Madness and marginality: The lives of Kenya's White insane 9781526118073

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The lives of Kenya’s White insane

Will Jackson

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general editor John M. MacKenzie When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded more than twenty-five years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With more than ninety books published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

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selected titles AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES RACE AND EMPIRE Eugenics in colonial Kenya Chloe Campbell

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SCIENCE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA Saul Dubow

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REPRESENTING AFRICA Landscape, exploration and empire in Southern Africa John McAleer ENDING BRITISH RULE IN AFRICA Writers in a common cause Carol Polsgrove ORDERING AFRICA Anthropology, European imperialism and the politics of knowledge Helen Tilley (ed.) with Robert Gordon

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the lives of kenya’s white insane Will Jackson

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Will Jackson 2013 The right of Will Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ROAD, MANCHESTER M13 9NR, UK and ROOM 400, 175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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Distributed in the United States exclusively by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC PRESS, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 2029 WEST MALL, VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 8889 6  hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or­ ­appropriate.

Typeset in Trump Medieval by Koinonia, Manchester

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Mental irritability and breakdown of the white man in the tropics is not directly a medical problem, but rather the psychological one, of citizenship and the herd. H. M. Hanschell, ‘Correspondence’, The British Medical Journal, 10 April 1926 Once we start letting ourselves go, there’s no end to it. Never forget we have the natives to consider. Sacha Carnegie, Red Dust in Africa, 1959

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C on t e nts

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General Editor’s introduction—ix Acknowledgements—xi Note on terms—xii

Introduction 1

 1 Approaching madness: deviant psychology in Kenya Colony

23

  2 ‘No ordinary chaps’: class, gender and the licensing of transgression

45

  3 The lives of Kenya’s white insane

80

  4 Battered wives and broken homes: the colonial family

106

  5 Stigma, shame and scandal: sex and mental illness

129

  6 States of emergency: psychosis and transgression

150

Conclusion

172



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Appendices—180 Bibliography—185 Index—207

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G EN E R A L EDITO R ’ S I N T ROD U CTIO N

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the striking characteristic of British rule in East and Central Africa is the manner in which the brevity of its years was matched by the comparative weakness of its power. The British colonial presence in the region encompassed in effect one human lifespan. Its pioneering period, with all its supposed triumphalism and hopes of an extended white command of the lands, their peoples and their resources, was swiftly telescoped into a brief era of enfeebled decline. Urged on by wars and global economic recession, an alleged golden era in the inter-war years was rapidly tarnished beyond redemption. In the aftermath of the Second World War, even as the European imperial system crumbled throughout Asia, politicians, administrators and settlers remained convinced that the British Empire would survive for many decades in the diverse countries of Kenya, Uganda, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and even the United Nations trusteeship territory of Tanganyika. Throughout these colonies, the formation of an African elite seemed at an early stage. Settlers, notably in Kenya, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, appeared to maintain full control over transitional modernising economies, while administrators seemed to have lengthy careers still available to them. African resistance was to ensure that the reality would be very different. Now we can also see that the historiography of this region has passed through equally truncated phases. The study of the record of explorers, pioneers, governors, and settler politicians, with their pursuit of ethnography and their creation of machineries of government, infrastructures, import– export economies linked to a global economy and such arrangements as executive and legislative councils has been swiftly superseded by concerns with African conditions and discontents, with the white failures in local controls, with environmental change, women’s and gendered history, and with marginal people. Nevertheless, the clichéd phrase about the change from history from above to history from below should demarcate something more than changes in historical procedures. The new forms of research and writing have the capacity to illuminate the ‘above’ as much as the ‘below’. Such perspectives are necessarily mutually enhancing, inseparably intertwined. The characteristics and situations of supposedly marginal people are not only enmeshed with the more prominent, they may well have a greater capacity to throw light upon the imperial condition. This book reveals the ways in which this is the case. As Will Jackson sug­­­ gests, despite this great broadening out of interests, the history of white people in the last phase of imperial rule has been entirely overshadowed by the overripe myths of the ‘Happy Valley’ set, by the emergence of Kikuyu Mau Mau resistance, the rapid development of the nationalist movement, and the record of brutal suppression in the British military campaign. All of this, combined

[ ix ]

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general editor’s introduction

with conflict in Central Africa, pressed towards the rapid acts of decolonisation of the early 1960s throughout the region (with the sole exception of Southern Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe, delayed by white revolt until 1980). But there is still a story of white settler life to be told, as disillusioned whites saw the world they had imagined and planned crumbling around them. For Jackson, the record of psychiatric cases, of those suffering from ‘tropical neurasthenia’ and other alleged mental illnesses of the time provides remarkable insights into the lives and anxieties of settlers. Some of these had been migrants as recently as the 1940s, envisaging opportunities for self-improvement that turned into a receding mirage, a hoped-for world that no longer fitted the reality. It is a record of people who had invariably failed to maintain the supposed standards required of white status in the colonial context, who had fallen from the pedestal of prestige required of Europeans in Africa, and through that fall had often found themselves not only transgressing what were seen as essential norms, but also bridging the social and physical gap between white and black that served to define the prerogatives of privilege. Such infringements pushed them into the realm of the ‘mentally ill’. Although the existence of such people was often carefully covered up or, wherever possible, they were removed from the scene, some records have survived and Jackson is the first to use these to unveil what he describes as almost a ‘collective nervous breakdown’ on the part of whites. He also elegantly sets this work into the now extensive historiography of forms of ‘madness’ and psychiatric care in other parts of the British Empire. Although any assessment of the character of professional psychiatry, its theory and its methods, is not the purpose of this book, the reader is struck by the manner in which this most socially conditioned of medical disciplines and therapeutic procedures (not to mention the quality of record keeping) inhabited a world that seems almost light years away from the present. If we need any indication of the speed with which ideas and fashions can be superseded, it is here. Yet through these case studies we derive strikingly illuminating insights into the late imperial condition. . John M. MacKenzie

[x]

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a c k n owl e d geme nts

An earlier version of Chapter 5 of this book appeared as ‘Bad Blood: Poverty, Psychopathy and The Politics of Transgression in Colonial Kenya, 1939–1959’, in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (39: 1, 2011) – my thanks to the journal’s editors for permission to reproduce this material here. The research on which the book is based was made possible by a Humanities Research Scholarship at the University of Leeds. Additional funding was provided by the Economic History Society, the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the Institute of Historical Research. I have benefited at various points in the research and writing of the book by the advice and encouragement of various colleagues. I would especially like to thank David Anderson, Brett Shadle, Elleke Boehmer, John Lonsdale, Julie Parle, Andrew Fearnley, Melissa Graboyes, Paul Ocobock, Paul Swanepoel and Waltraud Ernst. Shane Doyle and Andrew Thompson supervised the PhD out of which the book developed. Andrew was an inspiring supervisor; Shane had the misfortune to witness at close quarters all my intellectual blind alleys. To them both I am greatly indebted. I would also like to thank Richard Whiting for his gentle encouragement and Jon Wilson and Sarah Stockwell at King’s College London for getting me interested in imperial history to begin with. In Nairobi, I must thank Dr. Nelly Kitazi, the Superintendent at the Mathari Mental Hospital, for allowing me to consult patient case files. At the National Archives I was fortunate to have the support of Richard Ambani and Peterson Kithuka Nthiwa. Paul Ocobock and John Gitau Kariuki showed me that there was more to Kenya than archival research. I have been lucky to share the past six years in Leeds with a remarkable group of friends. I am particularly indebted to Eddy and Elliott, Emily and Helen, Bethany, Johan, Max and Nalini, Liz and Ste and Dave and Ged. All have sustained, inspired and disappointed me. Jesh and Jimmy in London will not read this book but were decisive in its writing. Without the love and support of my parents I would not have begun any sort of life involving books. I thank them for the gift of themselves – and their continued love. The book is for Jo, who understands.

[ xi ]

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n ot e o n te r ms

Throughout this book I discuss questions of racial identity and mental illness. Doing so raises inevitable problems. How to investigate the meaning of terms that we cannot avoid but use ourselves? How can language exist as both the object of analysis and its instrumental terms? How can we avoid imparting unintended meaning? In the chapters that follow I use the term ‘European’ to describe people who were judged by contemporaries to be European. Likewise, I use the terms ‘madness’, ‘insanity’ and ‘mental illness’ not as precise or scientific designations of my own but as broadly encompassing terms to describe the fact of a person’s treatment at a psychiatric institution. Before this research began, ethics clearance was obtained from the universities of Leeds and Nairobi. A serious concern was to protect the anonymity of psychiatric patients and their families. In what follows, all the names of individuals treated at the Mathari Mental Hospital, as well as their family members, have been changed. In addition, where appropriate, secondary information – relating, for example, to place names, details of an individual’s background and employment or the circumstances of their admission – have also been changed. In making these alterations I have endeavoured not to distort the analysis of patient life-histories. Most importantly, I hope that I have written with sympathy and respect towards those whose stories I have told.

[ xii ]

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Introduction

In 1951, just months before the announcement of a state of emergency in Kenya signalled the onset of the colony’s violent demise, a book was published in Nairobi. Entitled Under the Sun, the book was an affectionate biography of the late Dr Roland Burkitt, written by his erstwhile friend and mentee, Joseph Gregory.1 As an example of late colonial life-writing, the book at first appears unremarkable. Typical of a discursive tradition that by the middle of the twentieth century had made Kenya famous as the most picturesque of Britain’s colonies, the book encapsulated much of what Kenya Colony, for the Europeans who went there, was imagined to comprise. Exultant in the colony’s splendid outdoors yet acutely aware of the fragility of the settler position, Burkitt combined an unswerving dedication to the political project of colonial rule on the one hand with an apparently irrepressible eccentricity on the other. Burkitt, indeed, appears an exemplary figure, an embodiment of settler culture and an archetype of the men and women from whose trials and tribulations in the ‘white highlands’ of Kenya derived much of that colony’s folklore and fame. One notable feature of Burkitt’s life in Kenya was his enduring preoccupation with the possible effects of the tropical climate on ‘exotic’ Europeans (Gregory used the word here in the botanical sense). As has now been well established, anxiety over the degenerative effects of the tropical sun was a defining feature of nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial cultures – in Kenya and elsewhere.2 European settlers made much of the splendid natural backdrop that the colony provided but they harboured, at the same time, an acute collective consciousness of its danger. As Dane Kennedy had it, anxieties over climate served to articulate broader concerns about the political position of Kenya’s Europeans.3 To succumb to the deleterious effects of the altitude or the sun was to discredit the intellectual rationale for white minority rule. This is because the civilising ethos by which settler[1]

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madness and marginality

colonialism was defended rested entirely on the notion that Europeans possessed faculties of strength, wisdom and self-control that African peoples lacked. Europeans who degenerated or ‘went native’ collapsed the vital boundary lines separating colonisers from colonised. To this extent, the idiom of the natural world worked metaphorically – to articulate political jeopardy. Discussions over climate bespoke fears of contagion; defence against the sun meant protection of the race. To set an exemplary standard for other Europeans, Burkitt took his own prophylactic regime extremely seriously, comporting himself each day not only in a bee-hived, red-lined cork topi but with a red umbrella as well. A red spine pad stitched into his jacket afforded extra protection. Indeed, it was largely due to Burkitt that the wearing of special clothing to protect against the sun was maintained in Kenya for so long.4 Alongside degeneration, the ‘poor white problem’ also worried Burkitt. ‘It was a thing [he] always feared,’ wrote Gregory, ‘and he preached the dignity of the white man in the presence of the black as one of the great essentials for the happy development of the country.’5 This need to maintain white dignity – what we might term the ‘prestige imperative’ – was a critical determinant in shaping the contours of the settler colony. As Elizabeth Collingham has pointed out, prestige served primarily as the mechanism by which to divert attention from the cruder truth that colonial authority in fact depended on the potential use of force. The key was not merely that Europeans behave as Europeans should but that they were seen to behave as such by the ‘natives’ over which they claimed the legitimacy to rule.6 The ‘native’ in this sense served as the mirror by which colonial Europeans saw themselves.7 Roland Burkitt was well aware of the prestige imperative: he hated ‘race mixing’ and lobbied vigorously against ‘closer settlement’ schemes by which the immigration into Kenya of poorer Europeans would be entertained.8 Besides the preservation of race and class boundaries, Burkitt was also a staunch defender of traditional gender roles. ‘He had very fixed ideas on how women should dress and behave’, Gregory wrote, ‘[and] all departure from femininity was disapproved of in no uncertain manner.’9 Women who arrived at his surgery in trousers were sent home to change into something less subversive while Burkitt himself besported himself as only a white man in Kenya should. Having given up smoking on the grounds that it had become too effeminate, one of Burkitt’s favourite entertainments was to ride on the plains below Nairobi and shoot hyenas ‘at a gallop’.10 From a superficial reading of Gregory’s memoir, then, Roland Burkitt appears as an archetypal figure in the history of colonial Kenya. [2]

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introduction

Exercised by climate and ‘poor whites’ yet resplendent himself amid Kenya’s invigorating outdoors, implacably conservative in outlook yet larger than life in his own behaviour, Burkitt might well be thought of as an amalgam of white society. He certainly appears instantly recognisable from both popular and scholarly historical accounts.11 A closer reading of Gregory’s memoir, however, shows up another set of meanings and, in particular, the presence of another figure: Burkitt’s wife, Anita. In Gregory’s book Anita occupies only a marginal presence, appearing largely in a supporting role and serving primarily as a narrative device by which the character of her husband is embellished. It is not intended that the reader dwell on Anita’s interior experience, in other words: the book is a biography of Burkitt, not his wife, and of the latter, the following is all that we know. Anita Carter met her future husband on board ship in 1911. Then, Burkitt was on his way to the British East African Protectorate (as Kenya was known before the transition from Protectorate to Colony in 1920); Anita was travelling as a companion to Mary Fergusson, second Baroness Inverclyde, herself en route to join her husband, the Governor of Gibraltar. Such was Anita’s physical allure (Gregory describes her as slim and graceful with ‘even, attractive features and a charming expression’), that Anita had many suitors on board ship and was much sought after as a companion and dancing partner. Burkitt, by contrast, was greatly disadvantaged: He had never danced in his life, nor could his looks be highly commended, but he pursued the woman of his choice with great persistence all day and paid her every possible attention. When the tender came alongside [at Gibraltar] to carry Lady Inverclyde and her companion ashore Burkitt was all ready to accompany them but this was forbidden. In the few minutes at his disposal on the gangway he succeeded in extracting a promise of marriage from the blushing maiden, and when the ship sailed on he astonished many of the better favoured and, as they thought, more desirable young men by announcing his engagement.12

The passage captures well the gallantry by which imperial masculinity was defined. Burkitt is unyielding, persistent – and triumphant. Anita is passive. The valour of the underdog reworks Elizabethan courtly love. With her marriage to Burkitt, meanwhile, Anita’s transition is made: from suitor’s trophy to ‘incorporated wife’.13 It is not until Gregory returns to the subject of climate, however, later in the book, that Anita reappears. Here it transpires that, aside from his interest in heliophobic clothing, Burkitt was also deeply preoccupied by the design of Europeans’ houses, their ventilation and shade his two primary concerns. As with clothing, Burkitt led by example: [3]

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In his own home he had sunshades built over each window and green blinds that could be drawn when the sun was low and shining directly into the windows. Masses of trees shaded the house and added to the cool darkness which he loved so much. There is no doubt that it was restful but many people would find it depressing. It was all right for him who spent most of the day away, but a little hard on his wife who was there for days on end.14

Understatement here speaks volumes. While Burkitt was out hyenahunting on the plains, his wife was passing a solitary and dispiriting time at home. Ironically, what made Anita’s time at home depressing stemmed directly from her husband’s professional interest in the mental health of colonial Europeans. Burkitt himself was unaffected by the depressive effects of his home improvement but in designing his house against the harmful effects of the equatorial sun – in ‘doing’ discourse – Burkitt contributed directly to the very real distemper of his wife. So perhaps we should not be surprised when, two chapters later in Gregory’s book, we learn that Anita Burkitt did indeed suffer mental distress: For some time before her death it was known that Mrs Burkitt was in failing health. She was seen by psychiatrists, brain specialists, nerve specialists and all the best medical opinion in London. Nothing physical could be found wrong and so the profession fell back on climate. Kenya did not agree with her. Dr Burkitt thought he had ample proof in his own wife of all the things he had said about the harmful effects of the tropics on the exotic Europeans, especially women. So it was decided that Mrs Burkitt should leave Kenya for good and settle in England … She sold all those personal things she did not wish to take with her, arranged the house as for a bachelor establishment and left for England.15

Anita Burkitt died during her journey back to England in 1928. Gregory’s book refers to a ‘cerebral catastrophe’ but the causes of Anita’s death are as uncertain as the details of her life. Indeed, while Roland Burkitt looms large in the history of colonial Kenya, the life of his wife might best be thought of in terms of what Ann Stoler has described as ‘displaced histories’ – realms of possibility and experience that have been pushed to the edges of our vision by dominant discursive traditions.16 While Anita exists in the margins – in the shadows – of Gregory’s book, what little that we do know of her intimates most forcefully the expansiveness of all that we do not. Most intriguingly, the figure of Anita Burkitt represents the convergence of mental illness as a discursive construct and as an experiential reality. We know what Roland Burkitt thought about mental health and illness; we do not know the feelings of his wife. Such silences are replicated in much historical writing of Kenya. While research into colonial psychiatry [4]

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introduction

has told us a great deal about what doctors and other authority figures thought about mental illness, we know very little of the thoughts and feelings of the mentally ill themselves.17 The aim of this book is to get beyond the dominant – the archetypal – figure that Roland Burkitt represents and to attend directly to that of his wife. There were Europeans in Kenya whose lives bore little resemblance to those outstanding figures – the ‘great white hunters’, the aristocrats, the pioneers – who continue to dominate the history of Kenya’s colonial past. Yet it is precisely the idea that a man such as Burkitt was somehow typical of Kenya’s European population that has diverted historians from the experiences of the colony’s ‘other whites’ – the poor, the marginalised, the mentally ill. Emerging partly from the need to defend the political rationale for white settlement and partly from the development of the colony as a tourist destination, the idea of Kenya as a site of romance and adventure has proved remarkably resilient.18 While much innovate research has attended to the presence of deviant Europeans in other parts of the European empires – in India, for example, in South Africa, and in the Dutch East Indies19 – little has been written of the impoverished, the subversive or the mentally unwell among the Europeans of Kenya – a neglect that both reflects and has helped to perpetuate that colony’s gilded reputation.20 The considerable contemporary appeal of Kenya, meanwhile (and the popularity of safari travel in particular), has both fed upon and fuelled a reiterative mythology of Kenya’s romantic colonial past and ensured a steady demand for biographies of the colony’s more glamorous Europeans.21 While the combined effects of postcolonial theory and the ‘new imperial history’ have dramatically reshaped the study of colonial cultures and societies elsewhere, the literature on the Europeans in Kenya remains dominated by popular histories and evocative autobiographical accounts.22 This book attempts to challenge this roseate self-image by setting out to retrieve and reconstruct the lives of Kenya’s ‘white insane’. In Kenya Colony, Europeans who were considered to be mentally unwell were customarily removed – either repatriated to Britain or transferred to specialist mental institutions in South Africa. Tropical Africa, it was argued, was hardly conducive for the restoration of mental health. In the process of their removal, however, the mentally ill were first confined, in the early years of settlement in the colony’s jails and, from 1910, at the Mathari Mental Hospital outside Nairobi. Until the Second World War, only a very small number of Europeans were treated at Mathari but during the colony’s later years, they were admitted in significant numbers. From just a handful admitted each year during the inter-war period, during the 1940s and 1950s they were admitted in [5]

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23

their hundreds. In part this was down to improvements in the standards of medical treatment on offer at Mathari; more important still were the inadequacies of European welfare provision more broadly, a shortcoming only aggravated by the dramatic increase in the numbers of Europeans coming into Kenya during and after the Second World War. Crucial for our purposes is the fact that the doctors who treated Kenya’s ‘white insane’ assembled in the process a copious documentary record. A case file was maintained for every patient admitted to the hospital, each containing detailed information on the history and appearance of a patient’s mental illness. Many included correspondence from patients themselves and almost all contained records of conversations conducted between patients and the psychiatrists who treated them. While it would be naive to imagine that here can be found the voices of Kenya’s white insane ‘in their own words’, these patient case files, nevertheless, provide a remarkably rich resource for interrogating the dominant images and ideas by which Europeans in Kenya have written, both of Africa and of themselves.

Interrogating ‘the European’ Over two hundred and fifty patient case files have been consulted in the course of this study. All date from the twenty-year period following the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. In approaching these files, the book rests on a foundational premise – that the ideology supporting colonial rule was personified, embodied in a racial category: ‘the European’. Colonial rule, as we know, depended on the idea that those designated as European were endowed with aptitudes and abilities that both legitimated and demanded their domination of subject peoples.24 Whites enjoyed privilege not only because they were able to do so but also because they believed it to be right and proper that they should. Because that ideology was embodied, to be European did not entail merely a connection to a place so much as a claim to belong, to an epistemic logic that itself rested on the behaviour and the circumstances of those people so described. Europeans performed their racial identity, in other words, and in so doing laid claim to the privileges such identity conferred. We cannot assume that these claims were always successfully made. Skin colour was never on its own enough to secure an individual’s appelation as ‘white’ or ‘European’.25 That the performance of racial identity was necessary for the credibility of colonial rule does not mean that it proceeded smoothly. The concomitant historical problem is that, in a rhetorical sense, as long as the ideology of racial difference had political value, the idea of ‘the European’ could serve as well as [6]

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introduction

the Europeans themselves. Conformity to type was contrived through methods of social engineering but was expressed discursively as well – in the cultural construction of the colony by and for its European population, as well as for prospective settlers and potential critics in Britain and elsewhere. Historians wishing to write against the enduring force of colonial ideologies, therefore, not only in Kenya but across the European empires, face a significant methodological challenge: how can accounts be found that depart from the conventional image of the colonial white man – and woman – and the kinds of experiences that they enjoyed? For Terence Ranger, writing ‘against the grain’ must inevitably involve an attempt to locate Europeans ‘without power’: those who ‘let the side down’, ‘went native’ or wound up destitute, enfeebled, disillusioned or poor.26 In looking for Europeans without power, however, it may well be that the historian ends up reiterating the very notion that powerless Europeans were, by definition, anomalous. The ‘degenerate’ and the ‘poor white’, we should remember, were staple terms of colonial discourse – the antithetical alter egos of the archetypal European. As with any attempt to write history ‘from below’, moreover, the difficulty of locating the necessary sources presents a problem at once prosaic and profound. Kenya’s colonial elite had both the opportunity and the inclination to write of their time in Africa; the distressed and the destitute did not.27 This is not to say that records cannot be found concerning poor, deviant or marginalised Europeans. As Stoler, among others, has shown, precisely because these Europeans were problematic they became visible also. Managing emotion, dampening desire and policing constantly the affective as well as the spatial and political boundaries that separated colonisers from colonised were all critical concerns for colonial regimes.28 Just as Marxist historians of the 1960s tended to recognise their subjects only when they acted politically, so historians of empire risk seeing disreputable Europeans only through the primary lens of their racial transgression. Official records, in any case, are likely to tell us far more about how such people were dealt with by authorities than how the marginal themselves perceived the worlds around them and sought to control the direction of their lives. Our aim, in other words, cannot be to write of people defined by their poverty, their ‘madness’ or their transgression as to do so would be to reinscribe the very tenets of colonial ideology that we are attempting to move beyond. The point is not that the poor, the marginalised or the mentally ill were subversive – that is indisputable. But to foreground their subversion is to obscure a whole range of other narrative and subjective possibilities beyond the problem that, for colonial authorities, such people posed.29 [7]

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The existing literature on colonial Kenya only hints at such elusive, marginal worlds. In his work on settler society in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, Dane Kennedy discussed in depth the figurative significance of ‘poor whites’ but had less to say about their flesh-and-blood reality.30 Kennedy, significantly, was concerned primarily with how social norms were secured, not with how they were resisted, flouted, or ignored. Colonial authorities, it is clear, worked hard to pre-empt the emergence of a ‘poor white problem’: immigration restrictions worked to keep ‘poor whites’ out; subsidies to the settler economy kept extant whites from ‘going poor’; those that did so were repatriated.31 Europeans unwilling or unable to subscribe to social norms, Michael Redley notes, were dealt with harshly by the white community and occasionally rejected altogether.32 Whites who did not maintain racial standards were better off out of the way.33 More recently, John Lonsdale has described ‘poor whites’ as ‘the enemy within’, to be rehabilitated by the Salvation Army or repatriated as Distressed British Subjects, ‘at public expense, away from African eyes’.34 Dealing with Kenya’s ‘undesirable’ class was always a matter principally of denial: prohibiting entry into the colony of all but those with the financial reserves to make good was intended to prevent a ‘poor white problem’ from coming to pass; repatriating those who fell on hard times, or whose behaviour challenged the integrity of ‘the European’, constituted an implicit recognition that there was no place in the settler-colony for those who failed to uphold racial standards. Locating fine-grained histories of Kenya’s ‘other’ whites, however, proves an exercise in frustration; ‘undesirables’ and ‘poor whites’ all appear in the archival record most reliably at the point of their removal. These people exist seldom in the present tense, in other words, but as imperfect lives, coming into view precisely at the moment that they disappear. As for the mentally ill, while considerable research has focused on the treatment of colonised populations, historians who have engaged with the European insane have tended to limit their analysis to the incontrovertible danger that these people presented to white prestige.35 Less attention has been paid to the particular ways in which mental illness appeared – either to the afflicted themselves or to society at large.36 A significant reason why historians have not been able to attend as closely as they might have liked to the subjective, human dimensions of mental illness in the settler-colony stems principally from the constraints of available sources. For the most part, historians have written from official, government records. As such, they have told a psychiatric story: of doctors and institutions, diagnoses and treatment.37 The intention with this book is to embrace fully the ample [8]

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biographical quality of patient case files. This is not to downplay the fact that the documents these files comprise were compiled – and mostly written – by psychiatrists. This has to be the story of madness first of all. But the book emerges in the first instance out of an initial scepticism towards the idea of Kenya Colony as a place of sun-kissed panoramas and Mozart on safari. Its early impulse, in other words, was less towards Ranger’s ‘Europeans without power’ than it was towards Richard Dyer’s invitation to ‘make whiteness strange’.38 The aim, therefore, is not to locate a certain group of people delimited by their exceptional status, whether that be marked by deviance, poverty or illness, but to embrace a more expansive realm of possibility than that which the construction of colonial whiteness confers. The need for Europeans in Kenya to emulate the archetypal European was decisive in the configuration both of mental illness and of social marginality, but that is not to say that their failure to do so was necessarily uppermost in the minds of the marginal and the mentally ill themselves. We need to embrace the apparent paradox, in other words, that while the prestige imperative was doubtless a powerful and decisive social force, it may well have been an irrelevance for the very people subject to its most coercive disciplinary effects.

Ordinary lives Despite the perennial problems of evidence and the insistent, enduring claims of colonialist historiographies, it is notable that much innovative work has been undertaken in the attempt to uncover the ‘ordinary lives’ of individuals caught up in the expansion and contraction of the European empires overseas. Of African and Asian peoples, these developments came sooner. As the nationalist historiography of decolonisation fused with the emergence of area studies in the Western academy, it became inflected with, and inspired by, much inventive new work in social history, gender studies and social anthropology.39 The dramatic development of postcolonial studies in the 1980s, meanwhile, set out two divergent approaches for the study of empire: the first, to critique colonial discourse; the other, to attend to histories of subject peoples in ways that went beyond their former rulers’ claims to speak on their behalf.40 Both were animated by a common desire to challenge the mythologies by which empire had been sustained. Yet while the latter opened up all sorts of new possibilities for re-imagining the h ­ istories of colonised peoples, the former continued to place inordin­ate stress on the utterances and actions of a narrow and unrepresentative European elite. With Edward Said’s initial insight, the idea that Europeans constituted the native or Oriental ‘other’ has become a ­ commonplace.41 [9]

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Examining the ways in which such inventions were indexed by gender, race and class has made for more nuanced and complex debate.42 Yet still the focus has remained on those colonisers with the time, the talent and the inclination not only to give voice to their ideas and experience but, more importantly, to get their voices heard. The danger inherent in any reading of colonialist texts, therefore, is that to critique colonial discourses may serve inadvertently to foreground them. To apply Foucauldian theory to the work of Karen Blixen is to remain ‘stuck’ on Blixen nonetheless. In the early years of the twenty-first century, a number of books were published that looked to portend a new direction. In 2003, with the attention of many imperial historians taken with Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, books also appeared by Linda Colley (Captives: Britain, Empire and the Wider World, 1600–1850) and Robert Bickers (Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai).43 Significantly, both Colley and Bickers were interested in the ‘ordinary people’ of empire. As Colley put it, ‘British attitudes to empire have often been reconstructed – and over homogenised – on the slender basis of testimonies by a few conspicuous actors in positions of power or notoriety.’ The vast majority of imperial personnel were very different – and very plain: ‘minor settlers and farmers, common seamen and private soldiers, junior officers and small traders, itinerants and exiles, convicts and assorted womenfolk’. In building her imperial history from below, Colley wanted to see the British ‘for what they actually were, in their real diversity and limited dimensions, as distinct from how they wished to appear then, and from what they are still stereotypically viewed as being now’.44 While Colley compiled her study from the narratives of Britons captured overseas during the 250 years of British imperial expansion, Bickers’s subject was just one man. Yet in writing the life-history of Maurice Tinkler, an English policeman in interwar Shanghai, Bickers had similar motivations. Conventional imperial histories, he argued, routinely lack ‘the lived life of ordinary people and the events and circumstances that envelop them’. Then, in an almost exact reprisal of Colley: We have no end of biographies of senior or prominent colonial figures, and studies and celebrations of colonial lives … [but] there is little on the men of the armies of the empire, on the navy, the merchant navy, railwaymen, railway supervisors. Nothing on the gas engineers of empire, the road-builders [and] all those who weren’t quite pukka.45

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be included too. ‘The beachcomber, the blackbirder, the remittance man’, he wrote, ‘all have their place in the histories of colonialism, even if they serve to embarrass the affable memoirists and raconteurs who populate [its] nostalgic modern literature.’46 For Bickers, the elisions of imperial historiography were to be explained largely by the political charge that discussion of Britain’s imperial past continues to contain. Critics, Bickers argued, look only for violence and oppression; the nostalgic see only the upper-class public servants.47 Ideological hostility or nostalgic sympathy eclipsed the ‘ordinariness’ of empire; seeking out those who appeared as neither heroes nor villains was offered as one way to separate a study of empire from any political – or polemical – claims. For Richard Drayton, however, such neutrality is neither possible nor desirable. ‘The mental world of individuals at the frontier’, he writes – ‘usually white’ – has been the subject of ‘many elegant studies’. Yet the historians who wrote them, for Drayton, have failed to acknowledge the ‘dark side’ of empire, more concerned as they were ‘by epistemic violence than the real thing’.48 Drayton went on to discuss torture and terror but the ‘dark side’ for him was structural: the crucial point was less that torture was an important part of empire (and one underestimated by historians) but that it was empire’s inevitable corollary.49 Violence, Drayton argued, should not be considered as a problem that oddly pops up in the midst of imperial adventures, but as ‘the necessary recurrent partner to a non-consensual regime of exploitation’.50 The intention here is certainly not to downplay or overlook the ‘dark side’ of empire; indeed, it is precisely the dark side that courses, in various ways, throughout these case files. Drayton was right: violence, whether physical or epistemic, was perennial to empire. And yet it occurred – and must be understood – in ways that are far more diverse and more oblique than either a Marxist-inspired insistence on aggregating forces or a postcolonial stress on the ubiquity of colonial injustice can so readily encompass. The same scepticism that we apply to the rose-tinted view of empire must also be applied to the – no-less homogenising – view of empire as systematic oppression. What we need to discern are the ways in which violence was perpetrated – not to mention the ways in which it was suffered, resisted, rationalised and resented. Instead of a singular and malevolent ‘dark side’ of empire, therefore, we might better envisage a range of hardships and injuries that had social and psychological as well as economic effects. A significant part of what was fresh about Colley’s and Bickers’s approach was their willingness to combine attention to the indisputably problematic nature of Britons’ immiseration or captivity with a serious empathic concern for the subjectivity of those individuals [ 11 ]

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concerned. To this extent, their work marked a departure from an earlier school that had focused attention on the ways by which imperial authorities attempted to manage disruptive Europeans.51 For Bickers and Colley, their subjects were people first and problems second. It was an approach borne from conviction but only made possible by crucial sources – captivity narratives for Colley, a cache of personal papers for Bickers.52 Colley admitted the captivity narratives to be ‘imperfect, idiosyncratic and sometimes violently slanted’. They were also, she adds, ‘astonishingly rich and revealing’.53 The same can be said of the case files at Mathari. Here, at last, are to be found stories of Europeans in Kenya quite unlike, both in content and in form, those colourful and evocative characters that continue to dominate perceptions of the colony today. By writing a history that is biographical first and psychiatric second we are able to put into conversation the voices of the ‘mad’ with the voices of the sane. Besides Karen Blixen’s memoirs, hagiographies of ‘the pioneers’ and the proliferating slew of latter-day tourist accounts, to the canon of ‘white Kenya’ can now be added the suicidal settler-housewife, the psychopathic barmaid and the wayward missionary priest. These people bore little resemblance to ‘the European’ but they were Europeans nonetheless.

White madness The story of Anita Burkitt, it is important to note, is decisively not anomalous, isolated or exceptional, whatever colonial ideologues may have us believe. In the settler canon, the lonesome housewife is a familiar figure. Doris Lessing, whose novel, The Grass is Singing, depicted, perhaps more vividly than any other, the futility of the settler-colonial project, wrote this of her mother, who had settled in Southern Rhodesia in the inter-war years: I think what happened was this: When she arrived on that farm, which was still virgin bush, with not so much as a field cleared on it, not a house or a farm building – nothing; when she knew that this would be her future, a lonely one because of her neighbours, with whom she had nothing in common; when she knew that the forward drive of her life, which had been towards some form of conventional middle-class living, was blocked … when she knew that nothing she had hoped for could ever happen – then she had a breakdown and took to her bed. But words like breakdown and depression were not used then as they are now: people could be suffering from neurasthenia or low spirits. She said she had a bad heart and probably believed it, as she lay in bed with her heart pounding from anxiety, looking out over the African bush, where she would never feel at home.54

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Elsewhere, Ranajit Guha has written of the anxiety inherent in the experience of empire. To counter dominant colonial narratives, Guha argued, we need to purposefully locate those colonisers ‘agonising over the immensity of things in a world whose limits are not known’.55 It is in the spirit of Guha’s injunction that this book is conceived. It does not intend, however, to envisage either colonialism itself or those men and women caught up in it as pathological. Empire was tedious as it was traumatic, both brutalising and banal. To posit empire as, by definition, ‘mad’, or to argue that it gave rise to particular psychological tendencies, is to risk, as Frederick Cooper has suggested, a too simple transposition from the political to the personal; ‘from matters of state to the multidimensional contexts in which personalities are actually shaped’.56 It is a problem here mitigated to some extent by the richness of the patient case files under review but my analysis tends, nonetheless, less towards the insanity of empire than towards the peculiar life trajectories of those individuals within empire who found themselves recipient of psychiatric care. The intention is not to put together a hypothetical colonial condition, in other words, but to reconstruct life histories that show the varied and complicated ways in which individuals struggled to cope with their experiences of empire – and how the individuals and institutions of late-colonial society worked – or did not work – to care for and constrain them. If we are to err on the side of caution as regards a colonial condition, so we may also tread carefully in contemplating the apprehension of mental illness through the lens of social control. Since the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, social control theory has provided one of the major theoretical frameworks by which historians have approached the history of mental illness and its treatment.57 At its most basic (and at times its most misleading) social control theory posits psychiatry as an institutionalised apparatus for the control of deviance: as a means of ‘shutting up’ those people whose behaviour disturbed society at large. As long as research is sourced from hospital records, however, it is bound to tell us more about how deviance (or mental illness if we eschew the anti-psychiatric term) was managed, treated and controlled than it does about the ways in which it was experienced by ‘deviants’ themselves. Patient case files, though produced within the hospital and hardly autonomous from psychiatric discourse, nevertheless enable historians to countenance agency with the patient and not exclusively with the psychiatrist.58 What is more, they speak most forcefully of that which medical knowledge did not know – and that remains oblique in the records that remain. To think of social control as a blunt or, indeed, a necessarily effective instrument must be both to impart far more power to the doctors than in fact they did enjoy [ 13 ]

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and to accept with far too much credulity the central premise of the anti-psychiatry school – that institutional confinement worked less to restore mental health than to discipline anti-social – or deviant – behaviour. In any case, to get blindsided by the ‘reality’ or otherwise of mental illness can only take us away from the much richer possibilities that patient case files can provide. Specifically, what the files at Mathari contain are narratives of patients’ lives before they got to the hospital; in other words, before they became patients. These histories are produced within the hospital, but they take the reader outside its gates as well and they permit an approach that need not necessarily take insanity and its treatment as the only, or even the primary, analytical concern. As for social control, what we see when we get outside the hospital are the various intricate and idiosyncratic ways in which control – and resistance to it – played out. Such a variant of social control was heterodox, mostly informal and in lively tension with the agency and subjectivity of the individual concerned. There was no crude or totalising ‘shutting away’ of Kenya’s white insane, in other words. Neither the colonial state nor the European community was powerful or decisive enough for that.

