's ability to provide an accurate one. 2. NAZ B g/2/8R B7693· Patient No. 5705, "Winnie." Admitted I947• discharged, 1971. 3· Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New American Library, I965), xi. 4· Ibid., 242. 5· Walter Bromberg, M.D., From Shaman to Psychotherapist: A History of the Treatment ofMental Illness (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1975), 74, 95-g8. 6. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 221. 7· V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1g88), 2. 8. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso Books, I985),

3·

g. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 250. IO. Harriet Jane Deacon, "Madness, Race, and Moral Treatment: Robben Island Lunatic Asylum, Cape Colony, I846-I8go," History of Psychiatry 7 (I9g6): 28g. II. Charlene Smith, Rnbben Island (Cape Town: Mayibuye Books, I997), 43-55. I2. Ibid., 41. 13. Leland Bell, Mental and Social Disorder in SulJ.Saharan Africa, 43· I4. John Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam, I o. 15. Megan Vaughan, "Idioms of Madness: Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the Colonial Period," journal of Southern African Studies g, no. 2 ( I983) :78. I6. Personal communication with Dr. Julliet Dube-Ndebele, superintendent of Ingut-

NOTES TO PAGES 24-30

sheni Central Hospital and Mr. Phathisa Nyathi, popular Ndebele historian, February 25, I995· See also Kynyalala Gumbo, "Ingutsheni Prison or Rehabilitation Center?" B.A. Honors Thesis, Department of History, University of Zimbabwe, I985; G. R. Dent and C. L. S. Nyembezi, Scholar's Zulu Dictionary (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shuter, I993); Official Yearbook of the Colony of Southern Rhodesia, no. I, I924, 305. I 7. Interview with Nurse Msimanga, Ingutsheni Central Hospital, March I8, I992. I8. NAZ B 9/2/8R B7693Patient No. 4093, Admitted I942. I9. There were 20 shillings and 240 pence in I pound sterling. 20. Dane Kennedy, Islands of 'White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, I890-I939 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, I987), I3. 2I. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, I968), I50. 2 2. Cited in T. 0. Ranger, Aspects of Central African History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, I968), I36. 23. Jeff Peires, The House of Phalo: The History of the Xhosa People in the Last Days of Their Independence (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, I98 5), II. 24. Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All The Brutes: One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins ofEuropean Genocide (New York: New Press, 1997), 43-48. 25. Ibid., 52. 26. Ibid., 53· 27. According to T. 0. Ranger, Baden Powell's inspiration for the founding of the Boy Scouts occurred at the Matopos Hills in Southern Rhodesia. T. 0. Ranger, Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture, and History in the Matopos Hills ofZimba!mJe (Bloomington: Indiana U niversity Press, I999), 41. 28. Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes, 61. 29. For a detailed description of this early era of colonial rule and the prelude to the Rising, see Robin Palmer, Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, I977), 24-56, and Stanlake Samkange, The Origins of Rhodesia (New York: Frederick Praeger, 1969). 30. For theories on causes of the Rising, see D. N. Beach, "Chimurenga: The Shona Rising of I896-97, "journal ofAfrican History 20, no. 3 ( I979): 395-42o;julian Cobbing, "The Ndebele under the Khumalos," Ph.D. diss., University of Lancaster, I977; and T. 0. Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, I967). Cobbing disagrees with Ranger's interpretation of the I896 Rising as the first act of Zimbabwean nationalism and instead argues that the Rising was a last act ofthe independent Ndebele state. See Robin Palmer, Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia (London: Heinemann, 1977), chap. 2, and Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasant, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, I870-I939 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, I992), chap. I, on the social and economic impact of the rising on the Mrican population. 3 I. Cited in Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, I. 32. E. F. Knight, Rhodesia Today: A Description of the Present Condition and the Prospects of Mashonaland and Matabeland. (Bulawayo: Books of Rhodesia, I977), 2, 4, 42. 33· Ibid., 9· 34· Marshall Hole, The Making of Rhodesia (London: Macmillan, 1926), 76. 35· NAZ DM 2 I 9/ 1. NC Melsetter, to Magistrate, Melsetter, 17 March. I897. 36. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community (London: Verso, I983), chap. 5· 37· This concept is from Kennedy, Islands of 'White. 38. For a discussion of the centrality of the control of space in the operation of social power, see David Harvey, The Condition ofPostmodernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, I99I), chap. I4. 39· For a discussion of the nature of the Native Commissioner during the first decade of