A colonial demise? Unsurprisingly perhaps, the historiography of late colonial Kenya has been dominated by the colony’s conflicted, violent, decolonisation.59 The bloody violence of Mau Mau led historians inevitably to its roots and repercussions. In writing of Mau Mau, however, historians have most often written from political and economic perspectives, seeking to unravel the complicated ties between society and state, capital and class and between local, ethnic and national identities.60 The nature of settler society during this late-colonial period, meanwhile, has suffered from comparative neglect. While the majority of historical research into the Europeans in Kenya has focused on the period before 1939, moreover, of these only Kennedy’s study took as its principal concern the social and cultural dimensions of that community. Work on the late colonial period, by contrast, has focused in the main on the ‘high’ politics of constitutional reform, the transfer of settled land and the British endeavour to preserve once-imperial interests in a new post-imperial age.61 That European society during this late colonial period has been underresearched is all the more surprising considering that Europeans in Kenya at this time experienced such profound and unexpected change. Both in profile and in size, the community was transformed; those who went to Kenya after 1939 enjoyed neither the lustre of a civilising [ 14 ]

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mission nor the picturesque appeal of an English aristocracy transplanted to the African wilds. Few Europeans during this late colonial period, moreover, had the sensibility to treat Africans with either the haughty disdain or paternalistic affection that together typified the master–servant ideal. While some provoked alarm by the intimacy of their relations with Africans, others caused consternation by their failure to keep fear and loathing within designated bounds. As the size of the European population expanded, moreover, so did the numbers of those from beyond that gentlemanly background of the publicschool educated ‘men-of-the-officer-class’. Of those that were, many were themselves colonial refugees, migrants from India and elsewhere, hoping to capture something of the colonial lifestyle to which they had grown, if anything, too well accustomed. To these were added the refugees of another kind – men and women from across Europe and beyond who went to Kenya not with coherent plans to ‘build a country’ but to escape the hardships of their recent past.62 Increasing numbers of European women in Kenya, meanwhile, meant that the space for men to behave with cavalier indiscretion diminished at the same time as the behaviour of white women became the object of heightened concern. Kenya in 1945 was still described as a ‘young’ country but European settlement was by then half a century old. Until this point, the twintrack policy of preventing ‘undesirables’ from entering the colony while removing those already there had proved effective. After 1945, the formula ceased to provide the panacea that previously it had. The granting to immigrants of visitors’ permits prior to full residential status still provided authorities with a probationary mechanism of social control but its primary purpose was to limit Asian, not European, immigration.63 Increasing the numbers of Europeans coming into Kenya, it was hoped, would tilt the demographic balance of power. But if Kenya was to be a white man’s country, then the definition of a white man would need to be relaxed: as controls over the financial resources of European immigrants to Kenya were loosened, the first principal of the colony – that only the right kind of settler would be permitted access – came finally to an end.64 A second post-war settlement scheme brought 300 new white settlers to Kenya, but as stateassisted tenants, not pioneers.65 Even East German peasants were deemed acceptable: refugees from the new Cold War.66 Repatriation, meanwhile, once the principal means for ridding the colony of its deviant Europeans, no longer offered a viable recourse. Not only had the preparedness of British governments to accept undesirables from their colonies expired; so too had the validity of the idea that responsibility for those ‘Kenya-born’ could reside anywhere but in the land of their birth. [ 15 ]

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As European society became more diverse in Kenya, of equal significance in the late colonial period was the intensified need for the idealised archetype of ‘the European’ to be discursively deployed. As the Mau Mau emergency put Kenya under the spotlight of world attention, the necessity to the colony’s Europeans – its settlers especially – of an idealised public image became starkly apparent. Propaganda and public relations campaigns, intended to rebut hostile criticism abroad and make moderates of insurrectionists at home, hammered into a fine refrain a sanitised historical narrative of progress and development. It was a narrative, moreover, that turned on the continuing ability of Europeans to take the lead. Partnership was the mantra but only white Kenyans, it was suggested, had the technical skill, the enterprise and, most importantly, the character, to secure prosperity for all. To dispel the impression of settlers as anachronistic or oppressive, the symbolic ‘European’ was refurbished and updated: no longer ‘great white hunters’ but dauntless combatants of African terror in the forest and pious custodians of the imperial flame in their homes. The dramatic acceleration of international tourism, at the same time, gave Kenya Colony mass appeal. Thus, the paradox: precisely when settler society in Kenya began to fracture, the image of settler society – as cohesive, confident and picturesque – became enduringly entrenched. The book is comprised of six substantive chapters. The first two are broadly discursive: Chapter 1 considers perceptions of mental illness among Europeans in Kenya; Chapter 2 considers deviance. To be deviant in the settler-colony was to subvert white prestige but deviance was engaged intellectually principally through a language of mental aberration. While ideas around European degeneration are generally accepted to have fallen into abeyance by the outbreak of the Second World War, concern over deviant European behaviour did not let up; indeed, it intensified after 1939. Until that point the problem that both the indigent and the insane presented to white prestige had been for the most part resolved, via complementary tactics of discursive contrivance and social control. Precisely because the idea of ‘the European’ conferred such limited subjective possibility, however, all sorts of situations and behaviours had the potential to be construed as transgressive. From this regard, a significant advantage of psychiatric records is that they provide insight into the experiences of people who, so colonial ideologies would have us believe, simply were not there. The remainder of the book deals directly with the case files of Kenya’s white insane. Chapter 3 is devoted to a consideration of the problems and possibilities inherent in writing from these files and surveys [ 16 ]

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some of their recursive themes. While quite predictable phenomena emerge – poverty, violence, conflicted feelings towards both Africa and Africans – their configuration is seldom straightforward. The text that is the patient case file, I argue, demands a method of reading that is as empathic as it is analytical. The narratives that they afford are fractured and fragmented; what is frequently most compelling are their silences and gaps.67 These stories must inevitably raise questions, therefore, not only of the nature of settler society itself but also of the methods deployed to address it. By shifting the focus from the hospital to the home, Chapter 4 exposes the fragility of one of the most vital components of settler-colonial ideology: the European family. In Kenya, the settler homestead, as symbol for the insinuation of Europe into Africa, was an icon of settler culture. It was also inherently unstable. If Frantz Fanon was right to posit the family and the nation as analogous, then the myth of the settler nation can only be confounded by the reality of the embattled settler home.68 When families frayed or fell apart, moreover, Europeans found themselves dangerously exposed. While isolation has commonly been associated with the hardships of the frontier, what the evidence from colonial Kenya shows is the mental cost of isolation within an established white society. Chapter 5 considers sex. The important point here is less that transgressive sex was disciplined by psychiatric confinement but that psychiatric discourse served to make comprehensible that which could not be otherwise entertained. Thus, the loose woman became the psychopath: diagnosis made transgression safe. To be sure, it was not only women whose sexual behaviour offended colonial sensibilities but the ways in which sexual transgression linked to mental illness reflected the particular value – and the danger – of the white female body. Men who had sex with Africans also caused problems but, unlike women,they had opportunities to keep transgressions covered up. European women suspected of endangering the colony through their sexual behaviour, moreover, were liable to face forms of social sanction that contributed directly to their mental distress. Chapter 6 begins to think through the relationship between colonial discourse and the voices of Kenya’s white insane themselves. It does so by focusing exclusively on those judged to be deluded. Delusional content, I suggest, can be read quite plainly for social meaning; the point is less that in derangement we find a distortion of reality but, rather, that the content of psychosis can illuminate much about reality that might otherwise remain obscured. A concluding chapter reconsiders the connection between madness and marginality as Kenya Colony entered its final phase. [ 17 ]

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Notes   1 J. R. Gregory, Under the Sun: A Memoir of Dr. R. W. Burkitt of Kenya (Nairobi: The English Press, 1951).   2 Nancy Stepan, ‘Biology and Degeneration: Races and Proper Places’, in J. E. Chamberlin and Sander Gilman (eds), Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Dane Kennedy, ‘The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climatic Anxieties in the Colonial Tropics’, in J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester: Manchester University Press,1990); Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); D. N. Livingstone, ‘Tropical Climate and Moral Hygiene: The Anatomy of a Victorian Debate’, The British Journal For The History of Science, 32: 1 (1999); Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2005), pp. 13, 73, 80–2; Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 130–57.   3 Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 109–28.   4 Gregory, Under the Sun, p. 9.   5 Ibid., p. 32.   6 Elizabeth Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 19.   7 See, for an incisive discussion, Stephen Ellis, Season of Rains: Africa in the World (London: Hurst, 2011), p. 35.   8 Gregory, Under the Sun, p. 36. For Burkitt’s views on closer settlement, see R. W. Burkitt, ‘The Medical Aspect of Closer Settlement of Europeans in the Kenya Highlands’, Kenya and East African Medical Journal, 6 (1929–30), p. 188.   9 Gregory, Under the Sun, p. 91. 10 Ibid., p. 74. In an interview with the East African Standard, Burkitt argued that women who bob their hair were ‘branding themselves with a mark of the beast’. ‘The business of women in life’, he went on, ‘was to be under authority to man.’ East African Standard, 15 May 1926, p. 7. 11 Apart from Gregory’s memoir, Burkitt also features in Elspeth Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun: My Kenya (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985), pp. 3–4; Huxley, Nine Faces of Kenya (London: Collins Harvill, 1990), pp. 89–91; Arnold Curtis (ed.), Pioneers’ Scrapbook: Reminiscences of Kenya, 1890–1968 (London: Evans Bros, 1980), pp. 22, 67, 124; Errol Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers (London: Heinemann, 1985), pp. 174, 184–5, 199–200; C. S. Nicholls, Red Strangers: The White Tribe of Kenya (London: Timerwell, 2005), pp. 84–5, 146. 12 Gregory, Under the Sun, p. 11. 13 The concept of the ‘incorporated wife’ is defined by Hillary Callan as a condition of wifehood by which the social character ascribed to a woman is an intimate function of her husband’s occupational identity and character. Hillary Callan, ‘Introduction’, in Hillary Callan and Shirley Ardener (eds), The Incorporated Wife (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 1. 14 Gregory, Under the Sun, p. 18. 15 Ibid., p. 40. 16 Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 20. 17 Examples include Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and the African Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995); Gail C. Beuschel, ‘Shutting Africans Away: Race and Social Order in Colonial Kenya’ (PhD Thesis, University of London,

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2002); Sloan Mahone, ‘The Psychology of Rebellion: Colonial Medical Responses to Dissent in British East Africa’, Journal of African History, 47: 2 (2006); Sloan Mahone, ‘East African Psychiatry and the Practical Problems of Empire’, in Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (eds), Psychiatry and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). On tourism, see John Akama, ‘The Evolution of Tourism in Kenya’, The Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 7: 1 (1999); Will Jackson, ‘White Man’s Country: Kenya Colony and the Making of a Myth’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 5: 2 (2011). David Arnold, ‘European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 7 (1979); Hilary Beckles, ‘“Black Men in White Skins”: the Formation of a White Proletariat in West Indian Slave Society’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 15: 1 (1986); Beckles, ‘Black Over White: The “Poor White” Problem in Barbados Slave Society’, Immigrants and Minorities, 7: 1 (1988); Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31: 1 (1989); Robert Morrell (ed.), White but Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa, 1880–1940 (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 1992); Gregor Muller, Colonial Cambodia’s ‘Bad Frenchmen’: The Rise of French Rule and the Life of Thomas Caraman, 1840–97 (London: Routledge, 2006); Harald Fischer-Tiné, Low and Licentious Europeans: Race, Class and ‘White Subalternity’ in Colonial India (New Delhi: Black Swan, 2009); Satoshi Mizutani, The Meaning of White: Race, Class and the Domiciled Community in British India, 1858–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). But see: Brett Shadle, ‘Poor Whites, Jewganda, and Raving Dutchmen: Civilization and Whiteness in Early Colonial Kenya’ (paper delivered at African Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington DC, November 2011). To name just the most recent: Edward Paice, Lost Lion of Empire: the Life of Cape to Cairo Grogan, 1876–1976 (London: HarperCollins, 2001); C. S. Nicholls, Elspeth Huxley: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002); Sara Wheeler, Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton (London: Cape, 2006); Frances Osborne, The Bolter: Idina Sackville (London: Virago, 2008); Paul Spicer, The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice, Countess de Janze (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010); Mark Seal, Wildflower: The Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Murder of Joan Root (London: Phoenix, 2010). On the impact of postcolonial theory on imperial history see Dane Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Postcolonial Theory Revisited’, in Graham Huggan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). On the new imperial history see Stephen Howe, ‘Introduction’, in Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader (London: Routledge, 2010). Of the latter, see Kuki Gallman, I Dreamed of Africa (London: Viking, 1991); Natasha Illumberg, Tea on the Blue Sofa: Whispers of Love and Longing from Africa (London: Fourth Estate, 2004); Corinne Hoffman, I Married a Masai (London: Bliss Books, 2007). Kenya gained its independence in 1963. On ideologies of racial difference as the epistemic basis for colonial rule see Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 114–19; Abdul R. JanMohamed, ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’, Critical Inquiry, 12: 1 (1985). Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons in Late Imperial Families (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 10; Catherine Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 49–50. Terence Ranger, ‘Europeans in Black Africa’, Journal of World History, 9: 2 (1998). A point also addressed by Elizabeth Buettner in her Empire Families, p. 255. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). For a notable exception, see Nicholas Thomas and Richard Eves, Bad Colonists:

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30 31 32

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33 34 35

36

37

38 39

40 41 42

The South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999). Kennedy, Islands of White, pp. 148–67. Ibid., p. 43; Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson, ‘Settler Colonialism: A Concept and its Uses’, in Elkins and Pederson (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 9. Michael Redley, ‘The Politics of a Predicament: The White Community in Kenya, 1918–1932’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1976), p. 2. W. M. Ross, Kenya From Within (London: Allen & Unwin, 1924), p. 120. John Lonsdale, ‘Kenya: Home County and African Frontier’, in Robert Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons Over the Seas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 87. See, for example, Megan Vaughan, ‘Idioms of Madness: Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the Colonial Period’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 9: 2 (1983), p. 122; McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, pp. 14, 22–3; Richard Keller, ‘Madness and Colonization: Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800–1962’, Journal of Social History, 35: 2 (2001), p. 298. To date, the only work to examine in depth the history of mental illness among a colonising population remains Waltraud Ernst’s study of the European insane in British India. Ernst, Mad Tales From The Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800–1858 (London: Routledge, 1991). Megan Vaughan, ‘Introduction’ in Vaughan and Mahone, Psychiatry and Empire, p. 3. When foregrounding the recipients of psychiatric care, however, historians have been able to write more intimately of the patient experience. For biographical accounts see Shula Marks (ed.), Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (London: Women’s Press, 1987); Robert R. Edgar and Hillary Sapire, African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-century South African Prophet (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000); Jonathan Sadowsky, ‘The Confinements of Isaac O.: A Case of “Acute Mania” in Colonial Nigeria’, History of Psychiatry, 7: 25 (1996). For other accounts that foreground the patient experience, see Ernst, Mad Tales From The Raj, pp. 87–98; Julie Parle, States of Mind: Searching for Mental Health in Natal and Zululand (Scottsville, RSA: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007); Lynette Jackson, Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Racial Order in Colonial Zimbabwe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Janice Chesters, ‘A Horror of the Asylum or of the Home: Women’s Stories, 1880–1910’, in Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (eds), ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003); Tiffany Jones, Psychiatry, Mental Institutions, and the Mad in Apartheid South Africa (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 58–85. Richard Dyer, White (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 4 Examples include: Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (London: Routledge, 1965); E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Kenya Peasantry, 1888–1922’, East African Journal, 5: 2 (1972); Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness (Harlow: Longman, 1982); Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). For a useful overview, see Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Abingdon: Routledge 1998). Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). See also J. M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). See, for example, the essays collected in Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) and Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

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introduction 43 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003); Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the Wider World, 1600–1850 (London: Pimlico, 2003), and Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (London: Allen Lane, 2003). For the latest contribution to stress the ‘ordinary people’ of the British Empire, see Lanver Mak, The British in Egypt: Community, Crime and Crises, 1882–1922 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). 44 Colley, Captives, pp. 15–19. 45 Bickers, Empire Made Me, pp. 10–11. 46 Ibid., pp. 240. 47 Ibid., p. 36. 48 Richard Drayton, ‘Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46: 3 (2011), p. 680. 49 Or, as Paul Gilroy had it, imperial administration was ‘necessarily a violent, dirty and immoral business’. Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 102. 50 Recent additions to the imperial canon that emphasise the violence of empire include Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London: Verso, 2011). On Kenya, see David M. Anderson, ‘Punishment, Race and the ‘Raw Native’: Settler Society and Kenya’s Flogging Scandals, 1895–1930’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37: 3 (2011), and Brett Shadle, ‘Settlers, Africans and Inter-Personal Violence in Kenya’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 45: 1 (2012), pp. 57–80. On violence in the literary imagination, see Laura E. Franey, Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing on Africa, 1855–1902 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). 51 Arnold, ‘European Orphans’; Arnold, ‘White Colonisation and Labour in NineteenthCentury India’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 10: 2 (1983); Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories’; John G. Butcher, The British in Malaya: 1880–1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial SouthEast Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1979), pp. 93–6; Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class in the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies, and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), pp. 123–43; Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races: Defining “Europeans” in Late Colonial India’, Women’s History Review, 9: 2 (2000). More recent additions to this literature include Harald Fischer-Tiné and Susanne Gehrmann (eds), Empires and Boundaries: Rethinking Race, Class and Gender in Colonial Settings (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009) and Harald Fischer-Tiné and Ashwini Tambe (eds), The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 52 Notably, biographically-oriented imperial histories have tended towards a transnational framework. See, for example, David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across The British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For more recent work in this vein, see Sameetah Agha and Elizabeth Kolsky (eds), Fringes of Empire: People, Places and Spaces in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 53 Colley, Captives, p. 15. 54 Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of my Autobiography, 1949–1962 (London: Harper Collins, 1997), p. 145. 55 Ranajit Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, Critical Inquiry, 23: 3 (1997), pp. 487–9. 56 Frederick Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History’, The American Historical Review, 99: 5 (1994), p. 1542. 57 Key texts in the ‘anti-psychiatry’ vein are R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study of Sanity and Madness (London: Tavistock, 1960); Thomas Szasz, The

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59 60

61

62

63 64 65 66 67 68

Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Hoeber-Harper,1961); Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1965); Thomas J. Scheff, Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Theory (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966) and David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971). For a history that defends psychiatry against its critics, see Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry from the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: Wiley, 1997). Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society, 14: 2 (1985); Kerry Davies, ‘“Silent and Censured Travellers”?: Patients’ Narratives and Patients’ Voices: Perspectives on the History of Mental Illness Since 1948’, Social History of Medicine, 14: 2 (2001); Jones, Psychiatry, Mental Institutions, and the Mad, pp. 60–2. W. R. Ochieng and B. A. Ogot (eds), Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940–93 (London: James Currey, 1995). Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau (London: James Currey, 1987); Frank Furedi, The Mau Mau War in Perspective (London: James Currey, 1989); Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Book Two: Violence and Ethnicity (London: James Currey, 1992); Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). George Bennett and Alison Smith, ‘Kenya: From “White Man’s Country” to Kenyatta’s State, 1945–1963’, in Alison Smith and David Low, History of East Africa, Volume III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 109–56; Gary Wasserman, Politics of Decolonization: Kenya Europeans and the Land Issue, 1960–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). It is worth noting at this juncture Lorenzo Verancini’s suggestion that refugees can be seen as occupying the opposite end of a spectrum of possibilities, ranging between a move that can be considered entirely volitional – the settlers’ – and a displacement that is premised on an absolute lack of choice. Verancini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.  4. Evans, Law and Disorder, p. 208. Rhodes House (hereafter RH): Mss. Afr. s. 596, Box 46, File 4, Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Immigration Sub-Committee of the Elector’s Union, Nairobi Branch, 13 October 1950. Lonsdale, ‘Home County’, p. 99. RH: Mss. Afr. s. 596, Box 46, Files 4–5, Electors Union, Immigration Sub-Committee papers, 1947–1953. For an eloquent discussion of this point, see Diana Gittins, ‘Silences: The Case of a Psychiatric Hospital’, in Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson (eds), Narrative and Genre: Contexts and Types of Communication (London: Routledge, 1997). Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), pp. 141–2.

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Approaching madness: deviant psychology in Kenya Colony

If it is plausible to contend that by 1939 Kenya had come to be known around the world as a place of sun-soaked panoramas, tireless settlerfarmers and the romance of safari, that is not to say that less salubrious or triumphalist ideas were not also in circulation. In a discussion of white autobiographical writing in the colony, the literary scholar Gillian Whitlock compared the evocative prose of Karen Blixen with the much more dispiriting account of Kenya provided by Alyse Simpson, whose memoir, The Land that Never Was, appeared, like Blixen’s Out of Africa, in 1937. Far from being contradictory, Whitlock identified the dystopia invoked in Simpson’s book as being an indissoluble part of Blixen’s pastoral idyll. Neither façade was more authentic or false than the other. Instead, Whitlock argued, they might better be considered as two oppositional elements of the same discursive field. The Land that Never Was, according to Whitlock, should rightfully be seen as the foil to Out of Africa: antithetical to Blixen’s work but complementary also, intended as an antidote to the dominant idea of Kenya prevalent at the time, yet serving to reiterate it nonetheless, albeit in inverted form.1 Whitlock’s argument alerts us to the dangers in seeking to work outside discursive convention. The endeavour to locate Europeans in Kenya, unlike those to whom we are accustomed, may well result in our finding people and experiences that are in fact well within the parameters of colonial common sense. Yet the dialectic relation that Whitlock identifies between the utopian and dystopian elements within colonial discourse reminds us that contained within every vindication of settler ideology was the possibility of its denial. Beside the association of Kenya Colony with emotional uplift and harmonious well-being was another set of ideas that linked Kenya (or, more commonly, ‘Africa’) with feelings of depression and discontent. It was a discursive stream that continued throughout the colonial period. [ 23 ]

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Encompassing travel writing, memoir and fiction, as well as medical science, it recycled many older ideas of Africa as a ‘white man’s grave’ or a ‘heart of darkness’. These ideas did not remain constant, however, but were reconfigured and reworked – updated, as it were, for the twentieth century and settlement. While sanity and madness were at the heart of this discourse, ‘Africa-as-dystopia’ was as much to do with European deviance as it was with the debilitating or disorientating effects of Africa itself. Working our way through these ideas, we see that contemporary writing on European madness in Kenya can be understood on two distinct levels, suggestive both of the sociology of settler-colonialism and of the lived experience of Europeans themselves. This chapter approaches the subject of mental illness in Kenya Colony through the prism of contemporary ‘white writing’. Doing so, I argue, provides the necessary first steps for thinking through how we might usefully approach the lives of those Europeans judged to be insane.

Africa as a site of madness By the time that Kenya was opened for settlement in the early twentieth century, Africa was firmly established in the European mind as a place where strength was sapped and sanity undone. Since antiquity, the continent had exerted a powerful hold on the European imagination. As a world unknown, sighted from aboard ship but concealed beyond the shore, by the beginning of the nineteenth century Africa had come to exist less as a continental land mass than as a fantasy dreamscape of myth and legend, inhabited by extravagant profusions of nature and monstrous aberrations of the human form.2 More prosaically, until the medical advances of the mid-nineteenth century Europeans who ventured into equatorial Africa were liable to encounter disease, disaster and, often fairly quickly, death. The jungle and the swamp became its defining tropes.3 That the African environment – its heat, humidity, its flora and fauna – was unfamiliar to travellers only added to the sensation that Europeans in Africa were out of their rightful place. In explorer literature, the heroism of the central protagonist was shot through with graphic references to morbidity, nausea and fever while missionaries derived their saintly self-image at least in part from the ‘heathen rituals, idolatry and human sacrifice’ that they imputed to African tribes.4 As Africa was ‘opened up’ at the end of the nineteenth century its cultural production proliferated and by the time the continent’s partition was complete, the binary opposition between European sanity and African madness was firmly established.5 The rise of the popular press, at the same time, and the dramatic acceleration of commodity culture, gave mythic Africa unprecedented popular [ 24 ]

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6

appeal. The Christian endeavour to redeem the continent from slavery and superstition, meanwhile, only reinforced the association of Africa with darkness and degradation.7 By the beginning of the twentieth century, ideas connecting tropical Africa with European illness had hardened into a powerful cultural construct. Scientific racism divided humanity into races characterised by energy, expansiveness and virility on the one hand and by weakness, degeneracy and regression on the other.8 While the migration of Europeans into the wider world appeared to support the notion of their naturally expansive, enterprising spirit, their settlement in new and alien environments raised the troubling prospect that the very aptitudes that had brought them there might now be under threat. The bracing climate of northern Europe, it was contended, bred people endowed with those vital characteristics – energy, industry, restlessness – from which empires might arise. The tropics, by contrast, were lush and languorous and their inhabitants indolent and weak. The problem of imperial expansion, in short, was that it seemed to jeopardise those very qualities that had made the British people a colonising race. Simply for Europeans to have left Europe was transgression of a sort. While the symbolic significance of the enervated European was particular to the colonial domain, moreover, it formed nevertheless part of a wider imperial strain of doubt as teleological visions of progress were juxtaposed with nightmare scenarios of subversion and collapse. The criminal classes of Europe, it was feared, would breed faster than the virtuous and upstanding; the black man would overpower the white. These were prohibited possibilities, to be sure, ruled out by the assumptions of an ineffably self-confident imperial culture, but that is not to say that they were comprehensively suppressed and they can be discerned through much fin-de-siècle discussion concerning not only the fate of Britons in the extra-European world but also the future prospects for their empire; indeed, the very nature and direction of history itself.9 It was at this peculiar ‘high imperial’ moment that anxieties over the health of Europeans in Africa became most pronounced. The tropical world had long been associated with Europeans’ psychic and bodily deterioration; the British in India, for example, had, throughout the nineteenth century, felt themselves surrounded by a hostile and debilitating natural environment.10 In the African context, however, the paradox of medical and technological advance meant that, because Europeans were now entering the continent in considerable numbers, the association of Africa with illness – and mental illness in particular – far from declining, in fact became more entrenched.11 The so-called ‘partition’ brought Africa into the colonial domain; the [ 25 ]

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establishment of a Chartered Company administration in Rhodesia in 1889 (Rhodesia was to be renamed Southern Rhodesia in 1901) and a Protectorate in British East Africa in 1895 created embryonic settler states. As the Uganda Railway opened ‘British East’ for settlement, attention fixed on the health or otherwise of those pioneering British settlers and state officials charged with making a ‘white man’s country’ from the Kikuyu highlands north of Nairobi and the expansive Rift Valley to the west. Significantly, a region that had previously been traversed only by ‘maverick’ explorers was now to be colonised by British civilians. The explorer, we should stress, was, by definition, extra­ordinary: an amalgam of British fortitude and valour, but – as a heroic figure – exceptional nonetheless.12 Settlers and officials, by contrast, were representative. Ambassadors for their race and nation, they were the human stock on which a viable colonial future would depend, emissaries for civilisation and the building blocks from which a new African empire would be forged. Europeans unwilling or unable to live up to such exacting standards posed an insuperable problem for colonial ideologies that based the rationality for conquest on the putative superiority of the colonising race. From the beginning of white settlement in Kenya right through to its demise, degeneration served as the watchword for Europeans whose racial identity was imperilled or in doubt.13 While degeneration was commonly attributed to the effects of the natural environment, its salience in the settler-colonial context was principally to do with the protection of boundaries that separated colonisers from colonised. To degenerate was to transgress these boundaries. Although, in a narrow, medical sense, the term referenced the failure of the European ­constitution to acclimatise to foreign surrounds, in its wider, social sense degeneration was capacious enough a concept to encompass not only bodily weakness but also material privation, mental aberration and ‘moral decay’.14 One of the principal expressions of this idea was that of the European who lost his racial bearings or ‘went native’ in colonial surrounds. In the literary realm, there is no better or more influential depiction of this than that provided by Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella, Heart of Darkness. While much discussion has focused on whether Conrad sought to critique or endorse British imperialism (and whether, indeed, his image of Africa and Africans should rightly be seen as racist), his book might equally be considered in terms of sanity and its absence.15 To cultural anthropologists Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, the significance of Heart of Darkness was primarily its psychological orientation. The journey into Africa, they suggested, had become the journey into the self.16 In this regard, the horror that Kurtz, the central [ 26 ]

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protagonist, comes to glimpse is the knowledge of a universal kinship that dissolves the boundary lines separating other from self. In the realisation of his full human potential, madness threatens as the colonial European struggles to reconcile knowledge of his own savagery with the colonial projection of it ‘out there’ onto savage nature and natives beyond. While to contemporaries the figure of the degenerate signalled racial transgression, what Conrad intimated was its subjective experience.What the ‘degenerate’ came to discover was the very thing that colonial cultures formidably debarred: the possibility of a common humanity that yoked together citizens with subjects, colonisers with colonised. For an ideology and an enterprise founded on difference, the prospect of its dissolution was anathema and it informed much subsequent writing in the psychological vein.17

Colonial complaints From the early years of the twentieth century through to the later 1930s, tropical neurasthenia was the medical term most frequently deployed to describe various kinds of mental illness experienced by Europeans in the colonial world. Although its symptoms were various, tropical neurasthenia principally involved a state of nervous malfunction resulting in excessive irritability and abnormal fatigue.18 As a diagnosis, it was both vague and all-inclusive, reducible to catch-all euphemisms such as ‘jungle madness’ or ‘tropical ennui’ while sufficiently versatile to include just about anything that deviated from the self-restraint and calm control that racial ideologies imputed to the colonial European.19 Thus, an individual was liable to be judged neurasthenic if he experienced not only irritability or a lack of energy but also depression, lack of concentration, memory loss and ‘fits of passion’ as well as a veritable cornucopia of secondary symptoms.20 In one important sense, tropical neurasthenia functioned to confirm the racial category that ‘the European’ comprised. Only Europeans suffered from the condition: merely to be susceptible, therefore, was to have one’s whiteness underscored. Neurasthenia, in this respect at least, was a cautionary tale: in the act of self-protection, Europeans remembered that they were white. Only by observing the necessary prophylactic regime, it was suggested, could Europeans maintain their robust good health, and thus their racial identity, in colonial domains.21 Customs and conventions were to be meticulously observed, excitement and excess avoided.22 Alcohol should be consumed only in moderation, only at certain times of the day and only in (good) company.23 Holidays to the coast – ‘getting off the altitude’ as the practice was known – were believed to restore tired or fractured nerves. Regular [ 27 ]

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return visits to Britain were likewise recommended.24 The wearing of protective clothing and the careful design of housing ensured defence against the actinic rays of the equatorial sun.25 While neurasthenia has most often been associated with the tropical climate, it is important to note that doctors did not assume its causal primacy but countenanced instead a range of factors to explain why Europeans in Africa suffered mental distress.26 At a meeting of the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 1926, for example, various contending theories were put forward. One doctor saw the reasons for tropical neurasthenia as social first of all: failure and frustration were its principal causes, he argued, and the irritants of the tropics (the sun, the heat, the dust, the light) merely aggravating factors.27 Another member saw tropical neurasthenia as essentially a matter of nostalgia or home-sickness. The longer one stayed away from home, the worse the symptoms became. Another argued for the primacy of purpose: explorers such as David Livingstone had not suffered neurasthenia, it was argued, so consumed had they been with the pursuit of geographical knowledge – the ‘holy quest’ (missionaries were immune because only they managed to repress their homing instincts through religious vocation and altruistic good works). Without that calling, it was contended, susceptibility to neurasthenia was bound to increase.28 Another argued that neurasthenia was brought on by irritating Africans as much as it was by material discomfort or a stultifying climate.29 The furor Africanus, as Charles Trench recalled, could overcome the mildest European.30 Most forceful of all was the doctor who combined these various stress factors into a single compound of colonial hard-living. In what is now a well-cited speech, Hugh Stannus, erstwhile medical officer to the King’s African Rifles in Central Africa, listed some of the ‘noxious stimuli’ likely to bedevil the white man in the continent: He is exiled from home; often separated from his family; generally unable to make ends meet for some reason or other; suffering, in many cases, loneliness and lack of congenial society; envious of others; disappointed over promotion; with ambition thwarted. Living amidst a native population causes him annoyance at every turn because he has never troubled to understand its language and its psychology. From early morn till dewy eve he is in a state of unrest – ants at breakfast, flies at lunch, and termites for dinner, with a new species of moth every evening in his coffee. Beset all day by a sodden heat, whence there is no escape, and the unceasing attentions of the voracious insect world, he is driven to bed by his lamp being extinguished by the hordes which fly by night, only to be kept awake by the reiterated cry of the brain-fever bird or the local chorus of frogs. Never at rest! Always an on-guardedness!31

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For Stannus, the combined effects of discomfort, isolation and restless frustration resulted in a condition defined above all by fear. Neurasthenia, according to this view, entailed a failure to manage emotionally the difficulties attendant on life at the frontier. What was unique about the colonial context was that fear – the perpetual ‘on-guardedness’ – prevented successful coping. For those concerned with Europeans’ mental health, the point is clear: particular and profound psychological tendencies were liable to develop if hardships were not offset. In the first instance, it was material privation that was liable to test the ‘mettle’ of expatriate Europeans. Michael Blundell, later to become a prominent settler politician, described typical living conditions when he arrived in the Kipkarren valley in the 1920s: Everyone lived on a shoestring … devoting every spare shilling to the making of their farms. Even the construction engineer, a man responsible for the [railway] line from Eldoret to Kampala, lived in the poorest of conditions. He lived in a round African mud and wattle hut with loose thatch dumped on the roof, high walls and a beaten earth floor. He lay groaning and sweating on a camp bed at one side of the room, recovering from a bad go of malaria. A hurricane lamp with the glass covered in smoke hung from a roof pole. One small rickety table and a cheap 3 shilling Nubian chair on which I sat were the only furniture. Animal skins were spread on the floor.32

The scenario that Blundell describes is notable for several reasons. That the man he describes was a construction engineer, first of all, alerts us to the fact that privation in Kenya was not only rural – a phenomenon of the farms. There were urban, working whites in Kenya too. Second, it is important to note that material deprivation is indicated here by the adoption of African living conditions: poverty, in other words, could lead to a loss of racial integrity – at least, that is, in the eyes of other Europeans. Most important is that, although an image of privation, this is an image of illness as well. There is no indication here that the man is mentally unwell but the depiction is suggestive nevertheless of the psychological and emotional, as well as the material, dimensions of economic distress. Time and again in European writing of Kenya we encounter anecdotal evidence of men laid low by the difficult conditions of the early colonial environment.33 John Ainsworth, Provincial Commissioner for Nyanza Province, described his headquarters at Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria: By the time I had become more or less conversant with matters at Kisumu I was forced to the conclusion that most of the officers stationed

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there had developed what I termed a sort of ‘fear complex’ due to an obsession in connection with the climate, influenced no doubt by the general atmosphere of apathetic indifference. Certainly there had been a good deal of sickness at times, and some deaths. A few days before our arrival an Assistant District Commissioner had committed suicide in the Residency, where he had been given temporary accommodation. A few weeks later an assistant Surgeon shot himself, and some time later the Treasury Officer also committed suicide. Generally speaking, Kisumu was not, at this time, a place for a melancholy man.34

The ‘fear complex’, as Ainsworth portrayed it, resulted from a confluence of prevailing colonial discourse – the idea that the tropical climate was dangerous for Europeans – and a local ‘atmosphere’ emanating from the tropics themselves. Swampy and malarial, conditions at the coast were no better than at the lake. Men stationed there in the 1920s, Trench recounted, would have been shocked to see the places where they had ‘sweated, shivered and vomited with malaria’ later populated by package tourists from Europe.35 Charles Atkins, recruited to the colonial service in 1930, was posted to Kipini, north of Mombasa. Each evening, as he took his daily stroll, Atkins passed the graves of his predecessors, at least one of whom had killed himself, their monuments reminders of the morbidity and misery that colonial administration not infrequently entailed.36 ‘Of a variety of very able men under whom or with whom I served in the early days,’ wrote another colonial official, ‘one died of drink, two died of black-water fever, a fourth was suspected of taking drugs [and] a fifth ended in a home for inebriates. A sixth committed suicide. A seventh suffered the pains of delirium tremens and was believed subsequently to have drowned himself in the Red Sea.’37 Another official, on arrival at his administrative station in the Northern Frontier District in 1927, discovered the man he had come to replace sleeping half in and half out of his hut, afraid that if he slept inside his roof would cave in, while if he slept outside his face would be eaten away by hyenas: So he decided to put his bed half in and half out so that he could jump either way in an emergency. The man before him had died of blackwater fever and the man before him had similarly had a nervous breakdown and had to be brought south by an Indian sub-assistant surgeon. The D.C. before him had committed suicide, it was a gloomy place to live in, and of course in those one man stations there was not a European within a three day march and no motor transport or wireless or anything like that.38

Passages such as these reiterate conventional ideas of Africa as the ‘white man’s grave’ and for bright young District Officers, the sickly [ 30 ]

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men they replaced and the graves they observed on their afternoon walks resonated with a deeper cultural association connecting Africa with torpor, lassitude and fetid degeneration.39 As part of a tropic tradition, they demand to be read with scepticism but as personal testimony they offer us valuable, if allusive, empirical evidence. Isolation, privation, danger and disease all eroded away at colonials’ mental health. Discourses of degeneration need to be taken seriously, therefore, not for what they explain but for what they describe. That Europeans in Kenya were likely to encounter hardships particular to the colonial context, however, is hardly surprising.Writing of hardship retrospectively, however, served nonetheless to stress the fortitude of those who had withstood its effects. As Warwick Anderson has argued, suffering neurasthenia became a ‘badge of honour’ – but it was in surviving as much as in suffering that honour was bestowed.40 Hinting at the misery of the colony’s early days, meanwhile, forced distance between the present and the past. Reiterating darkest Africa served to make it safe as well – so long as it was glimpsed from a position of surety and strength. In one sense, of course, the link between environment and politics appears straightforward: the effects of the tropical climate on European constitutions precluded whites from performing manual work. Kenya, as Lord Cranworth insisted, was ‘an overseers’ country’ only: whites were not to work themselves but to supervise the work of others.41 It would be simplistic, however, to see discourses surrounding the African environment and Europeans’ vulnerability to it as mere pretext for the exploitation of African land and labour. For Kennedy, discourses of degeneration served primarily to instil an adversarial relationship between white settlers and the African environment. This, in turn, made racial sense out of any fear or alienation that colonials might privately have felt while at the same time setting out a range of prophylactic measures designed to regulate white behaviour.42 Deviance, in other words, was brought within manageable bounds; discursively via medical diagnosis, and socially, via the regimen of self-protection that all responsible Europeans were expected to adopt. Kennedy’s argument is illuminating for its concession that Europeans in Kenya were likely to have experienced a ‘real and serious’ sense of alienation. The second part of the argument, however – that climatic fears served to regulate behaviour – may underestimate, first, the extent to which Europeans did not conform to behavioural norms and, second, the extent to which a perception of themselves as unwelcome sojourners in a hostile land was liable to precipitate psychic distress among colonial Europeans as often as it redoubled their resolution to prosper and persevere. Fear that the African ­environment might [ 31 ]

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be injurious to mental health could be itself disturbing while the act of self-protection was as likely to induce anxiety as it was to insure against it. Most importantly, regimes of health-protection, by operating to delineate the colonisers from the colonised, cast responsibility for keeping sane on the individual: the prestige imperative meant that mental illness was liable to imply the fault of the afflicted as much as it reiterated the stresses and strains of an alien environment.43 The effects of phenomena that Kennedy and others have correctly ­identified to be real – isolation, exhaustion, feelings of dislocation and vulnerability – were compounded by the constant social pressure that Europeans remain resistant to them. Added to the dangers that ‘Africa’ presented, in short, were the daily demands of remaining white.

States of ill-ease In Kenya, intimations of foreboding were frequently articulated through the trope of the dark and disorientating forest – perhaps the defining symbol of Africa in European thought.44 In his semi-fictional account of his time spent at the Rift Valley farm belonging to Galbraith Cole, Llewelyn Powys described the ‘weight and vastness’ of an alien environment – of its ‘cavernous blackness’ at night and the ‘scaly, python trunks’ of its trees.45 For others, the African landscape seemed to portend primeval savagery. ‘Night in the Dark Continent’, wrote Raymond Barberton, ‘is unlike the night in more civilised lands, for here lurk the dragons and ferocious beasts of the long ago.’46 ‘There was a sinister feeling’, recounted Marion Dobbs of the Chepalungu forest in the Rift Valley, ‘[and I] could well imagine such a spot as the scene of terrible pagan rites in the dim and distant past.’ Frequently, memoirists juxtaposed the savagery of the night with the reassuring familiarity of the colonial home within. Doubtless, such writing served the functional purpose of legitimating the basic political premise of the settler-colony: celebrating the sanctity of English homes undergirded the value and the virtue of bourgeois domesticity amid the pagan backwardness of ‘native tribes’.47 So long as one felt safe and secure, peril ‘out there’ was itself rendered picturesque. It is not enough to dismiss such writing as merely the reiteration of a tropic tradition, however, or as the necessary means to underlining the validity of the settler-colonial home. On lonely settler farms and with racial antipathy being constantly reinstilled, it is hardly surprising that, for many, the idea of Africa as hostile and unknown predominated over Kenya’s more vaunted reputation.Enchantment and nightmare were never far apart. Even among those able to keep their anxieties well concealed, life in Kenya frequently engendered [ 32 ]

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feelings not of euphoria but of estrangement, of being far from home and out of place. In many accounts such sentiments were articulated through the idea of Africa’s impending reclamation of itself and the swamping of white civilisation by the jungle at its edge.48 In imagining Africa as dark and dangerous, Europeans, it has been argued, projected their own destructive impulses into the ‘native’ land and the bodies of its inhabitants. The encroachment of Africa from this perspective thus represented a ‘return of the repressed’.49 While, on one level, this signified the demise of the European mind, on another it represented the disintegration of the wider political project of colonial rule. ‘Do you realise’, wrote Elspeth Huxley, ‘that quite soon we will be in the past? And what will there be to show that we have ever existed? We shall be swallowed up like everything else in a dreadful, sunny limbo.’50 For Powys, the fragility of ‘civilisation’ (and by extension, the ­political project of colonial rule) induced a particular psychological state: One had but to step out of the little garden of geraniums … to find oneself in the actual jungle, in dark overgrown places which for thousands of years had remained undisturbed. It was this abrupt juxtaposition of the tamed with the untamed, at one’s very doorstep so to speak, which affected the nerves with an ever-present feeling of insecurity. One felt that oneself and one’s handful of black servants were permitted a foothold here on sufferance only – that in a moment of time, for a mere whim, these stately, wicked, bearded trees might conspire with their long-clawed parasitical creepers to obliterate one’s handiwork and reassert their ancient domination.51

Powys’s ‘wicked, bearded trees’ and ‘long-clawed parasitical creepers’ refresh the tropic scenery of ‘darkest Africa’ but his concession towards an ‘ever-present feeling of insecurity’ hints at the possibility that the colonial situation did induce a particular consciousness of danger – and a sensitivity to the vulnerability of the white position. For those seeking to deconstruct a passage such as this, it is hardly necessary to consider whether discursive convention reflected any subjective reality. Seeking to get ‘under the skin’ of the colonial experience, however, demands that we take such insinuations seriously. Indeed, the idea that colonialism induced particular psychological tendencies or ‘affective states’ has become a central tenet not only of colonial discourse but of postcolonial criticism as well. Writing of the British in India in the nineteenth century, Ranajit Guha suggested that from the experience of ‘dominance without consent’ flowed an insuperable element of anxiety. Unlike fear, anxiety had no direct object but emanated from the isolation of the coloniser [ 33 ]

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from the environment and the people over which he claimed to rule. That isolation, of course, was vital to the preservation of European selfhood; more than anything else it was involvement in the lands and cultures of colonised peoples that was thought to precipitate a loss of racial self. Yet vital as it was for preserving racial integrity, isolation generated also a perennial element of alienation, as constant to the colonial experience as the compensatory shows of strength intended to suppress it.52 According to literary scholar Stephen Clingman, what Olive Schreiner’s classic novel, The Story of an African Farm, demonstrated above all was the insuperable estrangement of the white settler: ‘surrounded by a hostile – or at best, indifferent – universe’, Clingman wrote, ‘there is no sense in which the novel or the characters feel really at home in their setting’.53 It is an idea congruent with Kennedy’s metaphor of settler communities as embattled, defensiveminded ‘islands of white’. It echoes also J. M. Coetzee’s discussion of the settler’s striving to find a language in which he can speak and be spoken to by Africa. The settler-poet, Coetzee argued, ‘in the words he throws out to the landscape … is seeking a dialogue with Africa – a reciprocity that will allow him an identity better than that of visitor, stranger, transient’.54 As Guha had it, the inevitable shortfall in that reciprocity is manifest in a sense of the uncanny.55 ‘Settlers’, John Lonsdale writes, ‘could feel haunted by the same unseen dangers as Africans’. This, for Lonsdale, revealed their ‘moral anxiety’.56 The settler, Doris Lessing wrote, was in a state of exile, but from Africa, not Britain.57 Colonials, in short, might never feel at home, despite their repetitious claims to the contrary. While critics such as Lessing and Coetze have approached colonial subjectivities through the reading of literary texts, others have sought to address directly colonialism’s psychological repercussions. In his 1956 book, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, the French psychoanalyst, Octave Mannoni described what he termed a colonial ‘complex’. Colonialism, Mannoni argued, engendered dependency on the part of colonised peoples and domination on the part of colonial Europeans.58Five years later, Frantz Fanon, using analysis of psychiatric cases during the Algerian war of independence, described what he termed a ‘colonial pathology’, a distinctive psychic disorder at the heart of colonialism itself. ‘Because it is a systematic negation of the other person,’ Fanon wrote, ‘and a furious determination to deny [him] all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly, “In reality, who am I?”’ For colonised people, colonial subjugation wrought (according to Fanon) a mental pathology that was ‘the direct product of oppression’. During episodes of colonial violence especially, the pathology [ 34 ]

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of the colonial condition became apparent. ‘Here,’ Fanon wrote, ‘we discover the kernel of that hatred of self which is characteristic of racial conflicts in segregated societies.’59 While Fanon was concerned with the plight of the colonised, others have stressed the need to include the colonisers in any account of the psychological ramifications of what Mannoni termed ‘the colonial situation’.60 To counter the triumphalism characteristic of colonial narratives, Guha argued, we need to recognise the isolation that many Europeans felt as they looked upon worlds that they could scarcely comprehend.61 Ashis Nandy, in his book, The Intimate Enemy, made a similar point. To neglect that there are victims of empire among the colonisers as well as the colonised, Nandy argued, is to reiterate the association of power with the colonial self and powerlessness with its ‘other’. This, Nandy contended, is a view of history promoted by colonialism itself: Colonialism, according to this view, is the name of a political economy which ensures a one-way flow of benefits, the subjects being the perpetual losers in a zero-sum game and the rulers the beneficiaries … This view has a vested interest in denying that the colonizers are at least as much affected by the ideology of colonialism, and that their degradation, too, can sometimes be terrifying.62

Nandy, notably, depicted colonialism not as a condition but as a process. Whereas Mannoni had suggested that empire attracted certain kinds of people, Nandy stressed the transformative force of empire itself. Previously upstanding, honourable men were corrupted by its dehumanising effects. The evil, as Guha put it, victimised not only its subjects but its instruments as well.63 ‘Colonisation’, Aimé Césaire proposed, ‘dehumanises even the most civilised man.’64 For contemporaries, it was above all the opportunities – the licence – of empire that threatened to capsize potentially fragile Europeans. ‘It is generally conceded’, wrote Charles Hobley in 1929, ‘that Africa exercises a peculiar charm’ for long-term European residents likely to have absorbed ‘the spirit of the continent’. While the attractions were various – life was freer and more simple than in Britain, conventions were looser, the challenges of settler farming brought wholesome reward – it was these same advantages that constituted a test of racial character for immigrant Europeans. Without ‘the restraints imposed by life in a densely populated Western community’, Hobley warned, those ‘of baser metal may struggle to stand alone’.65 Contact with Africa and with Africans was the crux of the matter. Europe was vulnerable because Africa was inherently invasive. The borders were porous; race was transmissible. For the Swiss ­psychiatrist, [ 35 ]

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Carl Gustav Jung, racial deterioration derived from a form of psychological contamination:

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Even today the European, however highly developed, cannot live with impunity among the Negroes in Africa; their psychology gets into him unnoticed and unconsciously he becomes a Negro. There is no fighting against it. In Africa there is a well-known technical expression for this: ‘going black.’ It is no mere snobbery that the English should consider anyone born in the colonies, even though the best blood may run in his veins, ‘slightly inferior.’ There are facts to support this view.66

A variant on this theme was the idea that the enterprise so intrinsic to the European character was liable to ebb away without the spur of competitiveness and industry to which he was accustomed. It was not so much ‘Darkest Africa’, according to this view, as the indolence of luxuriant, arcadian Africa that jeopardised the expatriate European: Farming in Kenya can be a hard struggle not only against climate, pests and diseases and fluctuating markets, but also against the constant temptation to slip back into the slipshod standards of tropical countries whose native people can exist with very little effort, but can excel only by defying the social codes and age-long customs of their fellow men.67

For others, it was the exercise of power that risked the white man’s fall from racial grace. As Hobley put it, elaborating on his theme of Africa as a moral test: The fact that [the settler] is often, for a time, master of the destinies of a number of natives appeals to the ruling instinct of his northern race. It may be called vanity. Some weak spirits succumb to that side of it, and become unduly autocratic and even tyrannous … the finer characters, who sustain the course, emerge successfully, having won the respect of their natives, and possessing a feeling of self-confidence – altogether finer men than when they began their new life.68

Frequently, historians have stressed the dangers presented by sexual contact between Europeans and Africans.69 Yet Hobley’s warning suggests that concerns also addressed the possibility that Europeans be provoked by ‘their’ natives not towards desire but to tyranny.70 The exercise of power itself could be a source of stress as settlers struggled to live up to the benevolent mastery that colonial discourses prescribed. Violence in the settler colony was permitted (indeed, demanded) but only within particular bounds. In attempting to emulate the paternalistic ethos so important to settler colonialism, settlers, officials – indeed all Europeans in Kenya – were challenged to pit their affective experience alongside that implied by the archetypal European.71 [ 36 ]

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White prestige and social control The vital importance that Europeans did successfully emulate the European ideal should not be underplayed. As embodiments of their civilising mission, Europeans were required to operate as role-models for African advance. Colonised people, the logic went, would willingly submit to colonial authority – so long as the aura of European strength and European virtue was maintained.72 ‘Kept intact’, Elspeth Huxley wrote, white prestige was a thousand times stronger than all the guns and locks and metal in the world; challenged, it could be brushed aside like a spider’s web: Indeed respect was the only protection available to Europeans who lived singly, or in scattered families, among thousands of Africans accustomed to constant warfare and armed with spears and poisoned arrows, but had themselves no barricades, and went about unarmed. This respect preserved them like an invisible coat of mail, or a form of magic, and seldom failed; but it had to be very carefully guarded. The least rent or puncture might, if not immediately checked or repaired, split the whole garment asunder and expose its wearer in all his human vulnerability. 73

If Europeans did not uphold white prestige, African docility could no longer be assumed. The idea of prestige, in other words, functioned to reassure Europeans of the security of their position – so long as they themselves complied with its demands. Transfigured through the civilising logic of the settler colony, however, prestige became rationalised as the necessary means to endow progress on imitative Africans. ‘The European’, in short, was an exemplary figure: embodiment of the civilisation that his colonising position obliged him to impart. ‘The native’, it was argued, possessed ‘a faculty for imitation’ that required Europeans to show only ‘the best characteristics of their race’.74 As Edward Grigg, Governor of Kenya in the later 1920s, insisted, all Europeans in Kenya enjoyed a special responsibility ‘to set a standard of civilisation’.75 ‘I always had it impressed on me’, one settler remembered, ‘that I must behave so as to earn the respect of the people amongst whom I lived.’76 ‘Each one of us is an emissary’, wrote another, ‘and the impression [that] we make as individuals must be … the pattern of all our race.’77 Dwelling on the importance of social conformity does much to extend an analysis of mental illness in the settler-colonial context. Put simply, it compels us to consider whether from the pressure to maintain white prestige there developed a particular consciousness among colonial Europeans of the dangers of transgression. As Kennedy pointed out, what distinguished Britain’s settler colonies in Africa from those in Australasia and North America was the numer[ 37 ]

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ical superiority of indigenous peoples. Unlike the temperate lands of settlement, in Africa indigenous peoples were not thin on the ground when Europeans arrived. Nor were they decimated by conquest and disease. This meant two – contradictory – things: first, that Europeans would rely on Africans for labour; and second, that throughout the colonial period, Europeans would remain acutely aware of their vulnerability. Such was the inherent jeopardy of white minority rule. The problem then became one of ‘preventing the necessary interaction between the two parties in the economic sphere from affecting the rigid lines of distinction in the social sphere’.78 Only by enforcing distance; by constantly reiterating their putative racial difference, could the tension by held. Settler culture, then, was determined by ‘the tenuous nature of white power’.79 Europeans may have adopted positions of strength but they harboured at the same time an acute awareness of their weakness.80 Nor was this delicate balance confined to the public domain. The presence of servants within the European home demanded that standards be upheld not only in public but also in the quotidian and the quiet; in the domestic and the day to day as much as on the high-stage of imperial pomp and ceremony and crisis. Even the sanctuary of inner thought could not safely be assumed. ‘In a country such as East Africa,’ wrote the wife of another colonial official, ‘the natives watch every action of the European and, as a rule, read most of his thoughts from the expression on his face.’81 The demand that ‘natives’ be constantly on hand as witness to ‘the European’, moreover, was directly at odds with the concomitant need for distance to be maintained between colonisers and colonised.82 Performing prestige, we need to countenance, was a site of paranoia as well as pride; the constant reiteration of a claim that could never be decisively confirmed. The importance of the ‘prestige imperative’, however, should not only be understood on the level of individual psychology. In Kenya, maintaining white prestige was a collective endeavour. According to Kennedy, such was its importance that social conformity was indeed attained. The effort to prevent deviance, Kennedy argued, brought into being a powerful network of communal norms meant to distinguish and enforce acceptable ‘white’ behaviour: Social sanctions, both informal and institutional, bound the settler population … into a straitjacket of conformity, a self-enforced system of pinched choices … The diverse origins of the settlers notwithstanding, a sense of social unity was forged, a conviction that gentleman and yeoman, colonel and private, merchant and miner, all had merged into a single, harmonious class.83

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It is a thesis problematic for its striking resemblance to contemporaries’ insistence upon social cohesion. The myth of ‘no poor whites’ was a vital part of the settler rationale while prevailing colonial discourse served to construct idealised visions of the Europeans in Kenya and the kinds of experiences they enjoyed.84 Yet Kennedy’s metaphor of a ‘straitjacket of conformity’ is illuminating, nonetheless. What, it forces us to ask, were the costs of failing to conform in a society which brooked such little margin for error? Might we not contend that in Kenya those Europeans unable or unwilling to maintain racial standards encountered forms of social sanction that were not only unique to the settler-colonial context but that were, moreover, injurious to the state of their mental health? When Europeans failed to uphold British honour, as one memoirist recalled, the consequences were inevitably ‘serious and far-reaching’.85 What were these consequences? And what did it mean to be excommunicated from a society for which the margins were never intended to be disciplined or managed so much as prohibited altogether? Working simultaneously to consider both the experience and the treatment of mental illness allows us to envisage both the social and psychological ramifications of having crossed the boundary lines separating colonisers from colonised. It also returns us to a onceascendant frame for understanding psychiatry – through the theoretical lens of social control. Since the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s – but stemming principally from the insights of Michel Foucault – the treatment of the mentally ill has commonly been understood as a method for disciplining social deviants and maintaining social order.86 In colonial Africa, however, as Megan Vaughan adeptly showed, on the grounds of Africans’ supposed racial difference, there was never a need for psychiatry to be deployed as a means of forcible social control. Their racial construction already rendered Africans ‘Other’.87 If theories of social control are inappropriate for understanding the psychiatric treatment of Africans, however, how are we to understand the treatment of Europeans? Surely, one might propose, the superfluity of the ‘madness’ label for subordinating racial ‘others’ can only be inverted when applied to the colonising self. Indeed, as Julie Parle has argued for the South African context, it may well have been more important for authorities to remove deviant Europeans from public view than it was to shut away ‘natives’ who behaved in similar ways.88 In India, as we know, the need to remove from public sight those Europeans who tarnished white prestige was at the heart of the colonial endeavour to institutionalise or deport those found to be impoverished or mentally ill.89 A focus on the life-histories of patients themselves, however, demands not only that we think about social control in the limited [ 39 ]

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sense of institutional confinement but that we extend our analysis to consider the place of deviance, social control and ‘white prestige’ in colonial society more broadly. Admission to a psychiatric hospital, it is important to remember, did not signify a simple shutting away of transgressive Europeans but represented merely one moment within wider histories of illness, deviance and social control. By now, we have identified at least three distinct ways in which a colonial condition in Kenya might be discerned: in the indisputable hardships attendant on colonial life (discomfort, disease, the absence of family, friends and social support); in the propensity of colonials to harbour feelings of antipathy towards Africa and Africans (ranging from estrangement to alienation, anxiety and fear); and in the c­ ultivated consciousness of the fragility of their position (and with it, the demand that Europeans not only act but think and feel within tightly circumscribed normative bounds). Without the necessary evidence, however, it is impossible to extrapolate human subjectivity from the outstanding features of a political dispensation. What we need to show are the ways by which the colonial condition in Kenya varied. We need to identify, in other words, the ways by which the determining features of a colonial situation moved, not only round the customary analytical pivots of race and class and gender but more disparately and idiosyncratically as well, according to the full range of subjective experience.Likewise, we need to establish the ways in which the nature of deviance and of madness changed over time. Beginning with the European association of Africa with madness, we see that the history of white insanity can hardly be understood in isolation from adjacent histories of deviance, transgression and social marginality. Before we consider the lives of the white insane themselves, t­ herefore, we need to look a little closer at the inter-relationship of these phenomena, their cultural construction and their attempted control.

Notes   1 Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell, 2000), pp. 118–23; Alyse Simpson, The Land That Never Was (London: Selwyn and Blunt, 1937).   2 Flora Veit-Wild, Writing Madness: Borderlines on the Body in African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), p. 7; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 22; Adam Hoschschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 6; Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 40. The principal studies which I draw upon in this section, however, are of older provenance, most notably: Philip Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964); Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa

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(New York: Twayne, 1970); and Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). See also Lucy Jarosz, ‘Constructing the Dark Continent: Metaphor as Geographic Representation of Africa’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, 74: 2 (1992). Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, p. 21. Johannes Fabian: Reason and Madness in the European Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 63; Pieterse, White on Black, p. 69. Keller, Colonial Madness, pp. 1–2, 21–2. On commodity and colonial Africa, see John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) pp. 15–38; Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1941 (California: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 119–67; McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 207–31. Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent’, Critical Inquiry, 12: 1 (1985), p. 170; Pieterse, White on Black, pp. 69–71. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 164–88; Rod Edmond, ‘Degeneration in Imperialist and Modernist Discourse’, in Nigel Rigby and Howard J. Booth (eds), Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality, 1890–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 42. Edmond, ‘Degeneration’, pp. 41–2; Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, pp. 191–2; Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 233–5. David Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), pp. 42–73; Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, pp. 124–33, 142–4; Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For references to hostile climate in the works of Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham, see Warwick Anderson, ‘Disease, Race and Empire’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70: 1 (1996), pp. 62–3. On associations of equatorial African with mental illness, see Anna Crozier, ‘Sensationalising Africa: British Medical Impressions of Sub-Saharan Africa, 1890–1939’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35: 3 (2007). Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 128. On degeneration, see Chamberlain and Gilman, Degeneration; Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Richard Eves, ‘Going Troppo: Images of White Savagery, Degeneration and Race in Turn‐of‐the‐Century Colonial Fictions of the Pacific’, Anthropology and History, 11: 2–3 (1999). Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p. 64. Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, Massachusetts Review, 18: 4 (1977); A. White, ‘Conrad and Imperialism’, in J. H. Stape (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Peter Firchow, Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000); see also Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, pp. 193–6. Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, p. 107. As Greene had it, ‘Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorians atlas, the blank unexplored continent, the shape of the human heart’, Graham Greene, In Search of a Character (London: Bodley Head, 1946), p. 91; Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, pp. 142–3. Anna Crozier, ‘What Was Tropical about Tropical Neurasthenia? The Utility of the Diagnosis in British East Africa’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 64: 4 (2009).

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madness and marginality 19 On the goldfields of 1850s Victoria, immigrants suffered from ‘colonial fever, nostalgia, sunstroke, gold fever and bush-mania’. Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, p. 21 and Sue Rowley, ‘Imagination, madness and nation in Australian bush mythology’, in Kate Darian Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (eds), Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Afica and Australia (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 138–9. On the French-African context, see Bertrand Taithe, The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 50–1. 20 ‘The Medical Aspects of Closer Settlement of Europeans in the Kenya Highlands’, Kenya and East African Medical Journal, 6 (1929); Dane Kennedy, ‘Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma: Tropical Neurasthenia and the Alienated Briton’, in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (eds), Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (London: Sangam, 2006), p. 165. 21 Livingstone, ‘Tropical Climate and Moral Hygiene’, pp. 104, 108–9. 22 Nora Strange, Kenya Today (London: Stanley Paul, 1934), p. 170; Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, p. 173; Curtin, The Image of Africa, p. 99; Crozier, ‘Sensationalising Africa’, pp. 400–1. 23 Strange, Kenya Today, p. 146; Charles Allen, Tales from the Dark Continent (London: BBC,1979), p. 60; Justin Willis, Potent Brews: A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa, 1850–1999 (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), p. 163. 24 Murdoch Mackinnon, ‘Medical Aspects of White Settlement in Kenya’, The East African Medical Journal, 9 (1935), p. 390; Charles Hobley, Kenya: From Chartered Company to Crown Colony (London: Witherby, 1929), p. 216; Aline Buxton, Kenya Days (London: Arnold, 1927), p. 20; Kennedy, ‘The Perils of the Midday Sun’, p. 131. 25 Ann MacDonald, ‘African roundabout’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 980, p. 150. 26 The foundational text linking neurasthenia to the sun was Charles Woodruff’s The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men (New York: Rebman, 1905). 27 Transactions of the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 20: 5 (1926), pp. 339–40. 28 Ibid., p. 341. 29 R. Van Someren, British Medical Journal, Correspondence (27 March 1926), p. 956. 30 Charles Chevenix Trench, Men Who Ruled Kenya: The Kenya Administration, 1892–1963 (London: Radcliffe Press, 1993), p. 86; See also Geoffrey Archer, Personal and Historical Memoirs of an East African administrator (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), p. 33. 31 Hugh S. Stannus, ‘Tropical Neurasthenia’, cited by Grenfell Price, White Settlers in the Tropics (New York: American Geographical Society, 1939), pp. 211–12; David Arnold, ‘The Place of “the Tropics” in Western Medical Ideas since 1750’, Tropical Medicine and International Health, 2: 4 (1997), p. 309; Kennedy, ‘Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma’, p. 158 and Crozier, ‘What Was Tropical about Tropical Neurasthenia?’, pp. 534, 540, 542. 32 Michael Blundell, A Love Affair with the Sun: A Memoir of Seventy Years in Kenya (Nairobi: Kenway, 1994) p. 11. See also Dundas, African Crossroads: An Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 15, for a description of the privations of serving as an Assistant District Commissioner in Kitui before the First World War. 33 Hermann Norden, White and Black in East Africa (London: Witherby, 1924), p. 62; Henry Seaton, Lion in the Morning (London: John Murray, 1963), p. 20; Allen, Tales from the Dark Continent, pp. 96, 106; Nicholls, Red Strangers, pp. 72, 100. 34 John Ainsworth Papers, ‘Kenya Reminiscences’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 380, p. 85. 35 Trench, Men Who Ruled Kenya, p. 109. 36 Ibid., p. 109. On suicide, see Nicholls, Red Strangers, pp. 74–5. 37 Seaton, Lion in the Morning, p. 21. 38 Allen, Tales from the Dark Continent, p. 98; Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 31. 39 Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, pp. 74, 81; Alastair Niven, ‘The Literary Engagement with Africa’, in Anthony Kirk-Greene and Douglas Rimmer

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49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

(eds), The British Intellectual Engagement with Africa in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 211. Warwick Anderson, ‘The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown’, American Historical Review, 102: 5 (1997). Lord Cranworth, A Colony in the Making or Sport and Profit in British East Africa (London: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 184–6. Kennedy, Islands of White, p. 110. In contrast, Anna Crozier argues that the metaphor of the white man gone to seed through drink was ‘usually attributed to the stresses of the environment rather than to any defect within the drinker themselves’. Crozier links this exculpation to ‘residual’ polygenist theories of races imparting the notion of Europeans ‘belonging’ naturally to the environment in which they were born. She provides no evidence, however, to support her claim that the environment not the person was to blame. On the contrary, considerable evidence exists, some presented here, to suggest that people who ‘went to seed’ were seen as culpable. Identifying how culpability varied from individual to individual shows the importance of gender, class and the kinds of behaviours that attracted authorities’ attention in conferring responsibility for mental breakdown upon the individual, the environment or a combination of both. Crozier, ‘Sensationalising Africa’, p. 401. Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 189. See also Margaret Gillon, ‘The Wagon and the Star’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 568, pp. 51–5, and G. Wallop, A Knot of Roots: An Autobiography (London: Bles, 1965), pp. 251–3. Llewelyn Powys, Black Laughter (London: MacDonald, 1925), pp. 5–6, 10–11. Raymond Mitford Barberton, ‘Across the Cherangani to Kamasia’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 1166, p. 11. See Maevis Birdsey’s memoirs for an exemplary passage in this regard. Birdsey, ‘Sigh Softly African Winds’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 1794, pp. 195–7. V. M. Carnegie, A Kenya Farm Diary (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1930), p. 44, 92; Errol Whittall, Dimbilil: the Story of an African Farm (London: Arthur Baker, 1956), p. 7; Shiva Naipaul, North of South: An African Journey (London: Penguin, 1996 edn), p. 80; Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, pp. 124–6. Clingman, ‘Beyond the Limit: The Social Relations of Madness in Southern African Fiction’, in Dominik LaCapra (ed.), The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 246. Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood (London: Penguin, 1959), p. 67. Llewelyn Powys, Black Laughter, p. 13. Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, pp. 487–9. Clingman, ‘Beyond the Limit’, p. 235. J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 7. Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’. Lonsdale, ‘Home County’, p. 88. Lessing, cited in David M. Hughes, Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape and the Problem of Belonging (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 2. Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (London: Methuen, 1956). Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1965), pp. 200–1, 249–50. On the ‘colonial situation’ see George Balandier, ‘The Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach’, in I. Wallerstein (ed.), Social Change and the Colonial Situation (New York: Wiley, 1951). Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 30. Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, p. 490.

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madness and marginality 64 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. by Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 20. 65 See also Strange, Kenya Today, pp. 168–9. 66 Cited in B. W. Burleson, Jung in Africa (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 73. 67 Elspeth Huxley, foreword to Jack Lipscomb, White Africans (London: Faber & Faber, 1955), p. 13. 68 Hobley, Kenya, p. 17. 69 See, most recently, David M. Anderson, ‘Sexual Threat and Settler Society: “Black Perils” in Colonial Kenya, c.1907–1930’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Society, 38: 1 (2010). 70 A similar point is made in Norman Leys, Kenya (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1924), pp. 165–6. 71 Emmanuelle Saada, ‘The Empire of Law: Dignity, Prestige, and Domination in the “Colonial Situation”’, French Politics, Culture and Society, 20: 2 (2002). 72 Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p. 19. 73 Huxley, Flame Trees of Thika, p. 16. 74 Strange, Kenya Today, p. 72. 75 Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere the Making of Kenya (London: Macmillan, 1935), Volume II, pp. 252–3. 76 Pamela Scott, A Nice Place to Live (London: M. Russell, 1991), p. 102. 77 Cherry Lander, My Kenya Acres: A Woman Farms in Mau Mau Country (London: George G. Harrap, 1957) p. 183. See also George Nightingale, ‘Memoirs’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 1951, p. 166. 78 Kennedy, Islands of White, p. 4. 79 Ibid. 80 Brian Keith Axel, ‘Historical Anthropology and its Vicissitudes’, in Axel (ed.), From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and its Futures (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 18. 81 M. W. Dobbs, ‘Recollections of Kenya, 1906–1931’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 504, p. 126. 82 Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p. 176; Lonsdale, ‘Home County’, p. 89. 83 Kennedy, Islands of White, pp. 167, 179. 84 Will Jackson, ‘Dangers to the Colony: Loose Women and the Poor White Problem in Kenya’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (forthcoming 2013) 85 Hildegarde Hinde, Some Problems of East Africa (London: Williams and Norgate, 1926), p. 87. 86 Foucault, Madness and Civilisation; Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull (eds), Social Control and the State: Historical and Comparative Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Andrew Scull, Social Order / Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective (London: Routledge, 1989). 87 Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 101, 106. 88 Julie Parle, States of Mind, p. 19; See also Harriet Deacon, ‘Insanity, Institutions and Society: The Case of the Robben Island Lunatic Asylum, 1846–1910’, in R. Porter and D. Wright (eds), The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800–1966 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 26; Shula Marks, ‘The Microphysics of Power: Mental Nursing in South Africa in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, in Vaughan and Mahone, Psychiatry and Empire, p. 67. 89 Waltraud Ernst, ‘Out of Sight and Out of Mind: Insanity in Early Nineteenth Century British India’, in B. Forsythe and J. Melling, Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800–1914: A Social History of Madness in Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 251.