NOTES TO PAGES

30-36

1

99

colonial rule see Colin Harding, Frontier Patrols: A History of the British South Africa Police and Other Rhodesian Forces (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1937). 40. For a good discussion of the historical context of Southern Rhodesia settler ideologies, see Enetia Vassilatos, "Race and Class: The Development and Influence of White Images of Blacks in Southern Rhodesia, I8go-1939," Ph.D. diss., University of Rhodesia, December 1977. 41. See S. R. Report of the Chief Native Commissioner Mashonaland Year Ending March 3 I, I90I. The CNC for Mashonaland was H. M. Taberer. 42. NAZ S 235l 440. Government Notice No. 181 of 18g8. 43· NAZ SRG4I 10, Native Affairs Committee, 19101 11. Another decision of the Native Affairs Committee was to prohibit mission stations from taking in girls fleeing from parental authority. 44· NAZ N 3l 1 I 1-5. Native Commissioner's Office, Charter, 1901. 45· Stephen Thornton, "Changing Patterns of Coercive Control: Part Two." Unpublished paper. I am indebted to Professor Terrence Ranger for this reference. 46. Deborah Kirkwood, "Settler Wives in Southern Rhodesia: A Case Study," in The Incorporated Wife, ed. Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener (Dover, N.H.: Croom Helm, 1984), 146. 47· Cited in T. 0. Ranger, "Whose Heritage? The Case of the Matobo National Park,Journal of Southern African Studies 15, no. 2 (1g8g): 219. 48. Ranger, Voices from the Rocks, 40. 49· S. R., Debates in the Legislative Council, July 17, 1908. 50. Rose Blennerhasett and Lucy Sleeman, Adventures in Mashonaland (New York: Macmillan, 1893), 172, 173,231,232. 51. Arthur Keppel:Jones, Rhodes and Rhodesia: The White Conquest of Zimbabwe, I 884- I 902 (Kingston, Ontario: McGill Queens University Press, 1983), and Blennerhasett and Sleeman, Adventures in Mashonaland. 52. NAZ T zl zgl 55 I 2. Secretary of the Treasury to Medical Director, October 25, 1922. 53· British South Africa Company, Reports on the Administration of Rhodesia, I889-I902, Vol. 1, 18g8, 8. 54· Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1oo- 1 15. Ranger characterized this period as one of "frank military despotism." 55· Claire Palley, The Constitutional History and Law of Southern Rhodesia, I 888- I 965 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 87-119. 56. Samkange, Origins of Rhodesia, 241-242. 57· Ibid., 242. 5 s. Ibid., z 4 1. 59· Frederick C. Selous, Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa (Salisbury: Pioneer Head, 1972), 57; and Deborah Kirkwood, "Settler Wives in Southern Rhodesia: A Case Study," 146. 6o. Kennedy, Islands of White, 14. 61. Knight, Rhodesia Today, so-51. 62. Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: the European Insane in British India, I Boo- I 85 8 (London: Routledge, 1991,97· 63. NAZ LO 2 I 1 I g, British South Africa Company Reports on the Administration of Rhodesia, I897-I898, 13. 64. Legislative Council Debates, June 17, 1908, 17 .Attorney General of Colony of Southern Rhodesia Tredgold at the Second Reading of the Lunacy Ordinance No.3, 1908. 65. NAZ LO 2 I 1 I g, British South African Company Reports on the Administration of Rhodesia, I897-I898, 13. 66. A. Kruger, Mental Health Law in South Africa (Durban: Butterworth, 1g8o), 12, 13.

200

NOTES TO PAGES

36-41

67. Ibid., 15, 88-1oo. 68. NAZ LO 2 I 1 I g, British South Africa Company Reports on the Administration of Rhodesia, I897-I898, 18gg, 10. 6g. Kruger, Mental Health Law, 12-16. 70. S. R., Report of the Chief Native Commissioner, Mashonaland, March 31, 1902, 2. 71. Michael Gelfand, ed., The Fleming Letters (I 894- I 9 I 4) (Salisbury: Government Printers, 1959), w; M. H. Webster, "A Review of the Development of the Health Services of Rhodesia from 1923 to the Present Day," CentralAfrican]ournal ofMedicine 19, 1 (1973): 7-

g.