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Cha p t e r two

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‘No ordinary chaps’: class, gender and the licensing of transgression

In her history of psychiatry in colonial Southern Rhodesia, Lynette Jackson has argued that the ‘frontier environment’ experienced by settlers during the early twentieth century contributed directly to the state of their mental health. Comprising ‘male fortune hunters’ with few restraining influences, the European ‘community’ in those early days was a ‘rough and unruly crowd’. Many settlers had experience of fighting imperialist wars; others had failed to get rich in the bonanza on the Rand. A significant number were in desperate economic straits. Drunkenness and violence were endemic; disease was widespread. Yet although this frontier environment ‘undoubtedly produced mental illness’, Jackson argues, it did not result in a heightened sensitivity among colonial authorities towards ‘behavioural abnormalities’. Without well-developed social norms, in other words, deviance was equally ill-formed.1 As Kai Erikson has argued, deviance might best be understood not as a property inherent in any particular kind of behaviour but a property conferred upon certain behaviour by contemporaries. Only when deviant behaviours were apprehended as such can they be said to exist.2 The same can be said of mental illness. That the policing of social norms may have become more sophisticated over time, however, is a reasonable supposition. Likewise, the importance ascribed to social conformity might well be thought of as flexible and fluid, depending on the relative stress that a particular community finds itself under and the stability or otherwise of its political position. In Kenya, theories of tropical neurasthenia had fallen into abeyance by the later 1930s and yet discourses of European degeneration persisted until the demise of colonial rule in 1963 – and beyond.3 Any decline in tolerance for deviant behaviours, however, can only be a part of the equation; also changing was the ability of state authorities to enforce adherence to social norms. Largely due to the redundancy [ 45 ]

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madness and marginality

of traditional mechanisms of social control (repatriation chief among them) but also reflective of the post-war emphasis on the provision of welfare by the state, increasing public concern was paid in Kenya to deviant Europeans. The need for the European community to assert the continued legitimacy of its position while anti-colonial nationalism shook the intellectual foundations of minority rule also served to focus minds on the maintenance of white prestige. Until the Second World War, the endeavour to control dangerous or deviant behaviour for the most part succeeded; only during the depression years of the early 1930s did a ‘poor white problem’ threaten to emerge. Yet Kenya’s socialite settlers were not noted only for their substantial wealth or their social prestige. ‘A winter home for aristocrats’ was one popular euphemism for the colony; ‘a place in the sun for shady people’ was another.4 Dashing earls lent glamour to the colony but also raised concern. Ghosts of degeneration were never far away. In order to contain deviance within manageable bounds, a practical project of social control was combined with a discursive ‘making safe’ of what might otherwise bring colonial rule into disrepute. In Kenya, as one senior administrator had it, there was almost a ‘cult of unconventionality’. ‘I soon came to the conclusion,’ wrote another, that in Kenya, ‘there were no ordinary chaps’.5 Life was lived ‘on different proportions’, it was said. Everyone, it seemed, was ‘larger than life’.6 That the robustness of life in Kenya was frequently attributed to the effects of climate, meanwhile, underlines the proximity of the relation between eccentricity and mental aberration. The lines between the unconventional and the deviant, though faint, were vital nonetheless.

Neutralising transgressing As to what deviance in Kenya Colony actually comprised, while in one sense a definition might well encompass any departure from the idealised figure of ‘the European’, poverty provides the logical place from which to start. Across the European empires, ‘poor whites’ were far more numerous than colonial mythologies would have us believe. As David Arnold has shown, by the mid-nineteenth century almost half of all Europeans in India can be described as poor.7 A similar proportion has been advanced for nineteenth-century Barbados.8 By the early twentieth century, according to Ann Stoler, the number of those ‘dangerously impoverished’ in the Dutch East Indies ran into the tens of thousands.9 In South Africa by the mid-1920s, over 200,000 of the country’s white population were classified as poor, a figure that had grown to 300,000 by the end of the decade.10 [ 46 ]

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no ordinary chaps

European poverty challenged the colonial social order in the most basic way. To be poor was not merely to exist in a state of deprivation: poverty bespoke the person and, by implication, the race to which he claimed to belong. In the settler-colony, comfort was the proof of racial superiority and, while colonials propagated the notion that wealth devolved from character first of all, conceptions of character in turn reflected ideas of what it meant to be European, ideas that were themselves rooted in a particular material standard of living.11 The conceit that Europeans were naturally suited to this standard elided the fact that social structures were deliberately engineered to ensure that standards were maintained. Colonial good-living thus provided both the justification and the reward for European settlement. In ideal terms race and class were overlaid. To be white and poor in Kenya was, however, not necessarily prob­­ lematic. Just as the Victorian image of Africa as a site of danger defined the explorer’s courage, so did the trials and tribulations of settler farming provide the stage on which the determination and resolve of the European colonist was performed. It is not surprising, therefore, that memoirists of Kenya not only admitted but celebrated the privations of their early lives: having endured and overcome, settlers recalled their earlier hardships with nostalgia, if not affection. The critical point, as Kennedy remarked, was not poverty itself but, rather, that poverty provided the occasion by which a person’s inner shortcomings might became apparent.12 To this extent, Kennedy was quite right to connect the concept of the ‘poor white’ to stereotyped visions of Kenya’s Afrikaner population. The problem was not that the ‘shiftless Afrikaner’ was poor but that he was believed to be happy remaining so.13 Complacent poverty bespoke the Afrikaner’s racial difference, while Britishness, comprising self-respect, dynamic purpose and a natural feel for colonial propriety, was defined in counter-distinction.14 In Kenya, therefore, poor white-ism was configured along boundary lines of race and nation. This is not to say, however, that poverty among English-speaking whites was never problematic. Excluded from respectable circles and frequently stigmatised by their failure, impoverished Europeans in Kenya were liable to suffer the costs not only of material poverty but of social marginality as well. Cut off from the support that white society might otherwise have provided, marginalised Europeans inevitably found succour elsewhere – in relations of love, friendship and collaborative alliance with ‘native’ peoples. If poverty among Europeans endangered a collective racial self-image, nothing was so dangerous to that self-image than relations that existed beyond the parameters of citizen and subject, master and servant, ‘bwana’ and ‘boy’. Sexual liaisons were what most alarmed contemporaries but the [ 47 ]

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madness and marginality

kinds of relationships that developed between ostracised Europeans and ‘native’ peoples were far more diverse than has previously been allowed. To colonial regimes, however, the outward signs of distress signalled foremost a diminishing of the distance deemed necessary for racial boundaries to be upheld and Europeans who lived, slept or worked alongside Africans or Asians were likely to be condemned as degenerate as often as they were thought deserving of pity or of aid.15 In the colonial context, then, it is at the category of the ‘poor white’ at which theories of deviance and degeneracy converge. As proponents for white settlement would have it, the ‘poor white’ was a contradiction in terms. Yet by blurring the boundaries between coloniser and colonised ‘poor whites’ made havoc of the endeavour to order humanity into clear and categorical, immutable groups. Failure to appreciate the importance of racial standards marked the absence of a racial sensibility; ‘poor whites’ were fifth columnists of a kind. Whether such shortcoming was thought to reflect inadequate social engineering, however, or whether it was taken to indicate the presence of a more profound, and possibly irredeemable, human flaw, was never very clear and debate over how best to prevent the emergence of a ‘poor white problem’ ranged from education to health, immigration to eugenics.16 Aside from their figurative significance, however, the social reality of ‘poor whites’ was a more complex phenomenon than an incongruous combination of race and class might suggest. In the Kenya context, certainly, it is impossible to think analytically about their presence without incorporating several attendant concepts: poverty, to be sure, but deviance, marginality and mental illness as well. Among Kenya’s settler elite, the pressure to conform to social norms was negated only by the kudos that derived from treating them with a haughty disdain. Men of ‘good British stock’, Charles Dundas wrote, ‘could be seen going about in disarray so extreme as to be patently studied and their habits, if not their minds, were as untidy as their dress.’17 If class was a determining factor in constituting colonial transgression, therefore, it is telling to observe that while poverty among Europeans was problematic, the affectation of poverty was certainly not. Hosting guests for dinner, Berkeley Cole, one of the colony’s most well-known aristocratic settlers, caused consternation to the uninitiated when he appeared in a threadbare pair of slippers, shrunken crepe drawers and an old bed jacket. Cole, as a guest remembered, was quite unmoved and made no allusion to his strange attire. During dinner a large cat wandered all over the table and a huge Russian boarhound, a magnificent animal, ate off our plates as well.18

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Writing in a similar vein, Elspeth Huxley recalled Raymond Hook, another well-connected settler who inherited land near Nanyuki. Hook, she recalled, was ‘a curious blend of the gypsy and the don’:

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He lived like a pig, oblivious of squalor, and inured to discomfort, yet could quote in the original Greek pages of Homer or Plato and had made a study of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Off he would go up the mountain with a bag of posho and another of beans, loaded on a mule, with a groundsheet for shelter and a thumbed copy of a Greek classic in his pocket, to disappear for weeks on end.19

What redeemed the squalor in which Hook lived was the idea that he subordinated the banalities of bourgeois housekeeping to the higher arts of the classics. That he could quote Homer or Plato ‘in the original Greek’ was testament to his breeding. Adherence to social norms, in this instance at least, was trumped only by the confidence to disregard them altogether. Not despite but because social and racial credentials were safely beyond doubt were wealthy settlers permitted to flaunt convention. That men of good British stock went about in disarray was remarkable to Dundas but his tone was one of indulgence, not consternation. As John Gunther later wrote, ‘only people utterly sure of themselves can dare to be quite so unconventional’.20 Settlers dressed in rags, in other words, not because they had to but because they could; the mixture of the ostentatious and the squalid were all part of Kenya Colony’s particular charm. If poverty was one point of possible transgression, contact with Africans was another. The relationship between coloniser and colonised was a vital ingredient in the making of the colonial dispensation; power was nothing without (self-)control. The ideal European, therefore, was able to combine the strength required to master ‘his’ (or ‘her’) ‘natives’ with the benevolence that served to justify subjection. Trusteeship was a doctrine of kindness first of all. In two particular respects the careful structuring of this relationship could be subverted: through violence and through sex. Both entailed an excessive emotional response to Africans and a collapsing of that vital distance keeping coloniser from colonised. Both jeopardised also the dominant position of the European over the African. As with poverty, however, in contemporary accounts of Kenya what we discover is not silence around either sex or violence but mythic indulgence. As with Kenya’s ‘cult of unconventionality’ transgression was not condemned censoriously out of hand but was neutralised through careful discursive work. It was done so in a tone consistent with the irreverence of Kenya’s elite settler culture: levity made safe what was otherwise taboo. Dundas, continuing his reflections on Kenya’s eccentric ­tradition, relayed the story of a well[ 49 ]

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connected English settler who had shot one of his African employees:

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I had to deal firmly with the scion of a good English family who peppered his native servant with shot so that his back was studded with pellets. His plea was one that surely would not be heard outside a Kenya court – the black villain had given him bad cream with his apple dumpling! Kenya court records could provide a wealth of humorous reading.21

Insistence on the humorous aspect of colonialism worked as a gesture of defiance. What the irreverence of this passage achieves is a suppression of the possibility that there was anything transpiring here other than the consummate exercise of power. Making light of transgression made it safe as well. Narratives operated to discount other narratives: the possibility that violence may have resulted not from Africans’ ineptitude but from their resistance (and that, furthermore, the perpetration of violence may have involved feelings less comfortable than those implied here) are effectively foreclosed. Other memoirists – women as well as men – wrote humorously of servants’ mishaps and the violent consequences that ensued.22 These, it is important to recognise, were defensive protestations: only because Europeans were safe and stable in their colonial position, the logic went, could they afford to enjoy it as well. Irreverence served to traverse – to discipline – those contentious boundary lines separating colonial common sense from transgression. The social practice of recounting such episodes, meanwhile, allowed Europeans the opportunity to smooth out and work through their experience of perpetrating violence or witnessing it at first hand. Difficult emotions – frustration, anxiety, dismay or disgust – were made manageable; story-telling made light of trouble and disquiet. Like poverty, violence itself was not necessarily problematic – so long as two essential criteria were met: violence must appear controlled and it must in no way imply contestation or struggle. Colonial authority needed to remain at all times unchecked. While violence enacted by Europeans upon Africans could be discursively and legally excused, violence that took place between Europeans and Africans represented a far more grievous challenge.23 What was at stake in the Silberrad affair of 1909 was not merely that an Assistant District Commissioner had been having sex with African women but that it had resulted in a violent altercation – an ‘unsightly scuffle’ – between Silberrad and the woman’s husband, a Maasai.24 Nor was this an isolated occurrence: most violent crimes perpetrated by Africans upon Europeans, Norman Leys suspected, were to be explained by rivalry for ‘native women’.25 After Silberrad, the famous Crewe Circular forbade such dangerous liaisons; henceforth, there would be far greater opprobrium attached [ 50 ]

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to sex between European men and African women. Such transgressive sexual contact nevertheless figures prominently in European writing, albeit most often with a nudge and a wink. Allusive if not ­apocryphal, the intention here was also to make light, often retrospectively, of forays into the ‘prohibited zone’. Richard Meinertzhagen, serving with the King’s African Rifles, remembered three Italian missionaries living ‘a most amoral life’ at Tusu. ‘They are certainly not white,’ Meinertzhagen joked, ‘but doubtless will soon be fathers.’26 Likewise, Charles Trench described some of the Europeans living at the coast in the Protectorate’s early days: There were three other European non-officials, all characters out of Somerset Maugham. Charles Whitton, ‘Coconut Charlie’, had lived there for sixteen years, and what he didn’t know about Lamu wasn’t knowledge. ‘Pioneer Percy’ Petley lived in another coconut plantation. He and his partner, Robert Milne, from time to time set off up the Tana on dubious trading expeditions. Nobody quite knew what they bought and sold but there was always a market for, and a supply of, poached elephant tusks and rhino horns. They were great favourites with the Gregory Smith family, with whom they usually lunched on their return from a venture to the interior. There was then much winking and nodding, and veiled references (pas devant les enfants) to glamorous Somali women.27

Men at the least had the licence to tell stories of what went on when they ventured outside the bounds of respectable white society.28 Chroniclers of transgression were careful to ensure, however, that reputations were preserved. ‘On going through the safe in the District Commissioner’s office’, as one official recalled, ‘I found enough material to blot the careers of a number of senior officials’: When the [Provincial Commissioner] arrived… I suggested that I might destroy a good deal of scurrilous material. He said ‘Yes but let’s have a look at [it] first,’ and spent a happy morning chuckling over these documents and then grunted, ‘Right. Have the damned thing burnt’ – which we did on the spot.29

Notable here is not merely the intimation of colonial transgression but the fact that attention is drawn also to its archival obliteration. White men in positions of power policed the history that they – quite selfconsciously – left behind. While sex between white men and African women could usually be covered up, for men to openly acknowledge such liaisons or, worse, to take an African as a wife, challenged colonial boundaries far more grievously, not so much by placing the white man beyond their bounds but by attempting to bring the ‘native’ woman within them. There are exceptions. Berkeley Cole (to Karen Blixen the most noble of all of Kenya’s settlers) was, during the later part of his life, [ 51 ]

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known to be living in a common-law marriage with a Somali woman. Cole’s eminent social status and his own discretion ensured that decorum was preserved.30 Elsewhere, Albert Walter, a government ­meteorologist, remembered a certain Mr Stevenson who had ‘gone native’ and ‘married a coloured woman’. Stevenson’s transgression was excused, like Cole’s, on the basis of his class. ‘He had a prosperous orange farm,’ Walter remembered, ‘a charming personality and was a very cultured man.’31 It is quite clear that in the construction of deviance, indices of class and gender served to distinguish between what was truly transgressive from that which could be invested with a neutral or even a positive moral valence. A tone of irreverence marked the erratic from the eccentric, the dangerous from the safe. What we see in the writing of deviance, moreover, can also be perceived in the treatment of deviance – and deviants – themselves. How deviance was constructed and controlled, was never constant. Class and gender were key determinants in its configuration but they too were in a state of flux, weathered and remoulded by social, political and ideological change. In order to chart how deviance was constituted dynamically, then, we need to look at its history over time.

Deviance at the frontier The period from the annexation of the East Africa Protectorate until the outbreak of the First World War is commonly known as Kenya’s ‘pioneer’ or ‘frontier’ phase.32 Resonant with Jackson’s observations of Rhodesia, testimony on Kenya’s early days suggests a certain primitive roughness – Nairobi was a mess of corrugated tin; recalcitrant tribes were yet to be subdued; women were few and far between. ‘Civilisation’, in short, had only just begun. Much of Kenya’s ‘cult of unconventionality’ can be dated to this period: ‘pioneers’, it was suggested, were by nature unorthodox; only the eccentric would leave ‘civilisation’ for the bush.33 Of the many deviants in Kenya at this time, I discuss here only four: Dr Henry Boedeker, one of the very first Europeans settlers in Kenya; Pelham Fooks and Arthur Barlow, two of the first to be deported, and Arthur Davidson, the first to be designated mad. Doctors in Kenya had a tradition of eccentricity. Roland Burkitt treated malaria with cold baths. Dr Gilks kept a pet leopard at his home. Dr Ribeiro did his rounds on a zebra.34 But the story of the first European doctor into Kenya, Dr Henry Boedeker, is yet more revealing. Boedeker was Parsee, of uncertain racial background (‘half-Burmese’ but ‘almost black’) and had caused a scandal in polite British society when he married the daughter of a Scottish baronet.35 Errol Trzebinski recounts the couple’s reasons for migrating to Kenya: [ 52 ]

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Dr Boedeker was planning to farm as far as possible from the stigma of being coloured. He had studied, trained and qualified as a doctor at Glasgow University and it was here that he fell in love with his wife, the daughter of Sir Henry Wardlaw of Tillicoultry. Their relationship was considered scandalous and the question of permanent union even more outrageous. He spoke English impeccably but neither the fact that this was one of his most attractive qualities or his medical expertise had any palliative effect on the disapproval. Just as they were searching for a chance to start a new life, an article describing Kikuyu country as a land flowing with milk and honey appeared in a British newspaper and this convinced them that they should emigrate to the British East African highlands.’36

The pioneers, according to popular myth, were a charismatic crowd. In the transition from civilisation to wilderness ample space was afforded for men to live well outside the bounds of social constraint. Later, their hagiographies were penned – to men such as James Martin, the illiterate Maltese who rose to become one of the Protectorate’s most influential officials; to Ewart Grogan, the man who walked (supposedly) to Cairo from the Cape; and to John Boyes, ‘king of the Kikuyu’ and occasional dacoit at whose funeral procession in 1951 ‘all the great men in the Colony mourned … the passing of an extraordinary man’.37 These are stories of rags to riches and ‘boys done good’, typical of the mythology of the settler colony as a site of moral and mental redemption. The case of Henry Boedeker intimates something else entirely, however. By claiming the right to marry a white woman of high class, Boedeker had caused a scandal in Britain. Racial and social boundaries had been dangerously transgressed. To avoid the social censure that ensued, Boedeker and his wife found haven in Kenya. The colony, from this perspective, operated as a safety valve for metropolitan transgression. Its supposed laxity, meanwhile, especially at a time when still sparsely settled, became a significant part of its contemporary renown – as a place for remittance men, ‘black sheep’ and fugitives from scandal.38 It was not merely from poverty or misfortune, in other words, from which migrants to Kenya found escape. Again, however, we need to apply a critical, sceptical reading to the ways in which the irreverent character of retrospective accounts have served to neutralise or disarm what were in fact sites of danger and contention. The idea that in Kenya ‘anything goes’ imparted a nonchalance to what in fact were areas of anxiety and stress. In Kenya, anything did not go, as the examples of Pelham Fooks and Arthur Barlow clearly show. Pelham Fooks first entered the Protectorate in 1900 and was consequently convicted for theft, forgery and twice for vagrancy.39 In 1905, R. W. Hamilton, a High Court judge at Mombasa, wrote to the Protec[ 53 ]

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torate’s Commissioner, requesting that Fooks be deported.40 That same year, however, authorities in South Africa and Aden announced that they were no longer prepared to allow indigents to land and officials in Kenya were faced with the problem of where to send their deviant Europeans. ‘It has become practically impossible’, wrote the Protectorate’s Commissioner, Donald Stewart, ‘to find a part of His Majesty’s dominions that will consent to receive undesirable bad characters. The only alternative that remains is to return them to their place of origin, which, if the place of origin is England, is a costly proceeding.’41 Stewart mentioned Fooks as typical of the kind of person frequently encountered in East Africa: besides the four occasions that he had been convicted in Mombasa, Stewart reported, Fooks had also been in prison in Nairobi, Zanzibar and in German East Africa. Itinerant, footloose and beholden to no one, Fooks was anathema to colonial ideologies precisely because he so utterly lacked the commitment to white prestige by which colonial populations took their bearings. Deportation, however, was to be used only for offences of a political kind.42 The alternative recourse for removing unwanted Europeans was provided by the Distressed British Subjects Act.43 If an individual was deemed incapable of supporting himself or to be leading a life of habitual crime, he could be imprisoned for six months, with sentences usually served at the Mombasa jail inside Fort Jesus.44 For the duration of their sentence, prisoners worked to earn the requisite money to pay for a third-class passage to London or Bombay. In the early years of British settlement in East Africa, one police officer alone was processing Distressed British Subjects at a rate of fifty in a single year.45 Notably, that same police officer, Robert Foran, had dealings with Pelham Fooks and he wrote about him at length in his memoir of the Kenya Police. Here we gain a much richer and more illuminating account than bureaucratic records provide. According to Foran, Fooks, the son of an Anglican bishop, educated at Eton, formerly an officer of the Brigade of Guards and at one time the aide-de-camp to a governor of Ceylon, had come to Mombasa to work on the construction of the Uganda Railway after a number of years spent drifting around Canada and the United States.46 Openly admitting of the fact that he had spent much of his time in North America in prison, Fooks’s habit, Foran writes, was to pass a ‘dud’ cheque and spend the proceeds on a drinking binge. When his money was exhausted he would give himself up at a police station and, when tried in court, would plead guilty and hope for a custodial sentence ‘of at least two years’ to keep him sober. When not in prison, Fooks lived a solitary existence in a hut at English Point, just north of Mombasa. [ 54 ]

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What is most telling about Foran’s account is the reaction of the European community in Mombasa to Fooks’s behaviour. When sentenced to terms of imprisonment, Fooks was customarily released each day, alone and unguarded, to perform gardening work at the houses of colonial officials in the town. At sunset each evening, he was rewarded with a drink at the house where he was working before returning to his cell. ‘This unique privilege’, Foran noted, ‘was never once abused.’ Fooks, he remembers, was an expert horticulturalist, an accomplished scholar and a very likeable man. Yet more remarkably, Fooks, at some point during his time in Mombasa, converted to Islam, regularly attended the mosque, sometimes even preached there and would regularly walk about the town dressed as a Muslim.47 Despite this, and despite his alcoholism, Fooks, it appears, was well liked by the British community in Kenya. When he finally died, aged 97, at Kisumu in 1939, Fooks, Foran notes, had won the respect and friendship of the European residents there, just as he had won the friendship of those officials whose gardens he had tended in Mombasa over thirty years before. Although alcoholic, criminal and intermittently destitute, therefore, Pelham Fooks is rehabilitated in Foran’s account and placed within the bounds of respectable white society. Even Fooks’s Muslim affectations could be encompassed within the heroic settler myth. Fooks, we might contend, was an ‘Orientalist’ of a sort and, as with Hook, Cole and Stevenson, what might otherwise have been construed as deviance is not merely forgiven but celebrated. Transgression is rehabilitated on the grounds of class and breeding. Other Europeans were deported at this time, most notably Berkeley Cole’s brother, Galbraith, after he shot and killed a suspected stock-thief on his Kikopey estate. Cole’s removal from Kenya was only temporary, however: deported not to Britain but to neighbouring German East Africa, Cole was promptly able to return, travelling back to his farm disguised as a Somali.48 The case of Arthur Barlow was rather different. The nephew of a Church of Scotland missionary, Barlow had none of the social capital that Kenya’s aristocrats enjoyed.49 Neither could his interest in African cultures be so safely confined within that Orientalist idiom by which Fooks and Cole ‘went native’. Not long after he arrived in Kenya, aged only seventeen, in 1903, Barlow was observed to be immersing himself in Kikuyu cultural life. He ate African food and drank their beer, he danced with Africans at the mission station and he quickly became fluent in the Kikuyu language.50 Barlow, in other words, did not merely play at ‘native’ life but engaged seriously with African cultural practice. This, in Derek Peterson’s words, ‘raised the spectre of dangerous racial mixing’. In 1905 Barlow was deported; [ 55 ]

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not to German East Africa, this time, but back to Britain. Only after a year had elapsed and Barlow had undertaken not to repeat his earlier behaviour was it agreed that he could re-enter the Protectorate. Like Pelham Fooks, Barlow was able to redeem himself in later life; indeed, he established himself as a leading authority on African culture.51 No settler hagiographies were written of him, however, and his forays into African life attracted no popular interest. There was nothing splendid or picturesque about his excursions into the exotic; nor was there any heroic individualism to be salvaged here: unlike the socialites, Barlow did not earn his contemporaries’ admiration by treating convention with conspicuous disdain. For all these reasons Barlow’s transgressions were of a very different sort from the eccentricity of the ‘pioneers’. Yet he has been remembered nonetheless. The last of our four ‘deviants’ is the most anonymous of all. On the fourth of September, 1903, John Ainsworth, one of the Protectorate’s most senior officials, wrote a letter to a British settlerfarmer in Natal. The letter read as follows: I have to advise you that a Mr Arthur Davidson, claiming to be your brother, arrived in Nairobi some time ago, and after staying at the local hotel developed symptoms of insanity which rendered it necessary for him to be taken charge of by the authorities. He was consequently placed in the Civil Hospital here and afterwards removed to Mombasa with a view to his being sent to Durban.52

In the aftermath of the South African war, Arthur Davidson was just one of a considerable number of itinerant and impoverished Europeans at large on the East African coast.53 Many had been in the Transvaal, where up to 100,000 fortune-hunters from around the world had arrived in the decade or so since gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886.54 In 1897 Transvaal president Paul Kruger passed legislation to bar entry to ‘undesirables’ and to remove those already there.55 To those transient Europeans working (or attempting to work) on the Transvaal, news of another ‘white man’s country’ to the north – and British to boot – generated considerable excitement. Rumours circulated that settlers could expect to receive ‘every encouragement’ from government: there was ‘abundant work’, it was said, ‘for willing, energetic hands’.56 In Kenya, while legislation provided for the removal of Distressed British Subjects, no laws had yet been established for dealing with the suspected insane. The nature of the challenge that they posed, moreover, was, in qualitative terms, quite different from that presented by the destitute or the distressed. The criminal and the insolvent had to be removed because they subverted colonial boundary lines [ 56 ]

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but also because they failed to carry out the primary function of the European settler – to foster the economic and social development of the colony. The insane, on the other hand, threatened to undermine the colonial dispensation in more various and more intractable ways. As Richard Keller has pointed out, the rule of ‘the autonomous European’ – as much a constructed figure as ‘the dependent African or Asian’ – relied above all on the power of European reason.57 Sanity was vital to the composition of racial difference because on it all other civilising aptitudes depended. Yet, as we have seen already, ‘symptoms of insanity’ in the colonial context could include a remarkably wide array of circumstances and behaviours. Indeed, anything that departed from that narrow range of emotional possibility that ‘the European’ described was liable to be construed as evidence of mental aberration. Just as insanity among colonial Europeans was inescapably problematic, therefore, the construction of certain behaviours as insane could provide a valuable coercive means for controlling deviance in its turn.58 The letter from Ainsworth to Davidson’s brother in Durban is the earliest record we have of a European suffering from mental illness in what was to become Kenya Colony. As a source, the letter is as powerful for what it does not say as for what it does. What, one wonders, were the symptoms of insanity that Davidson developed? How were they detected? Why, indeed, had Davidson come to Nairobi in the first place? In terms of empirical, documentary evidence, we can only draw a blank. Only once the institutional means were developed for the treatment of the mentally ill did Kenya’s white insane generate an archival presence. Yet not until the later 1930s did psychiatric treatment within Kenya develop from a primarily custodial function to one of care.59 While we can attempt to reconstruct life histories of Kenya’s white insane for the later colonial period, for Kenya’s early years we have only scattered biographical fragments and the folklore of the frontier.

The inter-war years If Kenya’s cult of unconventionality developed during its ‘pioneer’, pre-1914 period, it reached its apogee during the inter-war years. Indeed, it was from the eccentricity of Kenya’s socialite settlers at this time – reducible effectively to ‘Happy Valley’ – that much of Kenya’s celebrity appeal was established.60 At the same time, however, as the European population steadily increased, recurrent economic crises drove many settlers into poverty. Most newcomers gave up and returned home. Nine out of ten new arrivals to Kenya in the interwar years left. Failure was less exception than the norm.61 During this [ 57 ]

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intermediate phase, meanwhile, the increasing challenge of deviant Europeans was met with increasingly sophisticated systems of social control. It was in the aftermath of the First World War that serious statesponsored attempts were begun to transplant a British settler community to East Africa. The Soldier-Settlement scheme brought 685 new settlers to Kenya; by 1921 the European population had reached 10,000 – double the pre-war figure.62 While settler agriculture developed only fitfully, far more significant in shaping Kenya’s international reputation was the continued expansion of the safari industry and the emergence of the colony as a favoured setting for romantic fiction.63 From Kenya’s ‘wide open spaces’ derived a libidinous appeal. Significantly, a prominent typological component within ‘the Kenya novel’ was the figure of the great white hunter – the Victorian adventurer reworked for the age of tourist travel and commercialised ‘sport’. Indeed, it was during the inter-war years that safari tourism emerged as a key discursive site in the propagation of the idea of Kenya as a site of licence.64 Things happened on safari that could not happen during the usual social round. Specifically, white women could be sexualised: desirous of the primal physicality of the white hunter, the colony’s epic natural splendour lent discursive cover. As the safari was constructed as a mobile – and temporary – licentious site, Happy Valley constituted its locational equivalent. By the later 1920s the term had emerged as a byword for generic settler excess but it referred specifically also, to the Wanjohi Valley near Gilgil. As recent publications attest, the popular appetite for stories of Happy Valley shows no sign of abating.65 The deviance attributed to these socialite settlers, however, was not of the kind discussed above: whites here had sex with each other, not with Africans; the Wanjohi Valley was violent certainly but violence formed no part of the Happy Valley myth; these settlers were anything but poor. Yet Kenya’s hedonism excited alarm nonetheless. Margery Perham, visiting Kenya in 1929, described what she discovered when she arrived in Nairobi with some disquiet: As far as I could see Nairobi was largely peopled with young men wearing corduroy plus-fours or shorts, lurid green, orange, blue and purple shirts, and Stetson-hats. Some had revolvers in their belts. They imparted a certain reckless Wild West atmosphere to the town but some of them, to judge by their looks, would have to be very careful if they were not to become ‘poor whites’ in the almost technical South African sense.66

Poor whites ‘in the almost technical, South African sense’ meant men insensitive to the need for social discipline in a country where black outnumbered white. If freedom from social constraint was one of [ 58 ]

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Kenya’s great advantages, Perham implied, it needed to be reconciled, even subordinated, to that demand for social conformity by which settler colonialism was so strenuously defined. The men that Perham invoked were not poor, it is important to note, but reckless. Too much drinking, too much young, unconstrained spirit, endangered what more sensible heads knew to be sacrosanct – the collective endeavour that was the daily upkeep of white prestige. Only as long as Europeans were watchful of their conduct, and of each other, it was implied, would a poor white problem be forestalled.67 Foran went further. To him, Kenya’s socialite settlers were not only picturesque but dilettante as well. He described those gathered at Nairobi’s other notable hotels: At Nairobi there was an Old Stanley and a New Stanley Hotel, where the types who gathered there resembled some of those portrayed in Westerner films – rifles, revolvers or knives on belts, gaudy scarves, cowboy hats, rattling spurs of astonishing length, and brightly coloured shirts … At Nairobi in 1929 this peculiar atmosphere was still rampant. Nairobi had become a counterpart of small towns being developed in cowboy country on the Western prairies of America or Canada. Spectacles witnessed in Nairobi were often staggering to contemplate. Young ‘dizzy blondes’ could be seen parading the streets garbed exactly like a cowgirl in a Westerner film, but with a gold-rimmed monocle in one eye and smoking a cigarette in a long fancy holder.68

Honest, upstanding settlers disapproved of such goings on.69 To coun­­ ter­­­act Kenya’s ‘champagne air’, self-discipline was needed and a level head.70 The novelist, Nora Strange (whose own writing had done much to propagate the image of Kenya as a place of romance and adventure), combined prevailing climatic theory with a conservative bourgeois vision: The psychology of Kenya seems to emphasis the latent good and bad qualities in human nature. It makes for independence, initiative and good fellowship, but in course of time, it appears to undermine stability of purpose and blurs that all-essential, all-necessary sense of proportion, which should form the social basis of a country … Nerves are the bugbear of this speed-loving, speed-living age, not the sole prerogative of Kenya, where the altitude and rarified atmosphere take their toll of human resistance. Kenya calls for a temperately led existence. Nature herself is so prolific that she unconsciously forces the pace, and perhaps causes people to live dangerously from every point of view. Discipline is not a fashionable word these days, but that does not detract from the truth that it is the keynote of character. For all that domesticity may be laughed at as being dull and stodgy, in the long run it makes for human happiness and triumphs over irregularity of living.71

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As the citation makes clear, climactic theories were deployed in order to underline the need for moderation and restraint. Nerves were liable to fray if not assiduously controlled.72 The cultural philistinism of socialite settlers, moreover, threw the civilising mission into doubt. Africans, Julian Huxley warned, were being exposed to ‘a second rate Tatlerism’.73 Others fell back on the defence that such high-class deviants were, by nature, exceptional. The vast majority of Kenya’s settlers, as Joseph Gregory argued, were ‘the right type: fine strong, determined Britishers with a grand reputation behind them and a desire to make good that only the most severe adversity could suppress.74 To many whites in Kenya, socialite settlers were not settlers at all but ‘birds of passage’, holidaying in the ‘winter home for aristocrats’ that Kenya had come to be known. These people were not of the colony but sojourners within it, as illegitimate as the wrong-headed liberal and the detribalised native – and as dangerous as well. Although they might set a bad example for Africans, however, their wealth and social intuition ruled out the possibility of socialite settlers contacting Africans in subversive ways. While Happy Valley stole the headlines, ‘poor whites’ were discursively secreted and coercively controlled. While the importation of the Indian Legal Code into Kenya into 1902 provided the legal mechanisms for dealing with poor whites, it was not until the wake of the First World War that serious attention was paid to their effectiveness. New laws tightened up the system: the Immigration Restriction Ordinance of 1919 allowed for the deportation of anyone convicted within five years from the date of their entering the Colony of an offence punishable with imprisonment. The following year a revised vagrancy ordinance allowed for the repatriation, to Britain or elsewhere, of any European convicted as a vagrant.75 Those sentenced to longer terms of imprisonment, it was likewise recommended, were to be sent to England to serve out their sentence. ‘Europeans should not be imprisoned in this country,’ wrote Governor Grigg in 1926, ‘not only because of the difficulty in securing that standard of discipline and treatment which is necessary and desirable, but also because of the paramount importance of preventing the continued residence in this country of Europeans who have been guilty of serious crimes.’76 European prisoners, it was observed, would inevitably be confined in the same prisons as Africans and be guarded by African warders, a dangerous affront to racial prestige. It was becoming increasingly apparent, however, that regardless of the costs of deportation, provision was required to deal with impoverished Europeans within Kenya itself. In 1923, government agreed to provide an annual subsidy to the Salvation Army to accommodate ‘deserving’ cases at their hostel in Nairobi.77 When destitute Europeans [ 60 ]

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were charged as vagrants, magistrates were expected to use their discretion: if the case appeared deserving, the magistrate was empowered to remand the person in question and arrange for his accommodation with the Salvation Army.78 This way, Kenya’s deserving poor avoided the stigma of conviction while government avoided the financial and administrative costs of arranging for their deportation to Britain.79 The problem of impoverished Europeans in Kenya did not seriously worry authorities, however, until later in the decade when the collapse of world food prices coincided with successive years of drought. Elspeth Huxley describes the effect on the settler economy: As the depression deepened, farmers and businessmen went bankrupt in all directions and their fate was grim. There was no social security, no insurance, no dole, nothing between them and starvation but the kindness of still solvent friends.80

In the settler newspaper, the East African Standard, impoverished Europeans appealed for work. Up-country, some distressed settlerfarmers were reduced to subsisting on maize-meal porridge – ‘Africans’ food’ – supplemented by whatever vegetables they could grow and buck they could shoot.81 On the Trans-Nzoia plateau, a local hotelier fed the ‘down and out’ farmers.82 During 1929 alone, the Salvation Army supplied almost four thousand beds and over ten thousand meals to needy Europeans – this at a time when the total number of Europeans in the colony stood at only 15,000.83 To raise public awareness of the problem, the Salvation Army published a fund-raising brochure in which was described the circumstances pertaining to some of the people who had recently received assistance.84 Among them was a woman whose husband was in prison pending deportation, another who was described only as ‘a danger to the colony’ and an elderly woman discovered by the police to be living in a ‘native hut’ in the Kilimani area of Nairobi. That these people were poor was only part of the problem; that they violated racial boundaries was of more urgent concern. ‘There are English boys’, observed a settler, ‘working with Africans in garages and English girls serving in Indian shops. No matter how much one may dislike colour bars, in Kenya one sometimes wishes there was one to prevent Europeans going down.’85 In each of those cases deemed undeserving the Salvation Army arranged for the individual’s removal from the colony, either to Britain or South Africa, with the support of a charitable organisation, the League of Mercy, and government funds.86 Poverty among white settlers is customarily imagined as a rural phenomenon yet it is important to note that throughout the 1930s the Salvation Army was providing to significant numbers of urban poor. [ 61 ]

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Significantly, support for the Salvation Amy’s work was mobilised on grounds of white prestige. Assurances were made that no monies donated would be used for anything other than European welfare; the Salvation Army hostel, it was stressed, was for Europeans only. Those who could pay some or all of the 5 shillings rate per day did so; others were subsidised until their removal from the colony could be arranged.87 Some applications for admission to the hostel had to be refused – sixteen in just one month – owing to lack of accommodation. The point was stressed, moreover, that, because welfare services for Europeans in the colony were so limited, the alternative to the Salvation Army hostel was frequently the jail. As we shall see, it was not until the late colonial period than an alternative institutional solution to the poor white problem was proposed but the genesis of this policy can be dated to the years of the depression. Crucially, the moral appeal to compassion was merged with the morality of the civilising mission. Prestige made benevolence out of race: The value of this work cannot be overestimated. With such comparatively few Europeans resident here side by side with an enormous Asiatic and Native population, every endeavour must be used to prevent the growth of an indigent European section of the community, particularly at this stage of the Colony’s development.   Our people are here to serve those higher interests which make for the physical, moral, and spiritual uplift of all in Kenya without respect to Nationality or Creed.88

The connection between the supposed absence of deviant Europeans and the credibility of the civilising idea had been articulated earlier in the inter-war period, when the controversy that surrounded Indians’ claims for political enfranchisement made clear the link between the pre-eminent political position of the Europeans and their supposedly unique ability to foster civilisation among ‘backward races’. ‘We are now called upon to face the African,’ ran an editorial in the East African Standard, ‘and in this aspect he is peculiarly favoured because here among the Europeans there is hardly any of the “poor white” class to which otherwise he would inevitably be drawn.’89 Colonisation, as Elspeth Huxley wrote, could only succeed if it was entrusted to ‘the best among the colonising race’: no poor whites gave truth to the lie that enterprise and character were racially confined.90 Distressed Europeans themselves often appealed directly to government for help. Some wrote to the colonial secretariat to plea for financial support; others requested reductions in school and hospital fees.91 To assist deserving cases government made available a small fund for the ‘maintenance of destitute persons’, presided over by a committee which included representatives of the Salvation Army, the [ 62 ]

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League of Mercy and the East Africa Women’s League.92 One appellant, George Palmer, who had come to Kenya in 1915 from India, had been employed until 1922 as a locomotive driver on the Uganda Railway. In the following fifteen years he struggled to hold down regular work and in 1939 he appealed to the government for financial support. Noted to be ‘well-dressed and well-spoken’, Palmer was granted an indefinite allowance of £4 a month.93 Harold Thomas appeared less deserving but also managed to obtain a maintenance grant from the Kenya government. Like Palmer, Thomas had been employed on the Uganda railway, recruited from South Africa in 1919. Fifteen years later, he was unemployed and destitute, having been retrenched from his job in 1932. More worrying for the authorities was the fact that since 1922 Thomas had been living with a Seychellois woman with whom he had raised a family of ten children. Thomas, according to police reports, was ‘lazy’ and undeserving of support; the obvious solution was to have him convicted as a vagrant and deported. The problem remained his children who, because they had been born in Kenya, could not be compelled to leave. Being of mixed race and ‘illegitimate’, no schools would accept them, and charitable organisations refused to countenance support. With no option remaining, government granted Thomas a ‘dole’ of 5 shillings a day.94 Whether this subsidy continued after 1937, at which point records concerning the Thomas family cease (and indeed what became of the Thomas children after this date) is not indicated on his file. Numerous others received maintenance grants from government funds.95 Together, what these cases convey is the absence of anything but the most spartan of government-sponsored welfare for Europeans between the commencement of white settlement and the outbreak of the Second World War. Just how many people struggled to make ends meet, however, is difficult to establish: not all those in straitened circumstances made their presence felt. In a settler-colony, it should be underlined, white welfare was a contradiction in terms and while members of the colonial administration were entitled to subsidised hospital treatment as part of their remuneration, settlers were expected to remain self-sufficient.96 Until 1939, organisations such as the Salvation Army, the East Africa Women’s League and the League of Mercy provided only piecemeal support.97 The limited provision of ‘white welfare’ on the part of colonial regimes has been identified by historians as contributing to the particular privations of colonial life.98 Such limitations might also be taken, however, to suggest that more radical measures of social control – all reflecting the underlying imperative to absent deviant Europeans – worked. While the inter-war depression spelled the end for many [ 63 ]

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settler-farmers, repatriation of the impoverished and deportation of the undesirable, alongside piecemeal philanthropic support for the colony’s deserving poor, continued to contain a poor white problem within manageable bounds. Only in the wake of the Second World War – far more destabilising to Kenya than the Wall Street crash – did the question of deviance emerge as a significant public concern.99

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Late colonial Kenya That the number of poor and marginalised Europeans increased during the late colonial period is perhaps not surprising: as immigration increased, so did the numbers of those living on the edges of respectable, white society. European immigration into Kenya was changing in nature, however, as well as extent. While improved communications made East Africa more accessible, publicity advertising Kenya to the outside world appealed not only to the upstanding, self-reliant settlers the publicists had in mind but also to those displaced and disillusioned; some by war, others by austerity at home and the demise of Britain’s Asian empire.100 A survey of European immigrants conducted in 1957 indicated a level of social diversity considerably greater than twenty years before. Only 10 per cent of the Europeans entering Kenya that year were employed in government service; only 2 per cent in agriculture.101 No longer, as Alison Smith has noted, was it relevant to talk of ‘the settler’ or ‘the administrator’.102 In their place came not only the engineers, locust control officers, technocrats and statisticians of the ‘second colonial occupation’ but also a wide variety of people working in low-level, and often temporary, occupations – as builders and bricklayers, mechanics and metal workers, labourers and plasterers, electricians, foremen and clerks.103 Women, for the first time, made up almost half the European population but whereas the majority of women in Kenya before the war had been married, many of the new post-war arrivals were single and self-reliant, seeking work as nurses, teachers and, increasingly throughout the 1950s, as welfare workers.104 Others worked in less respectable positions, as barmaids and receptionists, secretaries and typists, hairdressers and shop assistants. These were hardly ‘poor whites’ in the traditional sense of the word but representatives of a transient, predominantly urban working class. By 1948 well over half the European population in Kenya were living in towns.105 Most notable, however, is the number of Europeans who were unemployed. Of the 30,000 Europeans in Kenya in 1948, just under half were not gainfully employed, a figure that remained roughly constant for the remainder of the colonial period.106 In part, this reflected a [ 64 ]

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demographic diversification: as the ‘pioneers’ of the frontier days grew old and infirm, new arrivals brought out their wives and children. As the numbers of Europeans working in low-level occupations increased, therefore, so too did the numbers of dependents reliant upon them. To one observant visitor at least, the number of impoverished Europeans in Kenya was clearly on the rise: Evelyn Waugh, retracing the journey he made around East Africa in the 1920s, observed as he arrived in Mombasa in 1959: ‘There are now poor whites in quite formidable numbers – a thing unknown thirty years ago.’107 Research into the social make-up of European communities elsewhere in East Africa during the late colonial period reinforces the argument that white society in Kenya was becoming increasingly heterogeneous. In particular, Cyril Sofer and Rhona Ross’s work on the European community in Jinja, a township in south-eastern Uganda, shows a European community characterised by transience and diversity, above all.108 Of Jinja’s total European population in 1951, less than half had been there for more than six months and only three out of every ten for more than a year.109 Almost a third of these new immigrants, moreover, came not from Britain but from Italy, Denmark and other European countries, many recruited to work on large-scale construction and engineering projects.110 Increasing numbers of Europeans were living outside Jinja’s traditional European quarter. The number of Europeans who did not employ servants or run a car was also on the rise: ‘Today,’ it was observed, ‘one sees Europeans trudging along the roads for miles […] cadging lifts where they can.’111 Many of those working on construction projects were living on the edges of town, in compound accommodation provided by the private contractors who employed them. Living two to a room and dining in a communal hall, this was a community more reminiscent of African migrant labour than it was of white colonial settlement. Also present in the region were several thousand European refugees and prisoners of war, interned in camps across East Africa. In Uganda alone were 7,000 Italian prisoners of war and 8,000 Polish refugees. Added to these, as the Governor later recalled: was a mixed lot of eastern Europeans picked up somewhere in the Middle East. Among them were a Vienna opera singer, an ex-Prussian officer, a Rumanian clown and twenty-one Levantine ladies, who were described as ‘causing havoc’ in the Middle East … The presence in the very heart of Africa of such a motley assembly of White people seemed to me to typify the disruptive character of the Second World War.112

That same disruption affected Kenya where over 50,000 Italian cap­­­­­tives were incarcerated in fourteen POW camps, the largest at Nanyuki.113 [ 65 ]

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From October 1941, groups of Italians were released on parole to work on settler farms. Allied soldiers, meanwhile, thronged Nairobi and Mombasa.114 There were also considerable numbers of Polish refugees in the colony. Pamela Scott recalls two young Polish women employed as nursemaids on a settler farm. ‘They were often hysterical’, she writes, ‘and would talk about committing suicide.’115 For many Europeans in Kenya, it seems, the war was close at hand. As the social profile of Europeans in Kenya was changing, so behavioural codes had also been eroded by the war. Karen Tranborg Hansen has shown that in Northern Rhodesia, new, working-class immigrants, ‘uncertain about the place and role of servants’ and unfamiliar with the mores and manners of colonial society, tended to treat Africans with a mixture of familiarity and crudeness rather than the distance and firmness that was expected of them.116 Hansen has also uncovered evidence to suggest increasing levels of family instability during the 1950s, incorporating a high incidence of break-ups, divorce and especially problems of childrearing and youth.117 Many of the British sailors stationed in Mombasa, Scott recalls, had come from orphanages and boys’ homes.118 Census reports, meanwhile, indicate that during the late colonial period the number of married women in Kenya was almost outnumbered by those unmarried, widowed or estranged.119 The significance of social diversification was not solely economic, in other words, but cultural as well. In 1952 barely a third of Kenya’s whites had known wartime, let alone pre-war Kenya. Garage mechanics, construction engineers, secretaries and salesmen did not share the outlook of older Kenya hands.120 If the privations of the frontier were a thing of the past, meanwhile, the confidence of colonial rule was starting to ebb. New post-war migrants could hardly be expected to be lauded back at home as bearers of a superior culture or as pioneers in a virgin land.121 These were people, as Stephen Constantine argued, less likely to feel themselves part of a Greater Britain than as fragments of diasporic migrant flows.122 While the men and women of the second colonial occupation embodied something of a forward-looking purpose, the ‘pioneers’ (or ‘old settlers’ as they were sometimes known) appeared as ‘burnt out cases from another age’.123 One should not assume, however, that immigrants to Kenya after 1939 were any less conservative in their outlook than the colony’s older Europeans. Indeed, it was precisely because many of the colony’s new white settlers were not rich that they were apprehensive of social and economic change.124 Among many of the new immigrants to Kenya, Michael Blundell recalled, were people who could not adjust themselves to the ‘social revolution’ of 1945. ‘Naturally inflexible in their outlook and highly conservative,’ Blundell writes, ‘they brought [ 66 ]

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to our political scene an almost fascist concept of organisation and massed emotion.’125 Many of these post-war settlers were demobilised soldiers or officers recently retired from India, staunchly committed to the past as the present overtook them.126 Exiles from decolonisation, these people came to Kenya already embittered. Emigrés not just from India but from Southern Africa as well endured the ‘culture shock’ of moving from one colony, and its attendant racial attitudes, to another. The presence of large numbers of military personnel in the colony, meanwhile, both during and after the Second World War, contributed to the increasing fractiousness of city life. As Foran later recalled: There was looting and theft of Army property, greater traffic problems, disturbances in the streets and bars at such places as Mombasa, Nairobi and Gilgil. Merchant seamen at Mombasa were a particular problem to the Police, and the breaking up of licensed premises were a nightly occurrence.127

Whether this can attest to any kind of social breakdown in late colonial Kenya is unclear. What is undeniable, however, is that the composition of colonial society during and after the Second World War was becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly conflicted. Whiteness was under stress. Also apparent during the late colonial period is the growing attention that was paid, both by community groups such as the East African Women’s League and the colonial government, towards the need for adequate welfare services to keep whiteness intact.

White welfare In 1946 a Social Welfare Organisation was established in Nairobi, headed by a Commissioner for Social Welfare, whose task it was to coordinate the provision of interested organisations. In 1948 the Commissioner submitted her first report.128 Distressed Europeans, the Commissioner wrote, comprised three distinct groups: ‘widows and children, the aged or incapacitated of respectable character and persons of both sexes who were unemployed through their own fault’. While a shortage of accommodation for persons in distress affected all these groups, it was the latter – the undeserving – who were the most intractable. Because charitable organisations were not obliged to accept applicants, frequently the ‘less commendable members of the community’ were refused admission. With limited budgets, organisations such as the League of Mercy were bound to prioritise respectable Europeans over ‘worthless individuals’. Moreover, because the committee that decided grants for the relief of distress was made up of representatives from these same organisations, those deemed unworthy [ 67 ]

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of assistance were liable to remain barred from reprieve. ‘It follows’, wrote the Commissioner, ‘that a point is reached in the career of the known wastrel when he or she is refused all further help and there is no alternative but a vagrancy charge. In the meantime he or she may resort to ‘nefarious business’. With a criminal conviction, moreover, an individual was unlikely to gain further employment. ‘Idleness in its turn’, the Commissioner continued, ‘brings contact with acquaintances of similar habits and further disastrous consequences ensue.’ A vicious circle formed, in short, by which an individual’s worsening public reputation led to his – or her – increasing social marginalisation. At the Salvation Army Hostel in Nairobi, it was observed, respectable people including young women and children were accommodated alongside destitute persons of doubtful character. ‘A situation in which young and old, good and bad, healthy and decrepit, are obliged to be mixed,’ the commissioner noted, ‘is most unsatisfactory.’ Apart from the Salvation Army, however, there were no other organisations in Kenya prepared to assist the colony’s ‘less deserving’. What was needed, according to the Commissioner’s report, was machinery that expressly targeted Kenya’s reprobate poor. Repatriation, by 1948, was no longer a viable option. In a European community of this size, wrote the Commissioner, it was inevitable that quite a number of social misfits would be produced that would then become ‘a burden on society’. It was a burden, moreover, that could no longer be evaded by a policy of repatriation. As the Commissioner explained: In certain cases repatriation is now impossible as for instance in the case of Europeans born in India or Burma. Furthermore, a Kenya born generation is now reaching middle age. In other cases also repatriation cannot be regarded as a wholly satisfactory solution as the repatriates would almost inevitably be a permanent charge on the tax payers of their country of origin – usually the United Kingdom – to which the individual has seldom contributed anything, having been absent for many years.129

In response to the Commissioner’s report and continued urgings from the East African Women’s League for government to tackle the problem of derelict Europeans, in July 1949 a committee was appointed to comprehensively investigate the problem of poverty among Kenya’s immigrant populations. ‘There is something ­objectionable’, the committee averred, ‘about shipping people away from what has become their home to places with which they have lost all contact.’ In the event of repatriation being inapplicable, there needed to be ‘a definition of responsibility within the Colony itself’.130 Echoing the Commissioner for Social Welfare, the committee reiterated that the [ 68 ]

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problem was exacerbated now that a generation had grown up in Kenya with no affiliations to the United Kingdom.131 By 1950 over a quarter of Europeans in Kenya were ‘Kenya-born’.132 As to the extent of the problem, the commission’s report concluded that, while distress among Europeans could not be said to be very serious, if impoverished Europeans were not assisted they would ‘inevitably attract attention’.133 This was the key point and while it would be futile to judge whether government concern for European welfare was motivated by compassionate concern or a more impersonal logic of social control, what undeniably differentiated colonial from metropolitan welfare reform was the key criterion of prestige. ‘Attracting attention’ was a euphemism for the unsightly prospect of a colonial racial order visibly undermined. Concerns with racial prestige, moreover, took on added urgency as Europeans in Kenya defended their right to continued minority rule.134 Such concerns were most clearly apparent in the formation of the European Welfare Society in 1955. Instigated by the European Electors’ Union, a series of meetings was held in December 1955 at which the ‘poor white problem’ was discussed. In the undesirable quarters of Nairobi and in various other towns across Kenya, it was stated, were to be found increasing numbers of ‘down and outs, alcoholics, ne’er-dowells and degenerates’. Dealing with European poverty, it was argued, was necessary ‘not only from the humanitarian point of view but also from the realistic view-point that our continuance as a Community and as Leaders is at stake.’ As a Welfare Society publicity brochure set out: We are a young Colony [but] as the Colony grows older so will the problem be increased and unless steps are taken now it is likely to get out of hand … Kenya has become our home and in Kenya we intend to stay. It does not take much imagination to picture the effect upon Asians and Africans when they see the depths to which some Europeans have sunk. Indeed we cannot afford to have such a canker in our midst which daily undermines our prestige.135

Elsewhere, historians have (quite rightly) pointed out the problematic presence of poor whites in colonial domains. It might also be noted, however, that attending to such a problematic presence serviced other needs. As anti-colonials, in Kenya and elsewhere, claimed their liberation, colonial communities were forced to present themselves not only to the people over whom they aspired to rule but also to critics around the world as the rightful custodians of progress for all. Dealing with the ‘poor white’ problem was essential, as the European Welfare Society had it, ‘for the preservation of our good name and for the maintenance [ 69 ]

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of our position as leaders’.136 While the Mau Mau emergency imperilled Kenya’s colonial future, in other words, it also enabled commitment to that future to be rhetorically renewed. As Kenya’s Great White Hunters were figuratively reworked in the forests of the Aberdares, white men sleeping rough in Nairobi presented a disturbing anomaly.137 ‘Whites must either lead this land,’ wrote a correspondent to the East African Standard as early as 1939, ‘or, sooner or later, they must quit this land.’138 Never more urgently needed was the totemic figure of the judicious, benevolent European. The emergence of European ‘degenerates’ as a public concern can to some extent, therefore, be explained by the fact that the voicing of public alarm allowed colonial Europeans to articulate their dedication to a healthy – and enduring – communal presence. The irony here is that the welfare of Kenya’s colonial Europeans became a significant public concern precisely at the point that a viable colonial future was itself disappearing out of view. Disposing of those newly-arrived into Kenya was far less problematic than dealing with the ‘Kenya-born’. While immigration restrictions worked to limit the entry into Kenya of the poor or uncommitted, improvements in the colony’s education facilities were intended to prevent the poor white problem arising from within.139 Preventing the problem from coming to pass, however, could only ever be partially successful. In 1955 the Federation of Social Services approached the Secretary of Local Government to request that 200 acres of land be made available to set up an institution for dealing with European ‘degenerates’.140 The problem was essentially one of an increasingly visible vagrant class. Just as Pelham Fooks had exercised minds in the colony’s early days, so one man in particular concentrated the authorities’ attention at its end. Little is known of Clive Percival Taylor other than that by 1955 he had over thirty criminal convictions for a range of minor infractions including theft, vagrancy, trespass and appearing drunk and disorderly. Described variously in government records as ‘drunk’, ‘derelict’ and ‘degenerate’, Clive Taylor was almost certainly an alcoholic living rough in Nairobi who by the mid-1950s had become a familiar face to the Kenya police. The trouble for the colonial authorities was that Clive Taylor was not alone. According to one estimate, there were at least twenty-five unemployed – ‘and unemployable’ – Europeans in the vicinity of Nairobi.141 Community organisations were doubtless alarmed by the threat these people posed to European prestige but they refused to offer assistance to those they judged to be unworthy of their help. In this sense, Clive Taylor cut an exemplary figure, anathema to a colonial society that depended on the enterprise and the dynamism of its European members to enforce their political claims. In a letter to the Colonial Secretariat, the Secretary [ 70 ]

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for Social Welfare set out the problem that ‘down and outs’ such as Clive Taylor presented: The three organizations which might help Taylor are the League of Mercy, the Salvation Army and British Legion but they are all sufficiently extended to have no doubt whatsoever that their funds should be used for more deserving cases. I can see little hope of their changing their minds and I confess I think their point of view a correct one … I think I should also throw cold water over the suggestion that we should ship ‘Clive Taylors’ of this Colony to the UK or anywhere else. I have already made arrangements for one or two other doubtfuls including a prostitute to be given an assisted passage to the UK and in one case of which I know of [whereby] a man was repatriated by another Ministry the Chairman of the National Assistance Board wrote a personal letter of complaint to the Colonial Office. The foisting of our responsibilities upon the taxpayer in another part of the world, in other words, is not welcome.142

An institution within Kenya at which such people could be forcibly committed offered the solution to the colony’s ‘poor white’ problem, now impossible to ignore. Possibilities for rehabilitation would be provided by agricultural work but the main benefit to the institution would be to keep reprobates out of public sight; to put them somewhere ‘out of mischief’ as the Secretary explained.143 To assess the extent of the problem – and to mobilise ­government support – a police investigation was undertaken to establish how many people ‘of the same type’ as Clive Taylor were residing in Nairobi, people ‘whose drunken and degenerate habits’ constituted an embarrassment and who should be considered likely inmates of the prospective institution. The resulting ‘list of European degenerates’, submitted by the Kenya Police to the Secretary for Defence in April 1957, provides a graphic glimpse of life on the edges of colonial society in 1950s Kenya (see Appendix III).144 Of the thirty-one people listed, a third were women, almost all of whom were separated from their husbands. Several of these women were noted as being ‘morally loose’ or of ‘unsavoury reputation’. Of the men, most had convictions for a range of petty crimes, including vagrancy, appearing drunk and disorderly, obtaining by false pretences, theft and trespass. Most striking, however, is the manner by which this information is conveyed. Configured through the discursive conventions of a police report, life histories are compressed into abbreviated short-hand prose. Each entry encapsulates the need for the confinement of an individual but beyond the one or two key facts that distil the racial crime of transgression lie hinterlands of biographical detail. Some entries are as sparse as they are emphatic: [ 71 ]

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Mary Van Vluten – immoral character – drunkard. Alfred Maclean – married to a Nandi woman.145

Others are more suggestive. In some instances, the whereabouts of the individual are not known. Cornelius Wellman, for example, was noted to have been charged recently in Eldoret for creating a disturbance but was believed to have gone consequently to Mombasa. In some cases, the very identity of the listed degenerate is not clear: Alison Riley had two aliases: Alison Macginn and Alison Walker. Rosemary StewartPrince was previously Mrs Meyrick but had reverted to her maiden name. Some of those listed had been seen to have transgressed the spatial boundaries that structured colonial society. Frederick Martin was noted to frequent Asian and African bars. Stewart Prince had been seen in ‘San Chique, Oriental and Railway Station Bars’. These are the stories of ‘ruined alcoholics’, to borrow Jock McCulloch’s phrase, but they are more than that as well. Frederick Martin had been convicted for embezzling cargo; Sidney Chivers had convictions for vagrancy, theft, traffic ordinances and possession of HM Forces equipment; John Percival was on a charge of murder in Tanganyika; Austin Murphy had traffic offences in Ireland, one of which involved manslaughter. Mary O’Brien – the name suggests she was also Irish – was managing the Harcourt Guest House. She was also in debt, of unsavoury reputation and, most allusively, was known to ‘frequent Nairobi’. The subtext in all of these potted histories is clear: Warning! Degenerates are endangering the myth on which all of our fortunes depend. The practical problem facing government now was how to achieve the legal means to forcibly incarcerate people whose ‘unsavoury character’ or ‘degenerate habits’ constituted no legal offence. Alcoholism, as in Britain, was in the nineteen fifties seen more often as moral failing than mental illness but in neither Kenya nor Britain was addiction to alcohol against the law.146 Vagrancy legislation, moreover, did not refer to alcoholics. ‘What really is required’, wrote the Director of Medical Services in October, 1957, ‘is an Ordinance along the lines of the Inebriates Act 1898 of the United Kingdom.’147 Such legislation, if adopted, would provide the means to incarcerate persons judged to be alcoholic: the 1898 Inebriates Act allowed for the confinement of ‘habitual drunkards’ in designated reformatories across Britain for a period up to three years.148 In 1950s Kenya, as in Victorian Britain, the ‘drunkard’ and the ‘degenerate’ occupied an ambiguous social position, neither mentally ill nor criminally culpable yet an affront to social order nonetheless. The proposed institution for European degenerates in Kenya sought to plug this gap: well away from the temptations [ 72 ]

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of city life, inmates would find redemption in the bracing air and the honest toil that was the supposed hallmark of Kenya’s highland farms. The institution was conceived, therefore, as a respite from the temptations of city life at the same time that ‘Kenya Colony’ itself was presented beyond its borders as a haven from the modern world. Although new legislation modelled on the Inebriates Act of 1898 was discounted by the colonial government the Institution for European degenerates went ahead nonetheless, under the auspices of the European Welfare Society.149 Opened in March 1960, the institution accommodated ten inmates by the end of the year, seven of whom entered voluntarily and three of whom were remanded on probation from the courts.150 An institutional solution to Kenya’s ‘poor white’ problem could never be realistically entertained, however, not unless it contained within it a more substantive aspect of medical or rehabilitative care than that on offer here.151 As deviance was controlled discursively, so deviants were socially controlled – not so much by confinement within as removal away from white society. From the inadequacy of Kenya’s institutions of confinement for accommodating Europeans – as well as from the sense that the European criminal and the insane were by nature incongruous in the colonial context – came the development of repatriation as the keystone of colonial social control. Only at the Mathari Mental Hospital were significant numbers of Europeans confined – and only here can the records be found by which to reconstruct the detail of their lives.

Notes   1 Lynette Jackson, Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Racial Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, p. 33.   2 Kai Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Wiley, 1966), p. 7.   3 See for example, Alexandra Fuller’s account of Southern Rhodesia prior to Zimbabwean independence: ‘The valley represented the insanity of the tropics so precarious for the fragile European psyche. The valley could send you into a spiral of madness overnight if you were white and highly strung.’ A. Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (London: Picador, 2002), p. 47.   4 C. J. D. Duder, ‘Love and the Lions’, p. 431. ‘Alcohol, altitude and adultery’ was another formula to which settler Kenya was not infrequently reduced. Trzebinksi, The Pioneers of Kenya, p. 86.   5 Dundas, African Crossroads, p. 58; R. A. Wilkinson, cited in Trench, Men who Ruled Kenya, p. 120.   6 Norden, White and Black, p. 62.   7 Arnold, ‘European Orphans’, p. 120.   8 David Lambert, ‘Liminal Figures: Poor whites, Freedmen, and Racial Re-inscription in colonial Barbados’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19: 3 (2001), p. 341.   9 Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories’, p. 151. 10 Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Charlottesville:

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madness and marginality University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 347. 11 Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories’, pp. 140–1. 12 Kennedy, Islands of White, p. 173. 13 Brian Du Toit, The Boers in East Africa Ethnicity and Identity (Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey, 1998), p. 105; Lonsdale, ‘Home County, p. 87. 14 Shadle, ‘Poor Whites, Jewganda, and Raving Dutchmen’. 15 Beckles, ‘Black Over White’, p. 5. 16 Huxley, White Man’s Country, II, pp. 253–4; Susanne Klausen, ‘“Poor Whiteism”, White Maternal Mortality, and the Promotion of ‘Public Health’: The Department of Public Health’s Support for Contraceptive Services in South Africa, 1930–1938’, South African Historical Journal, 45: 1 (2001); Chloe Campbell, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Colonial Kenya (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 46, 124; Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 173–80; Lis Lange, White, Poor and Angry: White Working Class Families in Johannesburg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 133–64; Buettner, Empire Families, pp. 74–89; Stoler, Canal Knowledge and Imperial Power, pp. 64–6; Kennedy, Islands of White, pp. 42–3, 81–2, 170–1; Fischer-Tiné, Low and Licentious Europeans, pp. 135–41. 17 Dundas, African Crossroads, p. 58. 18 Scott, A Nice Place to Live, p. 47. 19 Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun, p. 128. As Gregory recalled: ‘It was the custom to wear clothes till they literally dropped off, as the older the clothes the older the settler and new clothes were thought to indicate a greenhorn.’ James Gregory, Under the Sun, p. 7. 20 John Gunther, Inside Africa (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), p. 318. For other intimations of the cult of unconventionality that Kenya afforded, see Frederic de Janzé, Vertical Land: Descriptions of Life in Africa (London: Duckworth, 1928), p. 35; Strange, Kenya Today, p. 14; Sacha Carnegie, Red Dust of Africa (London: Peter Davies, 1959), p. 220; Seaton, Lion in the Morning, p. 20; Scott, A Nice Place to Live, pp. 47, 155. 21 Dundas, African Crossroads, p. 58. 22 Maevis Birdsey, ‘Sigh Softly African Winds’, p. 106; Eric Dutton, ‘Night of the Hyena’, RH: Micr. Afr. 587, p. 38; C. T. Todd, ‘Kenya’s Red Sunset’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 917 p. 41. 23 One notable female settler, Mary Walsh – or ‘pioneer Mary’ as she was sometimes called – was known for her ready use of the sjambok. Such propensity for violence was a significant part of her (affectionate) reputation and may well have done much to excuse her otherwise anomalous presence as a twice-married white woman on the unsettled frontier. Nicholls, Red Strangers, p. 32; Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers, pp. 18–20. On women in the early settler colony see Diana Jeator, ‘No Place for a Woman: Gwelo Town, Southern Rhodesia, 1894–1920’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 26: 1 (2000). The reason why the famous Grogan beating of 1909 was controversial, at least as far as the settler community was concerned, was not because the violence was thought to be excessive or illegitimate but because it had been censured by the colonial government. See Shadle, ‘White Settlers and the Law in Early Colonial Kenya’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 4: 3 (2010), p. 517 and Anderson, ‘Punishment, Race and “The Raw Native”’. 24 For the full account of this episode see Ronald Hyam, ‘Concubinage and the Colonial Service: the Crewe Circular’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14: 3 (1986). 25 Leys, Kenya, p. 168. 26 Richard Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary, 1902–1906 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1957), p. 34. 27 Trench, Men Who Ruled Kenya, p. 112. 28 See also Meinhertzhagen, Kenya Diary, pp. 9, 12 and Powys, Black Laughter, p. 129. 29 J. H. Clive, ‘A Cure for Insomnia. Reminiscences of Administration in Kenya, 1920–1947’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 678, p. 106.

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no ordinary chaps 30 Notably, Blixen does not mention Cole’s Somali mistress in her book but in the film version of Out of Africa we see her come to Cole’s funeral, where she pays her respects in silence, from beyond the white picket fence of the graveyard. Blixen wrote as Isak Dinesen: Dinesen, Out of Africa (New York: Vintage, 1937). 31 Albert Walter, ‘Echoes of a Vanishing Empire. Being the Memoirs of a Meteorologist and Civil Servant in the Colonial Empire. 1897–1947’, RH: Mss. Brit. Emp. r. 9, 10, p. 229. 32 On the period before the First World War, see Kennedy, Islands of White, pp. 21–7, 42–7 and M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). 33 Strange, Kenya Today, p. 14; Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, p.  172. 34 For an illustration, see Nigel Pavitt, Kenya: A Country in the Making: 1880–1940 (London: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 77. 35 Nicholls, Red Strangers, pp. 33–4; Trzebinksi, The Kenya Pioneers, pp. 9–12. 36 Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers, pp. 9–11; Huxley, Nine Faces of Kenya, p. 70; Nicholls, Red Strangers, pp. 33–4. 37 Philo Pullicino and M. J. Pullicino, Opening Africa: James Martin – From Finding Obama’s Tribe to Founding Nairobi (UK: MPI Publishing, 2008); Edward Paice, Lost Lion of Empire. John Boyes published two volumes of reminiscences describing his life in Kenya. These are: John Boyes, King of the Wakikuyu, ed. C. W. L. Bulpett (London: Methuen, 1911) and Company of Adventurers (London, ‘East Africa’, 1928). See also Charles Miller, Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism (New York: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 356–61, 368–75; Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers, p. 108. 38 Dundas, African Crossroads, p. 58. 39 Kenya National Archives (hereafter KNA): AP / 1 / 258, ‘Deportation of European Undesirables’, Hamilton to Stewart, 20 February 1905. 40 Ibid. 41 KNA: AP / 1 / 258, ‘Deportation of European Undesirables’, Stewart to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 5 June 1905. 42 KNA: AP / 1 / 258, ‘Deportation of European Undesirables’, Alfred Lyttleton, Secretary of State for the Colonies, to Donald Stewart, 16 August 1905. 43 Sections 109 and 110: Indian Criminal Procedure Code. 44 Robert Foran, The Kenya Police, 1887–1960 (London: Hale, 1964), p. 21; Trzebinksi, The Kenya Pioneers, p. 55. 45 Robert Foran, A Cuckoo in Kenya: The Reminiscences of a Pioneer Police Officer in British East Africa (London: Hutchinson, 1936), p. 146. 46 Foran, The Kenya Police, p. 41. 47 Ibid., p. 42. 48 For an overview of the conflicting perspectives on the Cole case, see ‘Galbriath Cole, Murderer’, in Carol Sicherman (ed.), Ngugi wa Thiong’o: A Source Book in Kenyan Literature and Resistance (London, 1990), pp. 333–40. 49 Gerishon M. Kirika, ‘Arthur Ruffelle Barlow’, in Gerald H. Anderson (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1999), p. 44. 50 Derek Peterson, ‘Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries’, The Journal of Religious History, 23: 1 (1999), p. 43. 51 Kirika, Arthur Ruffelle Barlow’, p. 44. 52 Ainsworth to Dickens’ brother, farmer in Natal, 4 September 1903, KNA: PC / COAST / 1 / 12 / 24. 53 Diana Cammack, The Rand At War: The Witwatersrand and the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902 (London: James Currey, 1990), pp. 117–29. For an account of the movement of distressed colonial subjects around the British world during this period see Amy Elizabeth Robinson, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Vagrant, Sailor: Colonial Mobility and the British Imperial State, 1880–1914’ (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2005) and Charles van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007).