72. Report on the Public Health, 1924. 73· Report on the Public Health, 1901-1906. 7 4· Report on the Public Health, 190 1. 75· Report on the Public Health, 1903. 76. Report on the Census of the Population, 1904. 77. NAZ J I 2 I 1 I 11. "G" Book. Acting Secretary of Law Department to Magistrate, Victoria,July 15, 1907. Re: Alleged Lunatic at Victoria. 78. NAZ RC 21.8.gR Box. 22275, Hotembe, Patient No. 1. 79· For a discussion about how effective this ordinance was on stemming tide oflabor desertions, see Charles van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, I 900I933 (London: Pluto Press, 1976), So. So. NAZRC 21/S/gR, Box 22275, Martin X., Ingutsheni patient no. 14.Admitted 1goS. Letter fromJJ. Healy of Salisbury Gaol to Magistrate of Salisbury, June S, 1go6. S1. While the view that masturbation was a major cause of mental illness may have lost much of its legitimacy by the 1SSos, there is much evidence that the view persisted, not only in popular prejudice, but among medical practitioners in colonial African as well. For instance, in 1Sg5, T. D. Greensless of the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum linked what hereferred to as the native addiction to masturbation with insanity. See Thomas Duncan Greensless, "Insanity Among the Natives of South Africa," journal of Mental Science 41 ( 1S95): 71-7S. Helpful works on the history of Western scientific attitudes toward masturbation include Alex Comfort, The Anxiety Makers: Some Curious Preoccupations of the Medical Profession (London: Nelson, 1967); and E. H. Hare, "Masturbatory Insanity: The History of an Idea,"]ournal of Mental Science, wS (1962): 1-23. S2. NAZ 21/S/gR Box. 22275. Martin X., Case No. 14. Letters fromJ.J. Healy of Salisbury Gaol to Magistrate of Salisbury June S, 1go6 through January 2, 1907. S3. NAZJ 2/1 I 11. Secretary Law Department to Magistrate, Salisbury, August 1, 1907. S4. Ibid. S5. Kruger, Mental Health Law, 15. S6. S. R., Debates in the Legislative Council, First Session of the Fourth Council, June 7, 1goS, 17. S7. Bulawayo Chronicle, April 24, 1goS. SS. Ysuneo Yoshikuni, "Black Migrant in a White City: A Social History of African Harare, 1Sgo-1925," Ph.D. diss., University of Zimbabwe, 1gSg. Sg. Bulawayo Chronicle, June 19, 1goS. go. Bulawayo Chronicle, January 3, 1goS. See also, Charles van Onselen, Chibaro, 43· 91. NAZ T 2 I 29/55/2. Chief Secretary H. H. Cas terns to Medical Director, October 17, 1go6. g2. S.R., Report on the Public Health, 1905-1907. 93· NAZ J 2/ 1 I 11. "G" book. Secretary for Law Department to Secretary for Public Works, October 1 1, 1907. 94· NAZ J 2 I 1 I 1 1. Secretary Law Department to Secretary Public Works, October 11, 1907.

NOTES TO PAGES

41-46

201

95· Report on the Public Health, I9o6 g6. NAZ LO 2 I I I g, Igo8. S. R., BSAC Estimates ofExpenditures to be Defrayed During Year Ending 3 I March, I 908. Public Works. 97. See Y Yoshikuni, "Black Migrants in a White City," I7-I8. g8. Official Yearbook of the Colony of Southern Rhodesia, No. 1, I924, 305. gg. Personal communication with Dr. Julliet Dube-Ndebele, Superintendent of Ingutsheni Mental Hospital, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. February 25, I995· I oo. Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, 1g8g. 101. NAZ g/ 2/ .8R, B 7693. Patient no. 5922. "Shadreck" Admitted 8.1.48 died 6.16.71. This file indicates that the vegetation around Ingutsheni was of tall grass. 102. Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise Poem: South African Voices in History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, I99I), 101. 103. Hole, The Making of Rhodesia, 28. 104. T. 0. Ranger, The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia, I898-I930 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 70-87; Cobbing, 'The Ndebele Under the Khumalos," 444· Nyamande retained an enduring significance as founder of the Ndebele National Home Movement in I9I5, and for his role as a chief advocate for the restoration of the Ndebele throne. 105. Personal Communication with Mr. Mark Nyathi, Matron, Ingutsheni Central Hospital, Bulawayo. May I 2, Iggi. Mr. Nyathi was the first trained Mrican psychiatric nurse in Rhodesia. 106. 'Nonne Vera, "Sorting it Out" in Worldview Magazine Online I2 ( Iggg): 2. 2.