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madness and marginality 54 J. S. Marais, The Fall of Kruger’s Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 1–5. 55 Cammack, The Rand at War, p. 19. 56 KNA: PC / COAST / 1 / 12 / 24, Price to Ainsworth, 21 July 1903. 57 Richard Keller, ‘Madness and Colonisation’, p. 298. 58 Vaughan, Curing Their Ills, p. 122. 59 McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, pp. 20–1; Campbell, Race and Empire, pp. 172–3. 60 On Happy Valley, see, among many, James Fox, White Mischief: The Murder of Lord Errol (London: Cape, 1982). 61 Dane Kennedy, ‘Foreword’ to Simpson, The Land That Never Was, p. v. 62 Kennedy, Islands of White, pp. 56, 197; C. J. D. Duder, ‘“Men of the Officer Class”: The Participants in the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme in Kenya’, African Affairs, 92: 366 (1993). 63 C. J. D. Duder, Love and the Lions: The Image of White Settlement in Kenya in Popular Fiction, 1919–1939’, African Affairs, 90: 360 (1991). 64 Edward Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), pp. 119–22. 65 Popular histories that emphasise the elite settler culture of Kenya include Miller, The Lunatic Express; Nicholas Best, Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya (London: Secker & Warburg, 1979); Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers; Nicholls, Red Strangers. Recent additions include Spicer, The Temptress and Osborne, The Bolter. 66 Margery Perham, East African Journey: Kenya and Tanganyika 1929–30 (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), p. 24. 67 Notably the Governor at the time of Perham’s visit shared similar concerns. See: Edward Grigg, Kenya’s Opportunity: Memories, Hopes and Ideas (London: Faber & Faber, 1955), p. 224. See also Gunther, Inside Africa, p. 317. 68 Foran, The Kenya Police, p. 55. 69 P. A. Clearkin, ‘Ramblings and Recollections of a Colonial Doctor’, RH: Mss. Brit. Emp. r. 4, Volume II, pp. 144 –5. 70 Seaton, Lion in the Morning, p. 20; Scott, A Nice Place to Live, p. 9; Norden, White and Black, p. 62. 71 Strange, Kenya Today, p. 170. 72 See also Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 338; Lander, My Kenya Acres, p. 43; Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, p. 6. 73 Julian Huxley, Africa View (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), pp. 212–13. 74 Gregory, Under the Sun, p. 8. See also Foran, A Cuckoo in Kenya, p. 87; Scott, A Nice Place to Live, p. 33; Michael Blundell, A Love Affair With the Sun, p. 13, and (sarcastically), Noel Smith papers, RH: Micr. Afr. 599, pp. 6, 9, 22. 75 KNA: AG / 16 / 240, Acting Solicitor General to Governor, 22 October 1925. For papers dealing with individuals deported from Kenya during the interwar years, see KNA: PC / COAST / 2 / 3 / 3 and KNA: PC / COAST / 1 / 3 / 174. 76 KNA: AG / 16 / 243, Governor to Leopold Amery, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Despatch no. 33, 9 September 1926. 77 KNA: AP / 1 / 1105, Attorney General to Chief Secretary, 8 January 1923. 78 KNA: GH / 27 / 8, Salvation Army. 79 KNA: AP / 1 / 1105, G. Northcote to Treasurer, 26 February 1923. 80 Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun, p. 55. 81 Trench, Men Who Ruled Kenya, p. 71; Lord Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 319. 82 Curtis, Pioneers’ Scrapbook, p. 120; Peter Evans, Law and Disorder or Scenes of Life in Kenya (London: Secker & Warburg, 1956), p. 10. 83 Lady Grigg, Speech to League of Mercy Annual General Meeting, East African Standard, 25 January 1930; KNA: AP / 1 / 1105, Attorney General to Chief Secretary, 8 January 1923; KNA: GH / 27 / 8, Salvation Army; KNA: AP / 1 / 1105, G. Northcote to Treasurer, 26 February 1923.

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no ordinary chaps   84 KNA: GH / 27 / 8, The Salvation Army, ‘Kenya Colony: A Resume of Social Service Activities among Europeans’, 1929.   85 Macdonald, ‘African Roundabout’, p. 148.   86 The League of Mercy was founded in 1910, its aim to assist Europeans in Kenya of all ages ‘who need our help through poverty, broken homes, [and] lack of work.’ KNA: BZ / 5 / 5, Mrs Mackay, Honorary Secretary, League of Mercy, testimony to Child Welfare Survey, 1960.   87 Salvation Army, ‘Resume of Social Service Activities’.   88 Ibid.   89 East African Standard, Editorial, 20 June 1923.   90 Huxley, White Man’s Country, I, p. 64.   91 For applications to government for financial support see KNA: AH / 13 / 132; JA / 25 / 1 and PC / RVP. 6A / 16 / 18.   92 KNA: JA / 25 / 1, Troughton to Vasey, 16 June 1948.   93 KNA: PC / RVP. 6A / 16 / 18, Honorary Secretary, Unemployment Executive Committee to District Commissioner, Nakuru, 21 April 1939.   94 KNA: PC / RVP. 6A / 1 / 9 / 1, Treasurer, Unemployment Executive Committee to Chief Secretary, 29 January and 19 February 1936; Superintendent of Police, to District Commissioner, Eldoret, 20 March 1936; District Commissioner to Treasurer, Nairobi, 22 March 1937.   95 For case-files concerning reduced education and health costs, see KNA series MOH / 1 / 8363 through MOH / 1 / 8428 (for health) and KNA files, ED / 2 / 19910, AV / 1 / 72 and AV / 1/ 73 (for education). For individuals in receipt of maintenance allowances, see KNA: PC / RVP. 6A / 16 / 18 and KNA: JA / 25 / 1   96 Fees at the Mombasa hospital in 1917, for example, were between 2 shillings and 5 shillings per diem according to their pay-grade. Non-officials paid 7 shillings or 12 shillings depending on the room that they occupied.   97 The East Africa Women’s League, founded in 1917, was the colony’s leading community organisation. On the provision of welfare by charitable organisations, see also Janet Seeley, ‘Social Welfare in a Kenyan Town: Policy and Practice, 1902–1963’, African Affairs, 86: 345 (1987).   98 Ernst, Mad Tales, p. 34; Parle, States of Mind, p. 33.   99 On the life of one damaged individual who arrived in Kenya at the late colonial moment, see John Heminway, ‘A Legendary Flying Doctor’s Dark Secret’, FT Magazine, 21 May 2010, www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c2576500–62e7–11df-b1d1–00144 feab49a.html#axzz1iJwldigk (accessed 1 January 2011). 100 On post-war migration out of Britain see: Stephen Constantine, ‘British Emigration to the Empire-Commonwealth since 1880: from Overseas Settlement to Diaspora’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31: 2 (2003), pp. 25–31; James Hammerton, ‘The Quest for Family and the Mobility of Modernity in Narratives of Post-war British Emigration’, Global Networks, 4: 3 (2004); J. Hammerton and A. Thomson, Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (Manchester, 2005). See also Rita Cruise O’Brien, White Society in Black Africa: The French of Senegal (London: Faber & Faber, 1972) p. 66. ­ ovember 101 A. Walter, ‘Report on the Census of non African employees in Kenya, 30 N 1945’. RH: 753. 12. s. 7; P. Duignan and L.H. Gann, White Settlers in Tropical Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 166; Alison Smith, ‘The Immigrant Communities (I): The Europeans’, in D. Low and A. Smith (eds), History of East Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), Volume III, p. 450; Kenya Colony and Protectorate, ‘Report on the Census of the Non-native Population of Kenya Colony and Protectorate taken on the night of the 25th February 1948’, Appendix XIII. 102 Smith, ‘The Europeans’, p. 460. 103 Ibid., p. 460; Gann and Duignan, White Settlers, p. 166. Such a diverse social profile is apparent among the European patients treated at the Mathari Mental Hospital. See Chapters 5 and 6. 104 Smith, ‘The Europeans’, p. 461. 105 Ibid.

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madness and marginality 106 In 1957 the proportion was 46 per cent. Gann and Duignan, White Settlers, p. 166; Kenya Colony and Protectorate, ‘Report on the Census of the Non-native Population of Kenya Colony and Protectorate taken on the night of the 25th February 1948’, p. 67. 107 Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa (London: Chapman & Hall, 1960), pp. 39–40. 108 Rhona Ross and Cyril Sofer, ‘Some Characteristics of an East African European Population’, British Journal of Sociology, 2: 4 (1951). For an anthropological study of European communities in late colonial Tanganyika, see R. E. S. Tanner, ‘Conflict within Small European Communities in Tanganyika’, Human Organisation, 23: 4 (1964). 109 Ibid., p. 317. 110 The proportion of non-British Europeans was yet higher in Tanganyika, where 35 per cent of its European population in 1948 was of non-British origin. Smith, ‘The Europeans’, p. 460. 111 Ross and Sofer, Some Characteristics, pp. 320–1. 112 Dundas, African Crossroads, pp. 220–2. 113 Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich, The British Empire and its Italian Prisoners of War, 1940–1947 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 44–51; Best, Happy Valley, p. 147. All non-allied civilian aliens (including several hundred German-Jewish refugees) were also interned. Cynthia Salvadori, Glimpses of the Jews of Kenya, 1904–2004 (Nairobi: Nairobi Hebrew Congregation, 2004), pp. 42–72. 114 Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London: Continuum 2006), pp. 197–204. 115 Scott, A Nice Place to Live, pp. 153–5. 116 K. T. Hansen, ‘White Women in a Changing World: Employment, Voluntary Work and Sex in Post-World War Two Northern Rhodesia’, in N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 262. 117 Hansen, ‘White Women’, p. 261. 118 Scott, A Nice Place to Live, p. 155. 119 Kenya Colony and Protectorate, ‘Report on the Census of the Non-native Population of Kenya Colony and Protectorate taken on the night of the 25th February 1948’, Appendix VIII. I use the term ‘estranged’ to include women separated from husbands as well as divorcees. 120 My thanks to John Lonsdale for alerting me to this statistic. 121 Smith, The Europeans, p. 465; Allen, Tales from the Dark Continent, p. 111; Farson, Last Chance in Africa (London: Victor Gallancz), p. 25. 122 Stephen Constantine, ‘British Emigration to the Empire-Commonwealth’. 123 Lonsdale, ‘Home County’, p. 103. 124 Evans, Law and Disorder, p. 11. 125 Michael Blundell, So Rough a Wind: The Kenya Memoirs of Sir. Michael Blundell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p. 81. 126 Robert Edgerton, Mau Mau: An African Crucible (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 22. 127 Foran, The Kenya Police, p. 124. 128 KNA JA / 25 / 1, Commissioner for Social Welfare to Chief Secretary, 27 April 1948: ‘Distressed Persons: European Vagrants’. 129 KNA: JA / 25 / 1, Commissioner for Social Welfare, to Chief Secretary, 27 April 1948. 130 KNA: MSS / 15 / 16 / 2, ‘Report on the Relief of Distress among Europeans and Asians’, 1950, p. 15. 131 KNA: GH / 7 / 80, Minster for Local Government, Health and Housing to Chairman, County Council of Nairobi, 19 April 1956. 132 Kenya Colony and Protectorate, ‘Report on the Census of the Non-native Population of Kenya Colony and Protectorate taken on the night of the 25th February 1948’, p. 53. 133 KNA: MSS / 15 / 16 / 2, ‘Report on the Relief of Distress among Europeans and Asians’, p. 5.

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no ordinary chaps 134 135 136 137

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138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149

150 151

W. Jackson, ‘White man’s country’, pp. 352–5. KNA: GH / 7 / 80, Kenya European Welfare Society, Publicity brochure, undated. Ibid. Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 119–48. On the cult of intrepid masculinity in Kenya see John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine Stereotype in late Victorian and Edwardian Times’, in J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 176–98. Cited in Lonsdale, ‘Home County’, p. 99. Kennedy, Islands of White, pp. 169–71; Du Toit, The Boers in East Africa, p. 112. KNA: AH / 13 / 133, Establishment of an Institution for European Degenerates, H. D. Dent, for Secretary of Defence, to Commissioner of Police, Nairobi, 18 January 1957. KNA: AH / 13 / 133, Establishment of an Institution for European Degenerates, John Cusack to W. B. Havelock, Minister for Local Government, Health and Housing, 12 May 1955. KNA: AH / 13 / 133, Secretary for Social Welfare, Memorandum, 14 January 1957. Ibid. KNA: AH / 13 / 133, Commissioner for Police to Secretary of Defence, 19 March 1957. The names used here in reference to the Institution for European Degenerates have not been changed, except for those that also occur also among the Mathari files. Betsy Thom, Dealing with Drink: Alcohol and Social Policy: From Treatment to Management (London: Free Association, 1999), pp. 1–4. KNA: AH / 13 / 133, Director of Medical Services to Secretary for African Affairs, 10 October 1957. G. Hunt, J. Mellor, J. Turner, ‘Wretched, Hatless and Miserably Clad: Women and the Inebriate Reformatories from 1900–1913’, British Journal of Sociology, 40: 2 (1989). KNA: AB / 2 / 14, Rehabilitation of Degenerates, Secretary for Health to Secretary for Community Development, 7 June 1957; Secretary for Community Development to Attorney General, 2 July 1957; GH / 7 / 80, George Nicol to Governor, 6 June 1960. KNA: GH / 7 / 80, George Nicol to Secretary for Health and Welfare, 22 November 1960. KNA: AB / 2 / 14, ‘Rehabilitation of Degenerates, J. P. Webber, Deputy Public Prosecutor to Secretary for Health, 11 May 1957.

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The lives of Kenya’s white insane

The Mathari Mental Hospital was founded in Nairobi in 1910, providing accommodation for eight African patients and only two Europeans.1 At first known simply as the Nairobi Lunatic Asylum, it was not until 1918 that the institution’s name was changed to Mathari and its designation changed from a lunatic asylum to a mental hospital.2 Legislation to authorise the confinement of the insane was provided by the Indian Lunacy Asylums Act 1858. Before an individual could be admitted to the asylum, the Act stipulated that they must first be certified by a magistrate as being ‘of unsound mind’. The magistrate, in turn, was required to examine the individual concerned with the assistance of a medical officer.3 Those suspected of insanity might also be confined for a period of observation, at the conclusion of which they were to be either certified or released. In practice, however, suspected lunatics (Europeans as well as Africans) were frequently incarcerated within the colony’s jails, at Nairobi and Kisumu and at the Mombasa gaol inside Fort Jesus, without due procedure being observed.4 Fort Jesus, for example, had been gazetted as an asylum in 1909 but no rules for its management or instructions for the care of its inmates were issued. Writing to the Provincial Commissioner in 1910, the deputy ­superintendent of the prison intimated that he had been responsible for the custody of suspected lunatics well before the prison was gazetted as an asylum. ‘I very much doubt the legality of its lunatic inmates,’ he complained.5 Transferring the suspected insane to and from court for certification was also problematic. On the completion of an observation period, ‘alleged lunatics’ were moved under police escort from the prison where they had been held to the magistrate’s court. The ­Protectorate’s Principal Medical Officer set out the effects of this procedure on the mental health of the person in question – and on white prestige more generally: [ 80 ]

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Should the person be suffering from delusional insanity, or delusions of persecutions, it is obvious that he may still further be distressed by the fact of his removal under police escort, marched publicly through the streets and detained with other persons awaiting trial within the precincts of the Magistrate’s Court … I submit that under no circumstances should any European, and very few Indians or Natives, be subjected to such treatment.6

Other problems attended the treatment of the European insane. Chief among them was the stigma that attended certification coupled with the widely held belief that treatment within an institution catering in the main for African and Asian patients must itself be inevitably deleterious for Europeans’ mental health. In part, this reflected broader concerns. Explanations for Europeans’ insanity were located in the African environment: only within the familiar environs of ‘home’, it was suggested, could Europeans recover their health. The inadequacy of the accommodation at Mathari gave truth to the lie. Until 1930 little in the way of psychiatric care was provided, wards remained overcrowded and the function of the hospital remained principally custodial – operating, as Jock McCulloch put it, as ‘a holding centre for acutely disturbed Africans and chronically ill Europeans’.7 Those Europeans who were unable to meet the costs of their upkeep, moreover, were likely to become an indefinite financial drain. ‘Europeans who become mentally irresponsible’, wrote the Principal Medical Officer in 1915, ‘become a permanent charge to the Protectorate if they are without means or if their relatives are unwilling to accept the responsibility of their care.’ There was a serious danger, he warned, that the asylum could become ‘the permanent refuge of derelicts whose support should be the care of other countries’.8 It was the combined effect of these factors – the problem of cost, the limitations of care and the widely-held belief in the harmful effects of the tropical climate – that led authorities to envisage the transfer of mentally ill Europeans out of Kenya as the only viable solution to the problem of the European insane. Legislation passed in 1918 allowed for the removal of European ‘lunatics’ to South Africa: paupers and those who identified South Africa as their ‘origin of choice’ could be removed by order of the Governor; others could be removed upon the application of a relative. In a memorandum issued by the Attorney General, the reasons for removal were spelled out: The lack of sufficient and suitable accommodation in this Protectorate for European lunatics, and the unsuitability of the tropical climate for protracted residence, render it highly desirable that some provision be made empowering His Excellency to remove mental patients to more suitable surroundings.9

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madness and marginality

Mentally ill Europeans had, in fact, been transferred to South Africa since the very beginning of European settlement; only with the increased numbers of immigrants to the Protectorate during and after the First World War did the need became clear for a systematised procedure to remove the colony’s white insane.10 Those who came from Britain could, in any case, be returned, the costs of their passage met by relatives or, in the case of their absence, by government funds. Throughout the colonial period, however, Europeans continued to be admitted to Mathari and confined there for considerable periods of time. Although their numbers remained low though the interwar years, during the Second World War the number of Europeans at the hospital dramatically increased and by 1948 the European population resident at the hospital had risen to sixty-eight.11 Files relating to these patients held at Kenya’s National Archives (not unlike those relating to the deportation of ‘undesirables’) provide fragmented life histories, often alongside more immediate accounts of patients’ treatment, their release to relatives or their transfer out of the colony.12 Frequently, documents relate to the management of patients’ property, the payment of their maintenance costs at the hospital and the arrangements for their discharge.13 In at least one case, the magistrate’s order for a patient’s release was cancelled when it was discovered that he was to be supervised by an Indian attendant: as with the management of children, only Europeans were judged able to dispense responsible care.14 Examining these records, we see that many of the patients admitted to the hospital were alcoholic or drug-dependent; others had suffered from malaria or blackwater fever.15 In other cases, patients were financially destitute or had become isolated from other Europeans.16 One woman had been abandoned by her husband; another had been jilted by a fiancé.17 Several male patients had fought in the First World War.18 Others exhibited episodes of inexplicable – and purportedly irrational – violence.19 Several of the patients admitted to Mathari were juveniles. In February 1946, Donald Savage, a seventeenyear-old ‘imbecile’, was transferred from Mathari to the Witrand institution in South Africa, the costs of his residence charged each month to the treasury in Nairobi. Records indicate that in 1969 Savage was still in South Africa, his upkeep still being paid by the (now independent) Kenya government. If and when Savage was released and whether he was able to return to Kenya is not detailed on his file.20 Patchy as these records are, it is difficult to draw meaningful conclusions as to how diagnosis was reached, what kinds of treatment were provided and under what precise circumstances patients were discharged. At the Mathari compound itself, however, case files relating to over 250 European patients have been preserved. Comprising exten[ 82 ]

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the lives of kenya’s white insane

sive case notes, certification documentation and letters of discharge as well as correspondence between doctors, family members, government officials and patients themselves, these files provide an extremely rich and, as yet, untapped historical resource. The case files relating to Europeans treated at Mathari are voluminous but incomplete. The vast majority of the files that survive relate to the late colonial period – specifically, to the twenty-year period between 1939 and 1959. Only a handful of files from the 1930s are available and nothing remains before 1931. Gaps occurring in the file codes, meanwhile, suggest that a significant proportion of the files from this late colonial period are missing. Many of the names of patients mentioned in the Kenya National Archives, moreover, cannot be found among the hospital records. Quite how many files are missing can be roughly deduced from gaps in the code numbers. Because file-codes were listed sequentially and by gender we can establish the likely minimum number of men and women admitted in any given year. The following is a sample code: EU. M. 4 / 55. The code indicates that the patient in question was European (EU), male (M) and was the fourth male European patient to be admitted in 1955 (4/55). By adding together the highest numbers occurring before the oblique stroke ( / ) for men and women respectively, we can calculate the likely minimum number of Europeans admitted in any given year. It must be borne in mind that these are minimum numbers: in 1940, for example, there are no records available for female European patients and only two for males. That one of these male patients has the file code 36/40 tells us that there were at least thirty-six European men admitted to Mathari that year and thus provides our minimum number, but how many European women were admitted we do not know. Appendix 1 indicates the number of files available from 1939 to 1959 and the minimum number of Europeans admitted for each year during this period. From this, we can see that at least four times as many Europeans were admitted to the Mathari hospital than there are case files currently available. Thus we know that each year during this period a minimum average of fifty Europeans were admitted to the hospital but the uneven spread of numbers puts the probable figure far higher. In 1944, for example, at least 154 Europeans were admitted to Mathari but for the following year there are no records at all from which to derive a minimum estimation. Even so, it remains the case that the proportion of Europeans in Kenya admitted for institutional psychiatric care, as against the overall European population, [ 83 ]

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madness and marginality

was at times significantly higher than that in Britain. In 1944, the admission rate into mental hospitals in England and Wales was 116 per 100,000, or 0.116 per cent. That same year, the rate of admission to Mathari (based on minimum figures), at 154 per total population of 20,000, was over six times greater, at 0.77 per cent.21 By the end of that year, the European accommodation at Mathari was noted to be severely overcrowded. Three years later, Mathari’s Europeans were ‘overflowing’ into the nursing homes of Nairobi.22 Also apparent from this table is the impact of the Second World War on the rates of Europeans admitted for psychiatric treatment in Kenya. The inflation in numbers between 1942 and 1944, for example, is doubtless due to the impact of the war. Numerous Italian prisonersof-war were admitted to Mathari during this period, largely because there were no means to forcibly restrain them at the internment camps where they were held.23 Others admitted during the war years were refugees from Europe, members of the British armed forces and women left bereft, abandoned or unconstrained by the presence of husbands, fathers, lovers and friends. Examining these files in depth adds necessary texture to McCulloch’s bald observation that the asylum’s wartime files ‘are filled with stories of European alcoholics who had brought ruin upon themselves and their families.’24 In simple numerical terms meanwhile, we can assert that during the last twenty-five years of colonial rule at least 1,000 Europeans were admitted to the Mathari hospital – and most likely, many more.25

Reading case files Historians of psychiatry have, increasingly over recent years, welcomed the inclusion of psychiatric patient records into more conventional methodologies.26 For historians working outside the psychiatric field, however, incorporating histories of ‘the mad’ into broader social history presents a formidable methodological challenge. In the first instance, the challenge unfolds directly from the nature of the sources themselves. While memoir, biography and other forms of life history provide a narrative form that asserts sequential order above all, the life histories to be garnered from hospital files are fractured, fragmented and seldom unambiguous. While the act of writing memoir may be understood to constitute a deliberate attempt on the part of the author to create meaning out of memory – to knock a life into coherent shape, as it were – hospital patients in no comparable way intended their life histories to be read, or indeed recorded.27 As John Tosh suggests, it may well be that it is precisely those sources that have been recorded without any thought for posterity that are the most revealing, but the [ 84 ]

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fact remains that the case files at Mathari provide biographies that were never deliberately imparted.28 If authorship was unwilling, neither can it be said to have been solely the patient’s own. Patient files comprise a cacophony of voices, some inscribed directly upon the page, others relayed through various layers of reportage, gossip, hearsay and (mis)communication. Authorial voice was never the patient’s sole preserve but a contested site in which doctors, family members, friends, government officials and various interested third parties competed to claim authentic knowledge of the patient’s identity and the meaning of his or her past. As Jonathan Andrews has cautioned, moreover, case files may likely say more about the preoccupations of a hospital’s medical regime than about the patients themselves.29 In his analysis of patient records at Bethlem Hospital in London, Akihito Suzuki has argued that until reforms to admission procedures were undertaken in the mid-nineteenth century, the authority for explaining mental illness resided primarily with patients’ family and friends. In the period after this point, patients were increasingly defined in the light of what the doctor observed in the hospital at first hand and what was relayed to him from patients.30 The doctor, in Suzuki’s words, ‘framed the patient’s subjectivity’, diminishing the authority of outsiders’ explanations and developing a confessional dialogue in which patients, guided by their doctor, narrated their own life histories, often divulging their most innermost secrets to an interlocutor who served simultaneously as therapist and scribe.31 In late colonial Kenya, patient records included testimony from a variety of sources and there is no clear evidence to support the view that psychiatrists favoured, in any consistent way, information gleaned from patients themselves, from friends or family members, or from their own observation. Psychiatrists judged patients’ sanity – or its absence – foremost through their own first-hand assessments of patient behaviour, but as to explaining how patients had become insane – how, in other words, they had come to be admitted – doctors relied on a miscellany of information that reflected less a concern to privilege one explanation over another than a preparedness to utilise whatever information was to hand. Only in cases in which the t­estimony of family members conflicted sharply with that provided by the patient did doctors hold the veracity of one or the other in doubt or disbelief. Frequently, historians of psychiatry have constructed analyses of patient populations according to indices of class and gender.32 At Mathari, however, no consistent overall pattern can be evinced as to the ways in which illness was perceived and treated. Both men and women, rich and poor, were described sometimes as being morally at [ 85 ]

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fault and at others as being the helpless victims of circumstance or disease.33 Likewise, both men and women were treated using electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), insulin coma therapy and anti-psychotic drugs, all of which were administered to treat a range of perceived disorders including depression, hysteria, mania and schizophrenia. Nor were women (or men) over-represented. Forty per cent of the European patients at Mathari were female, at a time when women made up 49 per cent of the total European population in the colony.34 That the proportion of men at Mathari is higher is due to the fact that a significant proportion of those males treated at the hospital had been transferred from internment camps or were members of the British armed forces. In basic numerical terms, therefore, a gendered analysis of the Mathari patients seems unlikely. Shifting the focus away from the psychiatrists and out into patients’ biographical hinterland, however, does allow for a recognition of the formative force of class and gender. The point is not so much that psychiatry operated to constitute individuals in classed or gendered ways but that mental illness developed within a social context in which class and gender were both intrinsic parts in the racial fantasy that was ‘the European’. At Mathari, comprehending mental illness was determined in the first instance by the prospects for successful treatment and doctors were able to hold in tension a variety of explanatory paradigms to make sense of their patients’ distress. That a patient could be deemed to have recovered his sanity only days after being diagnosed as schizophrenic; that another could be admitted, discharged and consequently readmitted; that explanations for mental disturbance could be found to have both social and biological causality, all this merely reaffirmed the capricious nature of disorders that were only dimly understood. Yet the haphazard way in which patients were diagnosed at Mathari makes problematic a quantitative analysis of patients’ illness, a fact exacerbated by the multiplicity of voices claiming knowledge of the person in question and the history of their affliction. Doctors’ pragmatism and the inevitable limitations in their perception notwithstanding, the psychiatric case file should in one important respect be understood as an element within a discursive apparatus – for asserting the authority of psychiatric knowledge and for deriving order from what was otherwise inchoate. Psychiatrists might have framed their patients’ subjectivity but they did so inscriptively, in the recording – the writing down – of patients’ life histories and the nature of their illness. Histories of human lives and of madness both, the case files offer up multi-tiered narratives, splicing together the illustrative and the incidental, the salient and the banal. Psychiatrists wrote to trace the origins and the nature of mental illness yet the [ 86 ]

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terms of their science were in a state of constant challenge: interrupted, embellished upon and frequently disregarded altogether by patients themselves and by the various significant others who strove to have their voices heard. All this too was written down. Contained within the rational-bureaucratic typescript of the psychiatric record is a veritable chaos of scenarios, sights and sentimental states. That the implicit purpose of psychiatric knowledge was to control this chaos is not to say that it was ever more than partially achieved. Contained within each enunciation of scientific truth was its fallibility; with every assertion of discursive order came an unruly riposte. Reading patient case files, therefore, might well be thought of as an exercise in listening too – in leaning in to catch the voices and the visions that made up, in the fullest sense, the life histories of the patients and their versions of the world. Taken as a documentary corpus, then, the psychiatric case-file presents a form of life-history that is plugged inescapably into the apprehension and the treatment of mental illness on the one hand and that pushes irrepressibly at the boundaries of this discourse on the other. These files can be read ‘for madness’, to be sure – for the light that they shed on the practice of psychiatry in a certain time and place – but they need not be read only for madness, for just as social context must inevitably inform how mental illness was perceived and treated, so mental illness (or at least, its documentary remains) can help us to shed new light on the nature of the social context. Jock McCulloch described the Europeans treated at Mathari as ‘alcoholics’ in the main, whose behaviour ‘scandalized the white community’.35 Richard Keller, more recently, has echoed the point. European patients in psychiatric hospitals in Africa, he writes, tended to be alcoholics – ‘a scourge of settler communities’ – whom conventional hospitals were unwilling to handle.36 To be sure, a considerable minority of Europeans at Mathari (approximately 30 per cent), were alcoholic and it is undeniable that alcoholism, in Kenya as elsewhere, frequently precipitated or coincided with unemployment, the breakdown of familial relations and, in some cases, destitution. But who these people were and what comprised their experience of Kenya must far exceed such a basic appellation. Nor, as they appear in the case files, do the white insane bear much resemblance to prevailing stereotypes of the ‘degenerate’ or ‘poor white’. One of the earliest European case histories at Mathari amply serves to make the point. Isaiah Kelly was a South African who spent six and a half months at the Mathari hospital in 1932. As with a number of these cases, the majority of documents remaining on his file concern arrangements for Kelly’s return to South Africa. We do not know when Kelly came to [ 87 ]

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Kenya, or why. As for the process that led to his admission, only very sketchy information remains. In a letter of referral, the doctor who commended Kelly be admitted to Mathari, recorded the following:

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Understands what is said to him and does what he is told. Sleeps and eats well. Is not dirty in his habits. Is quiet and obedient. Refuses to speak a single word.37

During the previous fortnight, Kelly, it transpires, had been incarcerated at the Nakuru prison. Nobody knew where he had been previously or why he would not speak. Observed to be in a ‘filthy condition’, Kelly was also noted to be ‘bearded, with long black hair, smooth facial features and an impassive biblical expression’.38 Less of a ‘down and out’, it seems, than something of a religious ascetic, Kelly was nonetheless diagnosed as schizophrenic and was held at Mathari while arrangements were made for his removal from the colony. Only in late February, when a Nairobi magistrate wrote to the hospital authorities, was any explanation found for Kelly’s mental state: I have now obtained the following information from one Mr Wessels for whose father the above named was working on a farm near Gilgil: Mr. Kelly is a German but more Dutch than German now, having been born and bred in South Africa.   He came to this country between 5 and 6 years ago and has been working for Mr Wessels’ father for the last 5 years.   About six months ago Kelly went to Eldoret with … his employer, when Mrs Wessels noticed that Kelly was very quiet and appeared very sad. On being asked what the reason was he replied that when in South Africa he wanted to marry a girl who loved him but was prevented by other people from doing so and that he had received a cable which is believed to be true conveying the information that the girl had died and that the news was the reason why he was so quiet and upset.   Subsequent to above, Mr Kelly gradually stopped speaking except that he will say ‘yes’ or ‘no; and that to his brother only. He then had an attack of fever and during the illness he stopped speaking. After the fever was over he did not speak at all.39

This is the total evidence that remains for the life of Isaiah Kelly. What little we know of him pales into insignificance against all that we do not: only at the point of his admission to Mathari is his historical invisibility breached. More challenging still is the fact that we have no ready analytical – historical – language with which to address his life. To be sure, there are inferences to be made. Specifically, one may wonder why Kelly was prevented from marrying the woman that he loved: did such a union transgress boundaries of class and culture, if not of race? Is here to be found the ‘key’ to Kelly’s mental distress? [ 88 ]

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There are, of course, no answers for these questions. What is unequivocally clear from these sources, however, is the full extent of the divergence between people appearing as embodiments of a racial ideology on the one hand and as susceptible, sentient human beings on the other. That Kelly conforms on a surface level to the stereotyped image of the ‘poor white’ – dirty, unkempt and only recently out of jail – belies the expansive realms of human history that remain out of sight The empirical method, it is worth remembering, relies on the ability to locate, verify and cross-reference evidence. For such an approach, the essentially unreliable nature of this data can only be a source of frustration. To those more ready to explore the imaginative spaces of the archive, however, the cryptic, enigmatic quality of these documents might be positively embraced. Colonial ideologies, we must remember, were themselves defined by a will to certainty – by the relentless assertion that progress was ineluctable, that racial identities were self-evident and that colonial claims to truth could find themselves continually reaffirmed. But claims to truth were only ever claims and the challenge in writing of them must be to resist the coherence and the force to which they themselves aspired. The challenge, as Stoler put it, is to represent incoherence – to resist the urge to impose our own ordering conventions and frames and so achieve a kind of history capable of retaining the allusive, incomplete nature of colonial knowledge.40 Yet what is there to be said of Isaiah Kelly, other than to insist that he was there? That he appears strange certainly helps in the endeavour to defamiliarise ‘the European’ but it is precisely this strangeness that makes writing of his life methodologically difficult. If discourse analysis aims to decode the terms of the colonial imagination, the difficulty in attempting to decode the Mathari case files unfolds largely from the fact that there is frequently no referential standard to operate as our key. Precisely because Kenya’s white insane were supposedly anomalous, there exists no circuit of representations – no discourse – in which their histories take on ready sense. As such, they leave us at first empty-handed, sources of bewilderment and ill-ease rather than building blocks of data unproblematic in themselves. These problems are compounded by the enigmatic nature of much of the case file contents. While many patient files contain numerous documents, each one serving to affirm or qualify the others, others divulge only the most skeletal of biographical information. William Hunter, for example, was admitted to Mathari some time in 1950. His Clinical Sheet (the standardised form recording the condition and the treatment of the patient) contains only the following: [ 89 ]

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Came to Africa 12 months ago. Quite healthy up to 1944 when TB was diagnosed. In 1945 stroke; started talking nonsense about 2 weeks ago. Born in India, spent most of his life there. Chief Complaint: Confusion, nonsensical, inconsecutive thought.41

Though repatriation aspired to some sort of resolution – to draw a line under these people’s lives – these narratives remain ongoing and unresolved; unlike the memoirs of Europeans in Kenya, these histories remain without conclusion, their futures open-ended. Unlike the memoirs, moreover, in which narrative order was conveyed by the trajectory from England to Kenya (and sometimes back to England), from arrival at Mombasa to fond farewells, and from the logical relation of one episode to the next, in the psychiatric records we find histories with no easily discernible logic. Records such as these expose the conceit of the self-authored account: lives were not strung together by sensible threads; residues of the past calcified the present; ambitions went unfulfilled. If the movement described within psychiatric case files is haphazard, however, that is not to say that narrative threads cannot be discerned. As the arrival of an individual at the hospital was marked by the opening of a case file, so the accumulation of its contents represented a dynamic, living inscription. The testimony of patients, their interpretation by doctors and their consideration by researchers years later all have been creative acts, all with their genesis at the point of an individual’s transgression – from sanity to madness and from the anonymity that the social body affords to the exceptionality of being designated ‘of unsound mind’.

Narrative trails Throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods a vast number of ‘Kenya memoirs’ have been written.42 Of those written during the late colonial period, the political imperative is clear: to defend the basis for white settlement at a time when decolonisation elsewhere and violent nationalism in Kenya was challenging the prospects on which careers, fortunes and family futures had been sunk.43 Of those accounts written after independence, many were coloured by the sadness of departure and nostalgia for a remembered past.44 Others combined reminiscence with a personal coming to terms with political change.45 What many of these memoirs share is conformity to narrative convention. Typically, their authors commence with an account of why they applied to the colonial administration or decided to migrate to Kenya.46 The journey out to East Africa is described and first sight of Mombasa announced as intimation of the felicity of a life to come.47 From Mombasa, memoirists typically describe their journey onwards, by rail, to Nairobi, the [ 90 ]

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profusions of wild game sighted from the carriage windows and the exhilaration that was felt as they encountered East Africa’s ‘unspoiled wilderness’ for the first time.48 Life histories thus borrow from the conventions of the travel writer and the tourist, sketching journeys that describe simultaneously temporal, spatial and historical advance. Just as they commence with clear beginnings, so these memoirs typically conclude with the resolution of return or a valedictory farewell, imparting either steadfast claims for belonging or nostalgic invocations of a lost and longed-for world. Of these, Blixen’s Out of Africa is the archetype. Although published well before independence, Blixen’s memoir is written from, and its tenor determined by, the perspective of having left. From the book’s opening line – ‘I had a farm in Africa’ – the memoir describes the remembering of time and place both irrevocably past. Others described the discomfort of returning to Europe before coming back to Kenya, commonly depicted as a spiritual home.49 For all these authors, the act of writing allowed the geographical boundaries of Kenya Colony, the narrative boundaries of the memoir and the temporal boundaries of the lives that are bracketed within their pages all to be overlaid. The histories to be garnered from the psychiatric files, by contrast, have no clear beginning or end but surface from, are interrupted by and dissolve back into silence. They afford biography of a sort, structured around the endeavour to explain mental illness, but the kinds of narrative they provide challenge the conceit of discrete, self-contained and coherent colonial lives. The results are histories that are at once more troubling and confused than the memoirs, and yet more credible also. Numerous Europeans in Kenya, it now becomes apparent, did not so much deliberately go to Kenya as ‘end up’ there. Many had lived elsewhere in Africa, in India and the Far East; others had served in the British Armed Forces and the merchant navy; still others had been sent to Kenya by their families, most frequently from Britain or South Africa. Several younger patients had lived in Salvation Army hostels; others had run away from home or school. While some had moved with parents or husbands in the course of their work with colonial administrations elsewhere, others arrived in Kenya at the end of their own exhausting imperial careers. Many had encountered illness, poverty and privation not only in Kenya but across the British world. Empire, we see, comprised trauma as well as triumph; disorientation and fatigue alongside vindication or content. Above all, what these files describe is itinerant, disordered movement: of people in and out of place; of the appearance and disappearance of ‘madness’ and of the indeterminate slippage between delusions, dreams and waking life. On the case file of Meredith Webster, for example, admitted to Mathari in [ 91 ]

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1956, we find the following handwritten synopsis of a subject’s past, drawn from conversations at the hospital between psychiatrist and patient: To Tanganyika 1946, husband had been out off and on since 1935 (married in 1939). He at home during World War 2 and came back in 1945.

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Mau Mau about – anxiety. During war, c.1942 – (not her) child drowned in millpond, she tried to reach it. Upset her a lot that she could not reach him. Dreamed of his hands coming up. Came to Tanganyika 1946 – troopship – very crowded, mothers and children, hectic, on arrival here I was really ragged. Took all cautions with diseases, quinine, boil water etc. – made too much of it.50

While Webster could trace her roots to England, others claimed their origins around the world. Charlotte Crawford gave her address as Dar es Salaam but was born in Shanghai, in 1925, where her father was employed by British American Tobacco and her mother worked as a nurse. When Crawford was six, she left Shanghai with her parents, though to where she went is not mentioned in her file. In 1933, aged eight, her parents separated; her father, it is noted, ‘drank’. Whether he was still alive at the point his daughter was admitted to Mathari in 1956 is unclear.51 Christophe Andersson, an alcoholic treated at Mathari in 1954, had been born in Denmark and educated in America. His case notes describe his arrival in Africa in 1935: then various jobs → Tanganyika 1935, sugar estate – Lupa 1938–39 – Kings African Rifles 5½ years, then Overseas Food Corporation, shooting crocodiles...52

Christophe Andersson was just one of a number of patients who came to Kenya having spent time elsewhere in Africa.53 A ­significant proportion, unsurprisingly, traced their origins to South Africa.54 Others arrived at Mathari from Uganda and Tanganyika. Indeed, as the principal psychiatric institution in the region, Mathari’s catchment area extended across all three British East African territories.55 Numerous others had spent considerable time in India. Peter Keddie had been there over twenty years before coming to Kenya in 1948; so too had Ronald Jacobs.56 Another patient with an Indian past was Lawrence White, seventy-three years old when he was admitted to Mathari in 1957. His Clinical Sheet also marked out the trajectory of his life: Born in 1884, Left India 1933 → England until 1938 → Home Command during war for 3 years → Kenya 1948 when his parents died.57

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When White was admitted to Mathari nine years later, it was noted that he still believed himself to be in India, telling doctors repeatedly that he must get back to his house in the cantonments.58 For White, the stuff of psychosis was anachronism itself. For men like White, Keddie and Jacobs, earlier imperial careers are likely to have significantly affected their expectations of, and responses to, colonial Kenya. These men were often inflexible in outlook, and steeped in ideologies of racial difference. But they were also men worn down by hardship and disappointment. Many had lost all contact with Britain and at Indian independence looked to Kenya as a refuge from a changed, and changing, post-war world. Others came to Kenya enfeebled by their colonial pasts. Many had endured debilitating illness. Francis Chambers suffered dengue fever in Madagascar.59 Gareth Martin had malaria in India and sand fly fever in Mesopotamia.60 Morag Mclure had typhoid in Argentina.61 Andrew Gumbal, admitted to Mathari in 1956, had spent twenty-three years in India where he suffered repeated attacks of malaria, dysentery and blackwater fever.62 Judged by doctors to be ‘disorientated and delusional’, Gumbal offered his own diagnosis of ‘extreme mental fatigue due to lack of leave and treatment’.63 Others came to Kenya after fleeing persecution in Europe. Eva Sokolowski, Maria Kleinmann and Eleanor Hallenbranner all were Jewish refugees. Sokolowski fled Poland with her family in 1942. The family moved through Persia and India and settled in Northern Rhodesia. Six months later, Eva met her husband and moved with him to Kenya. On her case notes is written, simply, ‘some terrifying war experiences and in Siberia’.64 Maria Kleinmann fled Germany in 1939. Almost all her immediate family were killed in the Holocaust.65 Eleanor Hallenbranner left her home in Lithuania in 1905, arriving in Germany by foot, England by cattle-boat and Mombasa by steam – via Cape Town, Johannesburg and Lourenço Marques.66 By the time Hallenbranner was admitted to Mathari in 1946, she had been in Kenya for almost fifty years. To Hallenbranner, distress generated by African insurgency was surpassed only by alarm at her own invidious position. ‘There is no peace at all,’ Hallenbranner complained from the hospital, ‘the place is so full of mental natives.’67 Other elderly white Kenyans also suffered from their degradation before and among the Africans to whom they had learned ingrained contempt. Robert Fallon, sixty-four years old when admitted to Mathari in 1954, had been in Kenya since 1927. ‘Any suggestion of boys looking after him’, a doctor noted, ‘only sends him wild.’68 Still others arrived in Kenya via yet more circuitous routes. Emily Hayward had gone from England to Australia aged five, back to England in 1932, aged twenty-three, to India in 1945, back to Australia and [ 93 ]

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on to Kenya in 1949.69 Angela Illingworth was born in Japan where her father was a Dutch diplomat: until he himself committed suicide, Angela had travelled the world on the coat-tails of his career.70 Jack Ellis, born in Ceylon, went to Germany at two, Scotland at five and on to Kenya in 1948, aged sixteen.71 Many of the Europeans at Mathari, moreover, were just that: over 30 per cent of those admitted after 1939 were not of British nationality. At Mathari there were men and women from across continental Europe; from Norway and Denmark, Poland, Germany, Hungary and Greece, as well as from Russia, Australia and the USA.72 Altogether, more than twenty different nationalities appear in these files. Kenya’s white insane, it transpires, were a cosmopolitan crowd.

Poor whites? Unsurprisingly, many of the Europeans at Mathari had suffered economic distress yet they hardly conform to the familiar image of the vagrant, the ‘down-and-out’ or the ‘poor white’.73 Robin Barker, for example, was working for the East Africa Tobacco Company (EATC) when he was admitted to Mathari in 1956. In April of that year, Barker had travelled to Ethiopia on the company’s behalf.74 His Clinical Sheet records what happened after that: April 1956 → Ethiopia to make money, got stuck in flooded river, lost much of his kit. He said things happened in Ethiopia which caused him great stress, did not say what.75

Barker, notably, had no history of mental illness before he went to Ethiopia. After he returned he suffered from insomnia, anorexia, absent-mindedness and preoccupation.76 By September, he had been admitted to Mathari, diagnosed as schizophrenic and treated with electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) and anti-psychotic drugs.77 There, Barker was seen to be ‘withdrawn, evasive, suspicious and apathetic’.78 At the end of September, he was discharged from Mathari. He returned to England two weeks later in the company of his wife.79 Although Robin Barker was no ‘poor white’, he was doubtless worried by his work. To doctors, Barker’s wife reported that for some time he had been working hard opening a new factory.80 A confidential EATC file seen by Mathari doctors recorded that Barker did not get along with the company’s African staff and described him as ‘tactless’ and ‘overbearing’.81 On one occasion local African authorities had asked that Barker be removed from their area. His hostility towards African colleagues, moreover, meant that Barker was held back from promotion. The doctrine of racial superiority had become, for Barker, if anything [ 94 ]

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too well ingrained. As to what transpired in Ethiopia we have no idea. What is clear is that Barker’s racial attitudes were incompatible with the position in which he found himself, working alongside Africans rather than overseeing their labour. Barker failed to adjust, in other words, to the ‘post-mastery’ that impending decolonisation portended. Racial arrogance, as Alison Smith has suggested, was often strongest in Kenya among those less well-off whites, excluded from European club society and exposed even marginally to the fear of non-white competition.82 At a time when colonial authorities were attempting to foster a more inclusive racial spirit based on ideas of partnership and development, the difficulties of those Europeans struggling to keep financially afloat were compounded by the additional burden of having to treat Africans as junior partners as opposed to brute inferiors. Colonial mentalities could not be unfastened overnight. But the problem was most acute for those lacking the financial wherewithal to keep a satisfactory distance between Africans and themselves. For others, it was less the pressures of work than the pressures of being out of work that contributed to their mental distress. Numerous European patients at Mathari (predominantly male) described the stress of recent redundancy or anxiety over their failure to find employment.83 Fiona Johnson and her husband had moved to Tanganyika from Britain in 1950. While Mr Johnson found work on the Tanganyika groundnut scheme, his wife got a job at a garage in Dar-es-Salaam.84 When the groundnut scheme was wound up, Mr Johnson moved to Mombasa to look for work, his wife following on a year later. Living in temporary railway accommodation (her husband had taken up a job as a railway surveyor), Mrs Johnson became depressed.85 She had been happy working in Tanganyika, she told her doctor, but in Mombasa, where she knew nobody, had no work and was worried about the couple’s financial troubles, she felt lonely and unhappy.86 Admitted to Mathari in November 1956, Fiona Johnson was diagnosed as ‘asymptomatic’ and discharged three weeks later.87 As with Barker and Johnson, the effects of incipient decolonisation are clearly apparent in the career of Ronald Jacobs. Having spent his working life on the railways in India, Jacobs moved with his wife to Kenya in 1947, the year of Indian independence.88 For a decade, Jacobs worked in a variety of jobs, as a secretary at a European club, in a clerical position at the colonial treasury and as an accountant for the East Africa Railways and Harbours. In 1958, when his contract with the EAR&H expired, Jacobs and his wife went ‘on leave’ to England.89 On return to Kenya, Jacobs became worried at the prospect of failing to find work.90 To doctors he appeared restless and agitated.91 ‘He continually says he is ruined,’ commented one. ‘Worry re. job, lost all [ 95 ]

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money, will go to jail, depressed’ noted another.92 Referred to Mathari as a temporary patient on the grounds that he was ‘unable to look after himself’, Jacobs wrote to the superintendent within days of entering the hospital. ‘I have no pension’, he wrote, ‘my wife cannot work and it is most important that I get further employment’.93 Diagnosed with ‘agitated depressive psychosis’, Jacobs was treated with a course of ECT and anti-psychotic drugs. Two weeks after he was admitted to Mathari, Jacobs was discharged.94 Ronald Jacobs came to Kenya at Indian independence. Having spent most of his adult life in India, it may well have been the case that he was disinclined to return to England. What Britain did offer, at this time, however – and that Kenya did not – was the support of a nascent welfare state and an established civil society. Churches, trade unions, friendly societies, charitable organisations and extended family networks all served to soften the blows of unemployment and financial distress. The problem for colonial expatriates of an older generation was that while return ‘home’ to Britain often appeared an uninviting prospect, ‘staying on’ in the colonies entailed a life without the safety nets that state and society in Britain could provide.95 Several of the Mathari patients had a series of jobs before being admitted to hospital, testifying to the fluid, unstable nature of colonial society during and after the Second World War. Keith Sorensen had been employed in ten different jobs in the six years prior to entering Mathari in April 1958.96 Justin Macdonald, admitted three weeks later, had had five jobs in eighteen months.97 In other cases, it was psychiatric confinement itself that precipitated financial distress for patients’ families. In March 1951, Jeremy Graham, an engineer who had first gone to East Africa from England in 1929, was admitted to Mathari after suffering from a stroke.98 Although the immediate circumstances surrounding his admittance are not detailed on his file, we do know that, five months after he entered the hospital, Graham’s wife wrote to the superintendent to propose that her husband be looked after at home. Unable to care for her husband herself, however, she proposed that a ‘reliable’ African be placed in charge: As you know I am away at work all day and also take in paying guests. I have two younger children.   The point is this, I am very worried about my husband and I just cannot go and see him myself. If I can get a reliable person (African) to look after him I would feel happier if I could bring him home and confine him to a room apart from the rest of the house. I must have a reliable boy come who would bathe, shave and do all the rest for my husband.   … I have a great deal of financial worry on top of worrying about my

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husband and I just cannot bear the thought of him being lonely and unhappy and if it would make any difference I’d rather have him back … I know if he is being well looked after but he loves his wireless and likes to see people …   Please let me know soon what you think … this worry is interfering with my work.99

For Mrs Graham, the problem of her husband’s illness was one of care. Preferring to look after her husband herself at home, Graham was frustrated by the necessity that she work herself, coupled with the prevailing belief that Africans were incapable of providing responsible care for European children or the mentally ill. When men were incapacitated, their wives were left doubly exposed: forced to go out to work themselves, they were unable to care for their husbands. This, compounded by the colonial imperative that Africans see Europeans only as fit and well, prevented the treatment of Graham at home. If poverty among Europeans bespoke their failure to maintain racial standards, it is also true that the kinds of situations that precipitated admission to the Mathari hospital were far more diverse, far more idiosyncratic and far more banal than the category of the ‘poor white’ would allow. Some people believed themselves to be poor or expressed anxieties over debt or job insecurity but were not destitute by any means. Other Europeans in Kenya who undoubtedly were poor did not suffer from mental distress. Poverty, in any case, may best be understood in both relative and absolute terms, for while the effects of poverty certainly contributed towards both mental and physical ill health, they were compounded by the social costs of shame, stigma and social marginalisation. Poverty in itself was not necessarily problematic. But the failure to withstand or overcome poverty, as apprehended both by the poor themselves and society at large, could lead to forms of social sanction of which both mental illness and institutional confinement were inescapable parts. Evidence to this effect is, most commonly, allusive. In January 1958, Paul Burroughs was apprehended by the police after creating a disturbance at Kisumu. To the doctor at the European hospital, Burroughs appeared psychotic. In a referral letter to Mathari, however, it was also noted that Burroughs had been living ‘in poor circumstances’ and was sharing a flat with African staff and domestics.100 The doctor’s additional observation that Burroughs had few acquaintances owing to his ‘odd behaviour’ suggests that what was perceived by contemporaries as erratic was as likely to comprise a transgression of racial boundaries as it did any behaviour that was self-evidentially ‘insane’.101 ‘A classic feature of colonial rhetoric’, as Lea Kalaora has pointed out, ‘was to link madness with impurity. Whites who spent a lot of time [ 97 ]

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with blacks were expected to lose their wits and their soul, becoming both insane and contaminated or corrupted.’102 Dane Kennedy was quite right to emphasise the demand for social cohesion among a community so conscious of its vulnerability. Yet it was a form of cohesion articulated through a particular social idiom and organised around a regimented social ritual, with the club its central institutional node.103 The ‘poor whites’ of post-war Kenya bore little resemblance to the traditional stereotype of the be-whiskered Afrikaner but they were still well outside the conventional social boundaries that had structured ‘white’ behaviour since the development of a distinctive settler culture in the inter-war years.104 Indeed, it was largely the effects of the Second World War that had rendered these conventional social boundaries redundant. As aristocrats and socialites were replaced by demobilised soldiers, economic migrants and retirees from the Raj, what had always been (and remained) the sine qua non of settler Kenya – the maintenance of distance between colonisers and colonised – began to dissolve. At the same time, Africans – urbanised, and politicised as never before – impinged on those spaces previously demarcated white. As Luise White has argued, it is in close proximity that racial distinctions are most emphatically asserted; in the settler context mental breakdown occurred more often than not at the racial frontier, most prosaically among those poorer Europeans unable to forge a necessary distance between ‘natives’ and themselves.105 Indeed, ‘the native’ looms large in many of these files. As we see when we consider the substance of patients’ delusions, the cultural conditioning of Europeans to experience fear, condescension or contempt towards Africans is clearly legible in the substance of psychosis. Africans feature in these case files, however, in a variety of ways. Even (especially) when their presence is elliptical or brief, the effect is striking. Granville Anderson, referred to Mathari in April 1947 after exhibiting intermittent fits of temper, was noted to direct his anger towards the Africans employed at his father’s farm. To the Mathari superintendent, Anderson’s father reported that his son, when in the grip of these fits, was ‘uncontrollable’. He ‘beats the natives’, he wrote, ‘for no reason at all’. According to his father, Granville had, just weeks previously, ‘tied a native up by the throat and said, “I am going to circumcise you and make you into a man.”’ Granville was a danger above all to himself, it was stressed, as ‘the natives … will one day strike back’. 106 In her discussion of African patients admitted to the Ingutsheni mental asylum in Nyasaland, Megan Vaughan suggested that the ‘native’ who went mad in ‘native’ fashion was relatively harmless; the problem lay with those Africans whose idioms of madness drew [ 98 ]

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on symbols of European civilisation: cars, bicycles, kings of England and silver mines; who flung back at the conquerors their own images of superiority ‘in disturbingly distorted forms’.107 What is remarkable here is the fact that Anderson’s anger towards Africans was expressed around idioms of African difference – and that, specifically, he mentioned circumcision. Since the clitoridectomy crisis of 1928–31, female circumcision had been a major area of controversy within the colonial ‘civilizing mission’ but for Europeans in the colony, male as well as female circumcision remained a primary marker of African difference.108 Within settler discourse, imputations of barbarity or superstition served to distance Africa from Europe yet the possibility remained, nonetheless, that Europeans might experience a range of feelings towards Africa and Africans, from curiosity and intrigue to fascination and desire. To be sure, Anderson’s assault might reasonably be read simply as an expression of brute racism. The fact that he threatened not only to harm an African, however, but to vandalise his cultural practice in the process suggests more than mindless violence. African circumcision represented a cultural and cosmological realm to which Anderson, as a European, had no access and a source of power to which he was denied. To desecrate African ‘tradition’, therefore, might well be thought of as an attempt to reassert authority from a consciousness of weakness, a consciousness that was itself transgressive. The fact that within a decade of this assault Mau Mau suspects were being castrated at the hands of European counter-insurgency forces implies that bodily desecration was envisaged not only by the mad.109 Within the case files of female European patients, also, there is evidence to suggest that the proximity of Africans within the home could be a source of discomfort and disquiet: housewives did not always enjoy a smooth discharge of power in the management of their servants and the ordering of their home. Mary Lovell had ‘servant trouble’.110 Eleanor Forrestor, it was noted, ‘does a lot of shouting and quarrelling with the boys’.111 Others expressed a fear of contamination by Africans. It was a core ingredient in the discursive construction of ‘the native’, of course, that he was a source of dirt and disease. While whiteness was articulated in counter-distinction – as clean, hygienic, pristine – the idea of Africa as contaminant was sincerely believed. Among the insane it was liable to be combined with the perception of a sexual threat. Meredith Whelan told doctors that contaminants were transferred from African servants to her belongings that were then transmitted by Whelan herself when she handled her contraceptives.112 Madeleine Carson, noted to have ‘deeply rooted sexual conflicts’, described her African servants as ‘filthy barbarians’ whose ‘lack of hygiene’ she ‘could not stand’.113 These are isolated incidents, [ 99 ]

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to be sure; hardly sufficient to support, in quantitative terms at least, contentions of a colonial pathology. Their significance, rather, is best considered as a discursive retort to the conventional image of the Europeans in Kenya as enjoying untroubled command. White women, we should stress, were trained to hate and fear ‘their’ natives; African servants, from this regard, were problematic because their presence within the home collapsed that vital social distance that kept ‘Africa’ both literally and figuratively outside. To get closer in to the private, interior worlds in which colonial lives took place, then, we need to situate ourselves within their most intimate affective sites: in the colonial family and inside the home.

Notes   1 John A. Carman, A Medical History of Kenya: A Personal Memoir (London: Collings, 1976), p. 6.   2 KNA: AG / 32 / 45: Lunacy General Correspondence, A. D. Milne, Principal Medical Officer to Chief Secretary, 18 June 1915; Acting Chief Secretary to Attorney General, 21 September 1918 (13); KNA: AG / 32 / 48, ‘Mathari Mental Hospital’. The name ‘Mathari’ derived from the name of a nearby stream. For a history of the colonial medical service in Kenya see A. Crozier, Practising Colonial Medicine: The Colonial Medical Service in British East Africa (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).   3 Ernst, Mad Tales, p. 45; McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, p. 26.   4 Particularly during the early days of settlement Europeans were held under observation at the prison within Fort Jesus, at the Nairobi jail and at hospitals at Nairobi, Eldoret and Kisumu. See KNA: AG / 32 / 45: Lunacy General Correspondence; KNA: AG / 32 / 44, Indian Lunatic Asylum Act: Lunatic Asylum Rules, 1933; KNA: MOH / 2 / 92: Mrs H. Paton; McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, pp. 21–2; Beuschel, ‘Shutting Africans Away’, p. ii.   5 KNA: AG / 32 / 45, T. A. Gray to Acting Provincial Commissioner, Mombasa, 12 February 1910.   6 KNA: AP / 1 / 731, ‘Procedure in Dealing with Lunatics’, Senior Medical Officer to Superintendent, HM Prison, Mombasa, 30 October 1911.   7 McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, p. 21.   8 KNA: AG / 32 / 76, ‘The Removal of Lunatics (European) Ordinance’, Principal Medical Officer, to Chief Secretary, 24 September 1915.   9 KNA: AG / 32 / 76, Attorney General, Memorandum: ‘The Removal of Lunatics (European) Ordinance, 1918’, 27 December 1918. 10 KNA: PC / COAST / 1 / 12 / 24; McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, p. 20; Beuschel, ‘Shutting Africans Away’, pp. 32–3. 11 In the six years between 1931 and 1936 on average no more than twelve Europeans were treated each year at the hospital, this compared to an average of 180 Africans, KNA: AG / 32 / 48, Ag. Solicitor General to Chief Secretary, 16 April 1937; McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, p. 25. 12 I found forty-one files at the Kenya National Archives relating to European ‘lunatics’. For the most part, these derive from the Attorney General’s office of the Colonial Secretariat, and the Department of Health. A small number contain copies of documents that originated at Mathari, including original correspondence from patients themselves. Most reflect the prerogative of the central administration: to coordinate the funding and arrangement of a patient’s confinement or their removal from the colony. 13 See, for example, the cases concerning Hugo Lawler, KNA: AG / 32 / 68 and Rachel Lee, KNA: BY / 2 / 188.

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the lives of kenya’s white insane 14 KNA: MOH / 2 / 355, Major Robert Palmer: Report from Director of Medical Services to Governor, 29 February 1944; Chief Secretary to Director of Medical Services, 1 March 1944; District Commissioner, Nairobi to Director of Medical Services, 8 March 1944. 15 See records relating to Trevor O’Dowd, KNA: AG / 32 / 59. 16 See records relating to Captain John Prosser: KNA: BY / 13 / 140; Mrs Antonia de Maurier: KNA: AG / 32 / 56; Samuel Mercy, KNA: AH / 13 / 132; Richard Driver, KNA: DC / KSM / 1 / 32 / 23 and KNA: AG / 32 / 66; and Josephine Cram, KNA: AH / 13 / 139. 17 See records relating to Lucy Prendergast, KNA: BY / 2 / 156 and Miss Rachel Maclure, KNA: AH / 13 / 40. 18 See records relating to Harvey McIlroy, KNA: MOH / 2 / 37 and Captain John Francis, KNA: BY / 2 / 338. 19 See records relating to Mr Christopher Home, KNA: MOH / 1 / 4526. 20 KNA: BY / 52 / 7, Donald Savage; KNA: MOH / 3 / 316, Care of Backward Children. 21 The above calculations are based on estimates of the total European population in 1944. See Appendix II. Admission rates for British mental hospitals are taken from: F. N. Garrett and C. R. Lowe, ‘Sex Pattern of Admissions to Mental Hospitals in Relation to Social Circumstances’, British Journal of Preventative and Social Medicine 13: 2 (1959), pp. 89–90. 22 Mathari Mental Hospital (hereafter MMH): EU.M.111/44, Progress of Case, 20 October 1944; MMH: EU.M.25/48, Dr. Satchwell, Nakuru, to Carothers, 21 September 1948. 23 See, for example, the case files of Allesandro Moretti, MMH: EU.M.34/41; Umberto Pagano, MMH: EU.M.54/42; Vicenzio Pinto, MMH: EU.M.40/41; Giuseppe Bartolini, MMH: EU.M.37/41. 24 McCulloch based his analysis on records consulted at the Kenya National Archives. 25 How many suffered mental problems of milder degree, left the colony of their own accord or passed undetected by medical and police authorities, remains open to question. 26 Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View’; Mark Finnane, ‘Asylums, Families and the State’, History Workshop Journal, 20 (Autumn 1985), p. 146; Guenter B. Risse and John Harley Warner, ‘Reconstructing Clinical Activities: Patient Records in Medical History’, Social History of Medicine, 5: 2 (1992); Jonathan Andrews, ‘Case Notes, Case Histories and the Patient’s Experience of Insanity at Gartnaval Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History of Medicine, 11: 2 (1998); Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam, pp. 48–9; Sally Swartz, ‘Lost Lives at the Cape: Gender, History and Mental Illness in the Cape, 1891–1910’, Feminism and Psychology, 9: 2 (1999), p. 157; Parle, States of Mind, p. 107; Joseph Melling, ‘Accommodating Madness: New Research in the Social History of Insanity and Institutions’, in Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe (eds), Insanity, Institutions and Society: 1800-1914: A Social History of Madness In Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 22. 27 As David Lowenthal has written, ‘The need to use and reuse memorial knowledge, and to forget as well as to recall, force us to select, distil, distort, and transform the past, accommodating things remembered to the needs of the present.’ Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 194; Sturrock, The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 4. 28 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, 5th edn (London: Longman, 2009), pp. 39, 138. 29 Andrews, ‘Case notes, case histories and the patient’s experience’, p. 265; Parle, States of Mind, p. 87. 30 Akihito Suzuki, ‘Framing Psychiatric Subjectivity: Doctor, Patient and RecordKeeping at Bethlem in the Nineteenth Century’, in Melling and Forsythe, Insanity, Institutions and Society, p. 117. 31 Ibid., p. 127.

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madness and marginality 32 See, for example, Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby (eds), Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish psychiatry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004) 33 This, notably, contrasts with nineteenth-century India where class did make a significant difference in determining the ways in which patients were described with, on the whole, poorer Europeans seen as culpable for their illness in a way that those of higher social status were not. Ernst, Mad Tales, p. 157. 34 At the 1948 census it was shown that 49 per cent of the European population were female. In 1957, 48 per cent of European immigrants were female. Report on the Census of the Non-native Population of Kenya Colony and Protectorate taken on the night of the 25h February 1948. 35 McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, p. 23. 36 Keller, ‘Madness and Colonization’, pp. 307–8. For a similar view see Nicholls, Red Strangers, p. 137. 37 MMH: EU.M.380/31, Med. Form. XLVc, The Indian Lunatic Asylums Act, Facts Indicating Insanity Observed by Myself: F. L. Henderson, 17 December 1931. 38 MMH: EU.M.380/31, Progress of Case, 31 December 1931. 39 MMH: EU.M.380/31, Resident Magistrate to the Superintendent, Mathari Mental Hospital, 23 February 1932. 40 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘“In Cold Blood”: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives’, Representations, 37 (1992), p. 154; See also Vincent Capanzano, Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (London: Granada, 1985), p. xiii. 41 MMH: EU.M.19/50, Clinical Sheet, ‘Previous Personal History’. 42 For scholarly discussion of some of these, see: Thomas R. Knipp, ‘Kenya’s Literary Ladies and the Mythologizing of the White Highlands’, South Atlantic Review, 55: 1 (1990); Abdulrazak Gurnah, ‘Settler Writing in Kenya: “Nomenculture is an uncertain science in these wild parts”’, in Booth and Rigby, Modernism and Empire; Whitlock, The Intimate Empire, pp. 112–41; Phyllis Lassner, Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004); pp. 118–59; Tony Simoes da Silva, ‘Narrating a White Africa: ­Autobiography, Race and History’, Third World Quarterly, 26: 3 (2005). 43 Of these, see for example, Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika; Dundas, African Crossroads; Lander, My Kenya Acres; James Stapleton, The Gate Hangs Well: An Account of the Author’s Experiences as a Farmer in Kenya (London: Hammond and Hammond, 1956); J. B. Carson, Sun, Sand and Safari: Some Leaves from a Kenya Notebook (London: R. Hale, 1957); Whittall, Dimbilil. Of the unpublished memoirs many are undated but those that can be clearly identified as having been written at the end of the colonial period include Margaret Gillon, ‘The Wagon and the Star’; Sidney Kelson, ‘Reflections on Kenya, 1923–1946’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 735; Eleanor Kendricks, ‘Woodsmoke’, RH: Micr. Afr. 59; J.H. Clive, ‘A Cure for Insomnia’; Todd, ‘Kenya’s Red Sunset’; Maevis Birdsey, ‘Sigh Softly African Winds’; Margaret Elkington, ‘Recollections of a Settler in Kenya 1905–1970’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 1558; Lady Eleanor Cole, Random Recollections of a Pioneer Kenya Settler (Woodbridge: Baron Publishing, 1974). On writing as a form of self-defence, see Lonsdale, ‘Home County’, p. 78 and Lonsdale, Mau Maus of the Mind, p. 406. 44 As Philip Holden suggests, national autobiographies as a genre follow a common structural grammar: ‘of a journey, a time in the wilderness of exile and then a return’. Philip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonisation: Modernity, Masculinity and the Nation-State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), p. 5. 45 See, for example, Tom Askwith, ‘Memoirs of Kenya, 1936–1961’, RH: Mss. Afr. s. 1770, Two Volumes; Michael Blundell, So Rough a Wind; Eric Dutton, ‘Night of the Hyena’. 46 Todd, ‘Kenya’s Red Sunset’, p. 1; T. Farnworth Anderson, ‘Reminiscences’, Mss Afr. s.1653, pp. 13–14; Foran, A Cuckoo in Kenya, p. 20; Stapleton, The Gate Hangs Well, p. 13; Gillon, ‘The Wagon and the Star’, pp. 7–8. 47 J. A. Hunter, Hunter (London: Hamilton, 1952), p. 17; Carson, Sun, Sand and Safari, p. 16; Walter, ‘Echoes of a Vanishing Empire’, p. 6; Foran, A Cuckoo in Kenya, p.

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45; Gillon, ‘The Wagon and the Star’, pp. 60, 63; Dundas, African Crossroads, p. 10; Eve Bache, The Youngest Lion: Early Farming Days in Kenya (London: Hutchinson, 1934), p. 14. Vivienne de Watteville, Out in the Blue (London: Methuen, 1927), pp. 1–3; Clearkin, ‘Ramblings and Recollections’, p. 99; Raymond Barberton, ‘The Trout Streams of Mount Elgon’, RH: Mss Afr. s. 1166, p. 1. See for example, Todd, ‘Kenya’s Red Sunset’, p. 220; Hunter, Hunter, pp. 103, 237; Gillon, ‘Wagon and the Star’, p. 140; Kendricks, ‘Memoirs’, p. 57. That Kendricks’s account operated to idealise the past is indicated by the fact that in 1952 she wrote to the Inland Revenue in Nairobi to appeal for assistance with paying school fees on the grounds of ‘financial distress’. Five years previously, one of Kendricks’s close relatives was admitted to the Mathari Hospital where she was treated until October, diagnosed to be ‘mentally defective’ and ‘an imbecile’. Although preparations were put in place for Kendricks’s relative to be transferred to a psychiatric institution in South Africa, she was eventually released to the care of her family in Kenya. KNA: AV / 1 / 73, ‘Correspondence Regarding Reduced Fees’, Edith Kendricks to Inland Revenue, 21 March, 1952; MMH: EU. F. 4/47. All names in this case have been changed to protect subjects’ anonymity. MMH: EU.F.21/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. MMH: EU.F.1/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’. MMH: EU.M.4/54, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’. See, for example, MMH: EU.M.60/42, Anthony Hall; MMH: EU.F.21/56, Meredith Webster; MMH: EU.M.1/58, Paul Burroughs. See, for example, MMH: EU.F.21/53, Carmen Brownlee; MMH: EU.M.20/41, Keith Cobe; MMH: EU.F.14/57, Madeleine Carson; MMH: EU.F.5/54, Marigold Harper; MMH: EU.F.4/47, Mabel Kendricks; EU.M.380/31, Isaiah Kelly; MMH: EU.M.25/41, Denis Krige; MMH: EU.F.16/57, Ingrid Wilson. Notably, the majority of Europeans at Mathari with South African origins had only relatively recently entered the country. They were also roughly split between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking (sometimes referred to as ‘Dutch’). MMH: EU.F.32/57, Annette Nicholson; MMH: EU.F.41/44, Amy Smith; MMH: EU.M.11/56, James Jackson; MMH: EU.F.22/54, Eva Sokolwski; MMH: EU.M.7/58, Philippe Vermalen; MMH: EU.M.9/58, Randell Headley; MMH, EU.F.1/56, Charlotte Crawford, MMH: EU.M.64/42, Glynn Merriman. MMH: EU.M.13/57; MMH: EU.M.2/58. See Chapter 6 for an extended discussion of this latter case. MMH: EU.M.8/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’. MMH: EU.M. 8/57, Dr John MacMillan, Mount Kenya Hospital, Nyeri, to Mathari, 29 May 1957. MMH: EU.M.5/53, Clinical Sheet, ‘Previous Health’. MMH: EU. M. 4/57, Discharge Letter, 16 April 1957: ‘Other Information and Medical History’. MMH: EU.F.4/52, Discharge Letter, 14 September 1956: ‘Other Information and Medical History’. MMH, EU.M.1/56, Mathari to Dr Cameron, 24 January 1956. MMH, EU.M.1/56, Patient’s handwritten notes, 15 January 1956. MMH: EU.F.22/54, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’. See Chapter 5 for a discussion of Eva Sokolowksi’s delusions. MMH: EU. F. 24/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘Family History’. East African Standard, 3 February 1956. MMH: EU.F.10/46, Eleanor Hallenbranner, handwritten letter, undated. MMH: EU.M.27/54, Dr. Slater to Dr. Foley, 14 October 1954. MMH: EU.F.26/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’. MMH: EU.F.2/57, Angela Illingworth, Discharge Letter, 11 March 1957: ‘Other Information and Medical History’. MMH: EU. M.10/58, Jack Ellis, Discharge Letter, 11 October 1957: ‘Other Information and Medical History’.