Bodies in Custody

I. At least, nothing appeared in that paper about the event between July 12 andJuly 24, Igo8. 2. This practice of locating asylums near major urban centers was apparently widespread. David Rothman has pointed out that the majority of asylums constructed in the United States in the nineteenth century were in such locations. However, even with this proximity, the sense of remoteness was produced through such things as scenic surroundings, or through placing the asylum atop a hill. See David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, I97I), I40, I4L 3· S.R., Debates in the Legislative Council, .June 17, 1908, 17. 4· Michel Foucault develops this concept in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (NewY 138 Sow, Ivan, 173 Spatial relations, g, 15, 16, 20-24; and boundaries, 29-32; and domestication, 21-23; and enhlanyeni, 24-29; "mapping" of people in, 46-47; and mobile women, 100, 103-4, 109-14; and overcrowding in asylums, 54-61. See also Place Spivak, Gayatri, 1oo Standing,]. E., 145 Stereotypes, 30, 6o, 104-9 Sternberg, Robert, 21gn66 Stoler, Anne, 105 "Strong rooms," 52 Swaenpoel, Doctor, 124 Swartz, Sally, 15 Syphilis, 38,77-79, 123-24. See also Venereal disease Szasz, Thomas, 183 Taberer, H. M., 28-29 Tafuba, 103 Tanner, Mrs., ix-x, 1-2, 187 Taxation,36-37,70-71 Taylor, Herbert, 36-37 Teasdale, Mr., 131, 142 Terra prohibitio, 1 oo

INDEX

Therapy management group (TMG), 12, 164-65 Thorazine (Largactil/ Chlorpromazine), 20, •s6-s7 Thomas, 66 Toman, 122 Torture, 17-1S Transvaal, 2S, 33, 3S, 42 Tredgold, Robert, 32, 33, 44-45; and admission policies, 61, 62; on asylum keepers, 47; and Hlombaze, 56 Tuberculosis, 64, 11S, 137-3S Tumuwe, 166 Turk Mine, 122 Ubuhlanya, g UDI (Unilateral Declaration oflndependence), 13, 1So Ukuhlanya, 103 Ukuthwasa, g-10, 126, 173 United Nations, 1So "Urbanised Native in Southern Rhodesia" (Howman), 6S, 72 Urbanization, 33, 6S, 71-72, 114 Ushewokunze, Herbert, 2-6, g, 13, 1S4SS, •gsn6 Utopis, 113, 114 Vadzimu, 177 Valkenberg Mental Hospital, 15, •so, 156 Vambe,Lawrence, 115 Van Onselen, Charles, 6S, 106-7 Vaughan, Megan, 14,101, 1go Venereal disease, 38, 53, 77-7g, 123-24, 202n42 Vera, YVonne, 42, 127 Verwoerd, H. F., 217n107 Vigne, Alfred, 4S, 62

Waddilove Training Institution, g4-g5 Watch Tower movement, go, g2-g3 Watson, W. H., 72, go, 1oS Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, g1 "White Peril," 105 Whitehead, Mrs., 81-82 WHO (World Health Organization), 7, 172, ISO, •go Winnie, 20-21,24-25,42, 153, 155, 175 Witchcraft, 7-8,62, 72, 81, 123,165 Witchcraft Suppression Act, 7, 62, S1, 123 Witwatersrand, 33

Women: and admission policies, 52- 53; and diseases of poverty, 11S-21; exclusion of, from lists of inmates, 46; and the Other, 104-g; and overcrowding, sg6I; and schizophrenia, 172; and stereotypes, 30; stray/traveling, 17, gg-12S, 18g; "uncontrollable," 121-28 World Bank, •go World War I, so- 51, 53, SS; bloodshed during, Sg; and missionaries, g1-g2 World War II, 78, 104, 124, 130, 164; changes in psychiatric care after, 15657; employment of women after, 115; training centers in Rhodesia during, 143; usage of penicillin after, 78 Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 1

Yaba asylum, 15, 23 Yao, 72 Zambezi, So Zambia, 1So ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army), 3, 1S2 ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union), 6, 13, 1S, 185, 186 ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African. National Union Patriotic Front), 184 Zhii riots, 1S1, 182 Zimbabwe Plateau, 7, g, 26 Zimbabwe Ruins, g4 ZIMNAMH (Zimbabwe National Association of Mental Health), 6 ZINATHA (Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association), 10-Il, 18, 184 Zionist churches, 121 ZIPRA (Zimbabwe Peoples Revolutionary Army), 1S2 Zomba, 23,72,go, 10S, 157, 15g Zomba Mental Hospital, go, 10S, 157, 15g Zosi, 160 Zulu rulers, 26 Zulu (Bambatha) rebellion, 71 Zulu, Shaka, 26 Zwena, 55 Zwimba, Matthew, 75, go-g8 Zwimba Reserve, 75, g2 Zwiripi, 15g-6o, 16g-7o, 177

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