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madness and marginality   72 It is telling that this information was frequently inserted under the heading ‘Race’.   73 Aside from the cases discussed here, see also the files pertaining to Eric Barton, MMH: EU.M.15/56; Matthew Crawford, MMH: EU.F.1/56; Madeleine Carson, MMH:EU.F.14/57; Emily Hayward, MMH: EU.F.26/56.   74 MMH: EU.M.13/56, Clinical Sheet, doctor’s notes, 15 August, 1956; interview with patient’s wife, undated.   75 MMH: EU.M.13/56, Clinical Sheet, Interview with patient’s wife, undated.   76 MMH: EU.M.13/56, Discharge Letter, 25 September 1956: ‘Other Information and Medical History’.   77 MMH: EU.M.13/56, Margetts to A. J. H. Bowerman, Personnel Adviser, E.A. Tobacco Co., 12 September 1956.   78 MMH: EU.M. 13/56, Discharge Letter, 25 September 1956: ‘Signs and Symptoms on admission’.   79 MMH: EU.M. 13/56, Discharge Letter, 25 September 1956: ‘Recommendations’.   80 MMH: EU.M.13/56, Clinical Sheet, Interview with patient’s wife, undated.   81 MMH: EU.M.13/56, Clinical Sheet, doctor’s notes, 15 August 1956.   82 Alison Smith, ‘The Europeans’, p. 462.   83 In addition to the cases discussed here, see also the files relating to Ivan Callow, MMH: EU.M.7/55 and Steven Fitzwallace, MMH: EU.M.16/53.   84 On the groundnut scheme, see Michael Havinden and David Meredith (eds), Colonialism and Development. Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 276–83.   85 MMH: EU.F.29/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’.   86 Ibid.   87 MMH: EU.F.29/56, Discharge Letter, 11 December 1956: ‘Condition at Discharge’.   88 MMH: EU.M.2/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’.   89 MMH: EU.M.2/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’. ‘Leave’ was used here euphemistically. Technically speaking, ‘leave’ referred to time off work, allowed to members of the colonial administration who customarily travelled to Britain to replenish their psychological stocks. That Jacobs used the term suggests that it was unlikely that he saw his coming to Kenya in terms of permanent settlement.   90 MMH: EU.M. 2/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’; Discharge Letter, 24 March 1958: ‘Signs and Symptoms on Admission’.   91 MMH: EU.M.2/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘General Appearance’.   92 MMH: EU.M.2/58, Recommendation for Temporary Treatment, 7 February 1958.   93 MMH: EU.M.2/58, Ronald Jacobs to Margetts, 10 February 1958.   94 MMH: EU.M.2/58, Ronald Jacobs, Discharge Letter, 24 March 1958: ‘Course and Treatment in Hospital’; ‘Diagnosis’; ‘Recommendation’. Jacobs continued to receive ECT as an outpatient until 3 March 1958.   95 On staying on see Marion E. Doro, ‘“Human Souvenirs of Another Era”: Europeans in Post-Kenyatta Kenya’, Africa Today, 26: 3 (1979). On returning, see Elizabeth Buettner, ‘From Somebodies to Nobodies: Britons Coming Home from India’, in Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (eds),Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to the Second World War (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 221–40.   96 MMH: EU.M.6/58, Margetts to Dr Horowitz, Nairobi, 16 April 1958.   97 MMH: EU.M.10/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Mental State’.   98 MMH: EU.M.4/51, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’.   99 MMH: EU.M.4/51, Patient’s Wife to Foley, 10 August 1951. 100 MMH: EU.M.1/58, Dr Pasqual, District Hospital, Kericho, to Margetts, 12 February 1958. 101 For similar cases from the national archives see KNA: AP / 1 / 1105: Dr. Walter Jenkinson to District Commissioner, Voi, 3 January 1931; KNA: AP / 1 / 1105, Provincial Commissioner, Nyanza to Registrar, Supreme Court, 2 February 1933; KNA: AH / 13 / 340, Assistant Superintendent of Police, to District Commissioner, Kisumu, 16 August, 1943. 102 Léa Kalaora, ‘Madness, Corruption and Exile: On Zimbabwe’s Remaining White Commercial Farmers’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37: 4 (2011).

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the lives of kenya’s white insane 103 On the club see Askwith, ‘Memoirs of Kenya, 1936–1961’, Volume I, p. 5; Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britishness, Clubbability and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution’, Journal of British Studies, 40: 4 (2001). 104 For contemporary examples of the stereotype see Nora Strange Kenya Dawn (London: Stanley Paul, 1929), p. 65 and Stapleton, The Gate Hangs Well, pp. 52–5. 105 Luise White, ‘Precarious Conditions: A Note on Counter-Insurgency in Africa after 1945’, Gender and History, 16: 3 (2004), p. 607. 106 MMH: EU.M.3/47, L. D. Anderson, Patient’s father, to Carothers, 11 April 1947. 107 Vaughan, Idioms of Madness, pp. 218–19. For an account of another white settler exhibiting excessive – and by extension, erratic – violence towards Africans, see Robert Morrell, Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2001), p. 257. 108 Jocelyn Murray, `The Church Missionary Society and the female circumcision issue in Kenya’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 8 (1976), 92–104; Robert L. Tignor, The Colonial Transformation of Kenya: the Kamba, Kikuyu and Maasai from 1900 to 1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 235–54; Lynn Thomas, ‘Imperial Concerns and ‘Women’s Affairs’: State Efforts to Regulate Clitoridectomy and Eradicate Abortion in Meru, Kenya, c.1910–1950’, Journal of African History, 39: 1 (1998); Penelope Hetherington, ‘The politics of female circumcision in the Central Province of colonial Kenya, 1920–30’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26: 1 (1998). 109 David M. Anderson, ‘Mau Mau in the High Court and the “Lost” British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39: 5 (2011), pp. 701–3. 110 MMH: EU.M.16/58, Discharge Letter, 23 October 1958: ‘Other information and Medical History’. 111 MMH: EU.M.1/58, F. P. Brown, European Hospital, Kisumu, to Margetts, 23 January1958; MMH: EU.M.7/54, Clinical Sheet, ‘Family History’. 112 MMH: EU.F/21.56, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’. 113 MMH: EU.F.14/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’.

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Battered wives and broken homes: the colonial family

If we accept the view that autobiography constitutes a writing of the self, then it is true also that ‘the Europeans’ were defined as much by the people to whom they related as by the stories that they told. ‘To whom one expressed attachment,’ Stoler writes, ‘as opposed to pity, contempt, indifference or disdain, provided both cultural and legal “proof” of who one was, where one ranked in the colonial order of things, and thus where one racially belonged.’1 Just as ‘private’ feeling was a vital concern for colonial states, so it was also a critical component in the construction of the totemic European. ‘The European’ was seldom described in isolation, in other words, but in relation to others – as mothers and fathers, husbands, wives and children. As subversive sentiment was suppressed, most obviously between colonisers and colonised, so was wholesome, respectable emotion publicised and applauded. Reading accounts of colonial lives therefore, we see ‘the European’ not magisterially insentient but alive and responsive to the joys of pioneering and that healthy emotional exchange that Christian marriage entailed and from which would ideally result in the raising of prodigious racial stocks. ‘The European’ was rarely depicted in the grip of strong emotion, however, but master of it. Relationships, like sentiment itself, were controlled; as colonial mythologies had it, by the stuff of race itself. Temperance, in this respect, was proof of character; only ‘the European’, the logic went, enjoyed true self-mastery and with it the right to mastery over others less evolved.

Familiar ideals Besides ‘the European’ as a figurative human symbol, therefore, the European family operated as a keystone of settler-colonial culture and the home, as its material embodiment, developed as one of colonial Kenya’s most powerful tropes.2 The roles that men and women were [ 106 ]

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expected to play within the home, however, were configured differently. As men revelled in the freedom from restraint that Africa’s ‘open spaces’ allowed, they cultivated a noble public image as husbands, fathers and benevolent household heads. Women, meanwhile, found themselves as civilisers in a double sense: of their European menfolk, first of all, for whom hearth and home were thought to provide a necessary protection against Africa’s degenerative effects; and of African women, to whom it was hoped settler housewives might impart that civility necessary to produce pliant projections of their own idealised bourgeois selves.3 From the endeavour to instil in African women the mentality of good mothers and wives followed regimes of sanitation, home-building and feminine charm. From the early 1920s at least, when European women began to enter the colony in significant numbers, the wives of settler farmers depicted themselves as matriarchs to the families of ‘the labour’ on their farms, dispensing medical care, occasional schooling and the exemplary model of a bright, clean and well-run home.4 In the late colonial period, as welfare became a state concern, women came together in clubs and societies to instil in ‘their’ Africans the sensibility to cook and clean, to scrub and sew and to find delight in the arrangement of flowers or the ritual procession of a three-course meal.5 It was to ‘their own’, however, as mothers and wives, that white women in Kenya played their most important colonial roles. Alongside the management of African servants and the raising of vital settler children, a central part of a woman’s role was to provide the emotional and material support for her husband’s travails. The ideal wife in Kenya was understanding of her husband’s concerns, ever ready to welcome (often uninvited) guests, attractive in her appearance and charming in her manner. The particular genius of women, it was suggested, was their uncomplaining preparedness to turn a hand. ‘Hard times’, wrote Nora Strange, bring out ‘what is best in men and what is most valiant in women’.6 Women at their best were self-sacrificial – caring not only for their families but also for the wider European community, not to mention the fortunes of their farms when husbands were away. They were expected to do so, moreover, despite the material obstacles that inhibited the seamless replication of a charming English home – and a charming English wife – in the often-difficult conditions of colonial Kenya.7 If the figure of the uncomplaining wife was an archetype of colonial discourse, the figure of the benevolent male was equally so. Benevolence conferred the right to exercise authority over African land and labour but it was also implicated in the patriarchal dispensation of [ 107 ]

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authority over European women. Patriarchy implied women’s vulnerability but it implied also the ability of colonial men to provide their necessary protection from Africa and Africans. Invoking the figure of the predatory ‘native’ male enabled white men to invoke in turn the purity of ‘their’ women and hence the need for their protection.8 The white woman was, at base, a metaphor for civilisation itself: sacred yet fragile, infinitely estimable yet constantly under siege. The support of women by men was less conspicuous in colonial discourses than the support women were expected to provide to their husbands: that it was imparted implicitly suggested that it could be taken for granted in a way that the correct behaviour of European women could not. While the ‘loose woman’ was a prominent ­precautionary trope, antonymic to the uncomplaining wife, the negligent or malicious husband was strikingly absent from contemporary discourse. ‘Drunks’ and ‘down-and-outs’, as we have seen, featured heavily in debates over European welfare in late colonial Kenya but the dominant image was of a single rogue and reprobate male. Failed masculinity took place outside the home, most visibly on the streets of Nairobi and Mombasa. Yet despite the emergence of the ‘poor white’ as a public concern, the idealised European family remained throughout the late colonial period as an enduring testament to colonial success, an allegory for the replenishing of a white man’s country and a model for African welfare as ‘detribalisation’ presented the unwelcome underside of African advance.9 Against the dominant idea of the European family, what the Mathari records afford are histories of conflict, estrangement, disappointment and abuse. As noted above, part of the glamour of Kenya during the inter-war years had derived from its popular association with divorce, scandal and extra-marital affairs. ‘Are you married or do you live in Kenya?’ was the oft-repeated joke. What we discover at Mathari are histories of family breakdown that are as resounding as they are mundane. The stresses and strains that we see here, moreover, were very much a part of the late colonial moment; the discomforts of the frontier may have passed but the personal costs of empire remained. In her work on British India, Elizabeth Buettner has stressed the point that, for the British overseas, the absence of loved ones was a perennial feature of colonial family life.10 The same can certainly be said of Kenya but the particular manner in which families were fractured and divided adds valuable depth and detail to what is now a well-worn story of children separated from their parents and husbands from their wives. Against the dominant idea of burdens willingly shouldered and sacrifices cheerfully borne we do well to remember that for many, life at the dying days of the British empire was a conflicted, and not infrequently painful, affair. [ 108 ]

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Complaining wives Susan Batty was thirty-four when she was admitted to Mathari in March 1958. The previous year she had approached a doctor at the Kiambu District Hospital to request the abortion of a two-month pregnancy. ‘I did not detect any mental disturbance at this time,’ the doctor noted, ‘but I naturally declined her request.’11 On 2 March 1958, the same doctor was called to Batty’s home at her husband’s request. There he found his patient ‘lying in bed in a state of misery’.12 After the doctor persuaded Batty’s husband to leave the room, she confessed to having attempted suicide by overdose the day before and said she was sorry that she had failed. She went on to explain that her husband, an agricultural officer, was ‘brutal’ to her, that he used physical violence, and that he had just dragged her from her bed by the hair. Mrs Batty also complained of migraine, vomiting and an inability to talk, all symptoms that she said began soon after her marriage ten years before. Batty remained at Mathari as a voluntary patient for a period of twelve days. On her Clinical Sheet, under ‘chief complaint’ is written, simply: ‘unhappy since marriage’.13 During the course of her treatment, Batty’s husband himself came to the hospital where he spoke with staff and with his wife. A nurse confided to doctors that Mr Batty was known to be ‘chasing another girl’. Batty denied this and rejected the idea that his wife’s depression was due to him. When asked his opinion of his wife’s condition, Mr Batty said that he found her quite well but ‘more dreary than usual’.14 Doctors diagnosed Mrs Batty as suffering from psychoneurotic depression but declared her fit for discharge, nonetheless. As she prepared to leave Mathari, Mrs Batty said that she was now ‘getting on well’ with her husband and that he had promised ‘not to beat her any more’.15 Numerous other women reported beatings at their husbands’ hands.16 Deborah Howard, certified as suffering from dypsomania and confined at Mathari for a fortnight in April 1954, told doctors that her husband ‘knocked her about’.17 On her Clinical Sheet under ‘physical appearance’ is written only: ‘battered’.18 In other cases, violent husbands were themselves admitted to Mathari. Ricky Sleighman, admitted in December 1956, had been assaulting his wife regularly for years.19 Also admitted in 1956, Jeremy Webber was referred to the hospital after a doctor at Mombasa had discovered his wife with a cut lip and various abrasions, the result, as the doctor observed, of a ‘beating up by her husband’.20 On 20 June, Webber’s wife was interviewed by hospital doctors:

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Originally he used to try and smother me under a pillow … Now he tries to strangle me. In addition, pulls hair, slaps face, broke her glasses in May … I am frightened of him.21

Because Webber had been admitted to Mathari as a voluntary patient, he was free to discharge himself, which he did three days after his wife’s visit to the hospital. Doctors, meanwhile, failed to reach a diagnosis. ‘My feeling’, wrote his doctor in Mombasa, ‘is that Mr Webber does not like to be criticised and has an uncontrollable temper which is not improved by the nagging of his wife.’22 The abuse of European women by their husbands was not only physical. Deirdre Gott, diagnosed as ‘hysterical’ when admitted to Mathari in December 1958, told her doctor that her husband had been calling her ‘a wicked woman’.23 Helen Osborn told doctors that both her mother-in-law and her husband were ‘trying to drive her mad’.24 Geraldine Wallace’s husband also told his wife that she was going mad.25 In cases in which women claimed the abuse, infidelity or neglect by their husband, however, it was typically the referring doctor who made the call as to whether these claims constituted reasonable grounds for distress or were themselves evidence of a disordered or dishonest mind. It was a bias not helped by the fact that husbands themselves often took a leading role in having their wives committed to Mathari as well as in offering explanations for the nature of their distress.26 Equally striking and no less divergent from the conventional image of the European man and wife are those cases in which women expressed negative emotion stemming directly from their failures to fulfil the roles prescribed for them by colonial society. Annette Nicholson, treated at Mathari in December 1957 for depression, complained to doctors that her husband treated her badly; her motherin-law was living with the couple, she reported, and her husband was ‘always bringing home friends’ to whom she was expected to offer hospitality.27 Charlotte Crawford said she felt ashamed. ‘My husband needs a nice bright confident wife who can do things,’ she said, ‘and my children need a nice bright mother.’28 Jemima Grant complained: ‘I’m not domesticated – [I] cannot cook.’29 Marigold Harper, it was ascertained, lacked confidence in cooking and sewing as she had not had the requisite training in these vital female tasks.30 If a failure to measure up to the vaunted ideal of colonial femininity caused distress for some, for others it was loneliness that came to define their experience of Kenya. This, notably, is one aspect of the female experience that did receive attention within contemporary writing – and that has been consequently corroborated in historical accounts.31 To be sure, the expansion of colonial welfare and ­development initiatives [ 110 ]

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during the late colonial period did provide some women with opportunities for a public role but for many, Kenya meant not a widening but a diminishing of horizons. The supposed vulnerability of white women to African predation entrenched their place within the home; many women (even in the 1950s) found themselves living considerable distances from their nearest neighbours but those living in towns could be isolated also – not so much away from white society, but secreted within its protective, claustrophobic folds. When Henry Seaton called at the home of the District Commissioner at Mombasa, he found the Commissioner’s wife ‘pale and wan’: ‘She must have found it a lonely life’, Seaton remembered; ‘her great tribulation [being] the eternal sound of tumbling surf’.32 Anita Burkitt, we recall, became mentally unwell while spending her days alone at home, shielded from the sun by her husband’s heliophobic grand designs. Tom Askwith, posted to the Tanganyika border as a District Officer in 1939, recalled his wife’s reaction to their new home as ‘fairly shattering’. ‘I was indeed fortunate’, he went on, ‘to marry someone who never complained … but the hardships of a colonial wife in remote tropical stations deserve a book to themselves.’33 The tenor of Askwith’s comments is itself significant. Chroniclers of Kenya may well have admitted the particular privations attendant on the female experience but loneliness and discomfort served nonetheless as important elements in the fashioning of the European ideal. The uncomplaining wife was vital in the propagation of a white man’s country; only if white women tolerated discomforts and pressed ahead with their domestic duties could the colonial project succeed.34 In contrast to conventional accounts what the Mathari records show clearly is that white women in Kenya did complain. Loneliness pointed not only to a uniquely female form of fortitude but to mental illness as well. Many of the European women at Mathari described lonely days spent within the home with little opportunity for social interaction. Amelia Sweet, admitted to the hospital in September 1955, reported that she felt ‘very lonely’.35 So did Fiona Johnson.36 Anna Hancock told doctors that her husband kept ‘going out and leaving me’.37 In at least one case, doctors advised a husband not to take his wife out to a ‘remote part of Africa’ for fear of triggering a relapse.38 In a letter to the hospital superintendent, Meredith Webster, who had given up her job in England as a librarian to move to Kenya, described the difficulties of colonial life: Living in Africa, to begin with in remote places, did not encourage outside social activities as my husband and I decided that we would

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never leave our children without a European in charge – this for many years was impossible …   … my first years in Africa were spent in rather lonely places and there were times when I did not see anyone outside my family for months.   … most certainly I should prefer to live in England but I should not be happy if it meant separation from my husband even for a short period. I look forward to the time when we can live in our own home with our children and when I can enjoy making that home and garden as attractive as possible.39

Several women had known their husbands for only a very brief time before they married.40 Others had travelled to Kenya in accordance with their partner’s wishes: Marigold Harper, admitted to Mathari in the spring of 1945, told her local doctor that she ‘couldn’t bear this country’. She had been happy in South Africa where she had been living, she said, but her husband had been anxious to come to Kenya and she had not wanted to stand in his way.41 In a letter to hospital staff, Marigold’s daughter explained that her mother hated the loneliness of farms in Kenya. ‘She is the sort of person’, she wrote, ‘who is far happier in a town than stuck out in the country but I think my father likes his present home.’42 It was precisely the absence of her husband, however, that explains Marigold’s admission to Mathari. After she attempted suicide by overdose, her doctor at Naivasha (having pumped her stomach with strychnine) wrote to Mathari. ‘The risk of leaving the patient in Naivasha without a nurse cannot be considered’, he stressed. No mention is made of the husband.43 In fact, it is only when a letter from Harper’s husband alerted doctors to the fact that she had been in Mathari beyond the ten days allowed for observation that it was realised that their patient must be either certified as insane or released into his care. Attempted suicide, in this instance, did not warrant certification but that was only because a husband had now made himself available to accept responsibility for the well-being of his wife.44 Nor was Harper’s the only case in which the provision of a husband’s care was significant in determining whether a female patient was to continue at Mathari or be discharged. Gabby Fairborne, who entered the hospital in April 1956, told doctors that her husband had threatened her with a gun and accused her of mental derangement. ‘She hated being alone’, it was noted, ‘and she hated being shut up.’45 Two weeks after admission, Fairborne was noted to be mentally normal and, within a fortnight, was judged fit for discharge. Attempts by doctors to contact Fairborne’s husband, however, drew a blank. To a magistrate at Nakuru, the Mathari superintendent complained that his patient’s husband was neglecting his wife. ‘Whether Fairborne likes it or not,’ [ 112 ]

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the superintendent argued, ‘he is still legally married to Mrs Fairborne … apart from any moral obligation, undoubtedly there is a legal one that he take responsibility for his wife’s welfare’. Due to be released at the end of May, Mrs Fairborne was noted to be ‘without money or plans’.46 No evidence remains of her life in Kenya after this point. Other case files divulge patchier histories but allude nonetheless to the problems women encountered in the absence of their men. In April 1953 Carmen Brownlee was treated at Mathari for alcoholism. Her husband, her records note, had been ‘away for years’; in his absence Brownlee, a recent immigrant from South Africa, began ‘drinking to excess’.47 Charlotte Crawford ‘lost the will to live’ when her husband went to India for two months, leaving Charlotte with his parents.48 At the Kenya National Archives, numerous records remain of women left stranded when husbands were deported, posted out of Kenya or simply upped and left. The Kenya Law Society offered legal representation to these women free of charge – provided its officers were satisfied that applicants were honest and deserving.49

Vulnerable men Together, this evidence does much to unsettle those archetypal figures of the gallant, protective husband and the uncomplaining wife. If we are tempted to consider the colonial enterprise as being especially difficult for women, however, it is important to note that men as well as women found day-to-day life in Kenya difficult, lonely or depressing. Indeed, while much feminist-inspired scholarship has focused attention in recent years on the social positioning of white women within the colonial domain, it may well be the case that white men have suffered from comparative neglect.50 Likewise, while feminist studies of mental illness tend to focus on women, less attention has been paid to the ways in which deviations from norms of masculinity have coincided with – and served to articulate – mental illness among men.51 To be sure, deconstructionist approaches have done much to interrogate the cultural construction of colonial masculinity but still we know relatively little about the ways in which boys and men encountered empire in ways other than what dominant discourses prescribed.52 Too often, on the other hand, the domestic domain and the female have been overlaid, with the European male strangely absented from the colonial home. Among Kenya’s ‘white insane’ we find ample evidence of men and boys whose life histories do much to defamiliarise the dominant image of colonial manhood. White men could be malign but fragile too: power was scarcely a male preserve. Empire, we have been led to [ 113 ]

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believe, was a uniquely attractive prospect for young men, unencumbered as they often were and charged with a spirit of adventure.53 In late colonial Kenya, however, there arrived numerous young men, often from unstable family backgrounds and often unable to cope with the isolation and bewilderment that commonly ensued. Toby Kollman was just 10 years old when he came to Kenya in June 1949 with his parents and his elder sister. When his mother and sister returned to England four years later, Kollman was left in Kenya with his violent, alcoholic father. Worried over his parents’ troubled marriage and estranged from the familiarity of his childhood home, he twice attempted suicide but on both occasions ‘lost his nerve’.54 When admitted to Mathari in the summer of 1956, Kollman told doctors that he was afraid of his father and had wanted to return to England with his mother.55 Diagnosed as depressed, Kollman spent a month at the hospital where his condition rapidly improved. On discharge, he returned to work at a technical college in Nairobi where he was training as an engineer. No records remain to indicate whether Kollman remained in Kenya, or indeed, whether he was reunited with his family. Other young men struggled to cope when family members left the colony. In July 1947, 21-year-old Struan Martin suffered what doctors described as ‘a nervous breakdown’ after his father, his only relative, left for England without him.56 Jonathan Roscoe, 24 years old when admitted to Mathari in 1951, had been working for the East Africa Railways and Harbours when he attempted suicide in the spring of that year.57 His Clinical Sheet described his early life: Born Nairobi, school Nairobi; left Parklands 14 or 15 years of age; moved to Mombasa; no work 2 years; then joined army; medically boarded out for malaria; joined Gailey and Roberts; back to Mombasa; joined Merchant Navy; sailed to Colombo and India; idle a year; then joined oil company 4 months; idle another 2 years, then joined railways March 1950.58

Roscoe, it transpired, lived with his parents in Mombasa.59 When he attempted suicide, however, in April 1951, his parents were away in England ‘on leave’. He cut his wrists, Roscoe explained, because his two dogs had died.60 A similar episode, it transpired, had occurred on a previous occasion when he had been left alone.61 For Roscoe, it seems, the stress of only intermittent employment was worsened not by social stigma but by the absence of his parents. While concern over the separation of families in Kenya has frequently focused on the distress experienced by women who sent their children to England for schooling, in this case we see the situation reversed: taking regular [ 114 ]

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leave was seen as the necessary means to maintaining mental health but the outcome of the practice, in this instance at least, was to leave other family members isolated. Of course, isolation was itself identified as a common source of mental distress for colonial Europeans but it was associated more often with officials at remote administrative stations, the Northern Frontier District in particular, than with young men stranded in Kenya’s towns. Another young man living alone in Kenya was Oscar Randolph. In October 1947 Randolph, 18 years old and suffering from tuberculosis, was sent by his parents in England to the farm in the Kedong Valley where his aunt was living.62 When his aunt left for Mombasa the following spring, however, Randolph refused to go with her, choosing instead to live alone in a house on a nearby farm, for which he paid a nominal rent. As to what he did there during the following year, his case file yields only scraps of information. A police report states that he lived as a recluse, never associating with Europeans and going out for walks only occasionally, alone, at night. In late January 1949 Randolph told the manager of the farm that he was lonely and set off on foot for Nairobi, some fifty miles away. Before he left, he gave to an elderly Kikuyu man named Ngosi the three white rabbits which he had been keeping as pets. Four days later, a man dressed in a ragged shirt and battered shoes was brought to the police station in Mombasa. The man was dirty and unkempt and, when questioned, told a police inspector that he had ‘given up the world’.63 He said that he wished to be segregated away from people in order to meditate and he expressed an interest in embracing Islam. The man was Oscar Randolph. The police inspector in charge judged him to be both mentally unbalanced and a vagrant and Randolph was duly held in the prison at Fort Jesus for a week before being transferred to Mathari. There, however, he showed no signs of mental illness; the problem, indeed, was less that Randolph was mad but more that he was sane. No hotels would take him; he refused to live with his aunt but he could not be trusted to live as a European on his own. Though his aunt expressed a hope that someone might take her nephew ‘up country’ or that he could be admitted to a nursing home, what actually became of Oscar Randolph is unknown. In a letter to Mathari, the Senior Medical Officer at the European Hospital in Mombasa described Randolph as a ‘remittance man from Gloucester’.64 To the historian, however, Oscar Randolph eludes categorisation. Apparently sane when inside Mathari, he was variously described as a vagrant, a lunatic and a recluse in the period before he was admitted.65 While there is compelling evidence on file to suggest that Randolph was depressed – or lonely at the least – one might also [ 115 ]

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consider the resourcefulness by which he lived. Randolph may well have been rejected by his parents but it was he in turn who rejected his aunt and created a solitary life for himself on a settler farm. We might also remark at the endurance he showed in walking from the Kedong Valley to Nairobi and jumping a train to Mombasa. There he told police that he was trying to get to India. Randolph’s designation as a ‘remittance man’ is clearly inadequate. By definition, the remittance man was a person to be forgotten about and kept out of the way. The brief glimpse we have of Randolph’s life suggests that this remittance man, at any rate, had not given up on forging his own way in the world.66 No less striking is Randolph’s preparedness to develop friendships with non-Europeans. When in Mombasa, unwilling to stay with his aunt, Randolph found lodgings at the house of an Indian.67 He also had the name of an Arab in the town, who, so Randolph told his aunt, had a house for him and was prepared to put him up.68 To the police who apprehended him, Randolph’s relations with non-Europeans marked him out as peculiar but for Randolph himself, estrangement from ‘white’ society did not mean estrangement from society altogether. Notably, when he left the Kedong Valley farm where he had been staying, Randolph entrusted his pet rabbits to an elderly Kikuyu. These were ties of trust and support that were unthinkable to a colonial culture characterised supposedly by the ability of Europeans to remain inscrutable and aloof to the ‘natives’ over which they claimed to rule. Other young men had run away from home or from institutional care; still others had impoverished or unstable family backgrounds.69 Joseph Dryden had been born in Glasgow in 1939.70 The eldest of ten children, he left school at 15 in order to support his family: both parents suffered from tuberculosis and his father was a heavy drinker. Dryden consequently took a series of jobs, none lasting longer than a year, but his father ‘drank the money’ that Joseph remitted home and when, in 1957, he was called up for military service, Joseph decided to sign on as a regular soldier for a six-year engagement.71 He consequently spent eight months working at an army depot in Scotland before serving six weeks in Kenya, four months in the Persian Gulf and three months in Jordan. In 1958, Dryden arrived back in Kenya from where he continued to send £2 each week back to his mother in Glasgow. During the course of his military service, Dryden had been on a number of charges for drunkenness and insubordination. Matters came to a head in September when he was posted to Amman. What followed is described in a letter from the Royal Army Medical Corps to the Mathari Hospital where Dryden was admitted in December 1958: [ 116 ]

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Three months ago he went to Amman and soon after arrival he was charged with drunkenness, resisting arrest, and failure to obey a sergeant’s command. He was held in custody awaiting court martial and during this time assaulted a corporal of the guard. There were also a number of breakouts from the guardroom and 11 days before returning to Muthaiga he was put in solitary confinement in a native gaol. On return to Muthaiga 14 days ago he and other prisoners took over the guard room and held it for 5 hours. He has since been in solitary confinement there.72

On the first of December, while still in solitary confinement, Joseph Dryden cut his arms, face and chest with a razor blade. Significantly, doctors were sure that this act of self-harm was not a serious attempt at suicide but, rather, a calculated attempt to bring attention to his case. Specifically, Dryden was worried that while on court martial the financial stipend that he made to his mother in Glasgow would be suspended. The letter that accompanied Dryden, who was sent under armed guard from his barracks to Mathari, noted: He complains of bad treatment and has also been worried that on Court Martial the £2 a week which he has sent home to his mother will be stopped.   He has not yet replied to his mother’s letter which he received two weeks ago. Last night he felt he must try to bring attention to his case and says he would repeat the act given the opportunity. No desire to commit suicide.73

On admission to Mathari, Dryden was found to exhibit no abnormal talk or behaviour. Nor could evidence be found for psychosis.74 In conversation with the hospital superintendent, meanwhile, an officer from the army’s medical corps admitted that Dryden had been transferred to Mathari because the barracks where he had been held were inadequate for his control.75 Whether Dryden’s act of self-harm should be understood in the light of his family’s hardship, his father’s drinking or Dryden’s own experience of military service is unclear. That ‘poor family background’ is mentioned on his file is, however, illuminating. For Joseph Dryden, leaving school at 15 in order to provide financial support for his impoverished parents and numerous siblings in Glasgow precipitated a period of unstable employment and itinerant military service. In the final analysis Dryden’s impoverished background explains his presence not only in Mathari but in Kenya Colony as well. In late colonial Kenya, we can surmise, there were a number of men with traumatic early life experiences. Some came from broken homes, many were impoverished, others had been neglected by their parents or were separated from their wives. ‘I have come to the stage’, Berkeley Cole told Karen Blixen shortly before he died in 1925, ‘when I can only [ 117 ]

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drive in the very best of cars, only smoke the finest cigars and only drink the most exquisite vintages of wine.’76 Few such men came to Kenya after 1939. Few indeed, could even remember the likes of Cole, Delamere, Blixen and Finch-Hatton. The Mau Mau Emergency, to be sure, provided ample opportunity for renewing the mythology of the gallant male ideal.77 More mundane perhaps but no less heroic, the men of the ‘second colonial occupation’ also served the ideological cause – embodiments of the purpose, benevolence and technical proficiency by which the late colonial state was defined. Yet we should be cautious in accepting the triumphalism of colonial discourses too readily, however critically they may be read. Empire conferred honour and adventure upon some young men but not for all. Distance from family members might well have afforded freedom from restraint for many but for others it led to bewilderment and despair. Historians have been right to stress the deleterious effects of familial separation in the colonial domain. It is also important, however, to recognise its gendered effects. As women were let down by the men on whom they staked dependence, men suffered the weighty expectation that they could flourish on their own.

Broken homes Any discussion of the family in Kenya Colony, of course, has ­inevitably to take its cue from its much publicised image as a place of sexual and moral deviance. At the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi and at the Wanjohi Valley in the Rift, drug-taking and wife-swapping earned the colony sensational appeal. Approaching the legend of ‘Happy Valley’ with scepticism does not mean, however, that marital breakdown was uncommon in Kenya. Among the Europeans at Mathari, almost a third were either separated from their spouses or were involved in a troubled relationship. Among those who were or had been married, the proportion is even higher. Wealth, as has been argued already, enabled a flaunting of social convention but with less exalted social standing, relations that became embittered or estranged had a social as well as an emotional cost. Divorce in mid-century Britain conferred the taint of disrepute; to the pain of separation was added the shame of public scandal.78 In Kenya, where the prestige imperative made such exacting demands upon Europeans’ behaviour, public opprobrium went deeper still. The exotics at Muthaiga could afford to disregard the norm: with the financial wherewithal to enter and leave the colony as they pleased (and the opportunity to contain themselves within exclusive social enclaves while they were there), they had no need for the kind of racial solidarity that the rest of white society worked so assiduously to [ 118 ]

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maintain. The need for social conformity increased as one descended the social scale; where money was tight, respectability provided an alternative resource. Only among the embattled did social conformity have consequence and it was here, among the engineers, the secretaries, the mechanics and the clerks, that we see the impoverishing effects of public scandal unfold. Yet to read these stories through a lens of social control (that is, as testimony to the force of social sanction), would be to underplay the very real psychic damage that accompanied the breaking up of family bonds. Social and personal lives were interleaved. Above all, it was the combined effects of marital breakdown, material distress and social marginalisation that most often led an individual to the hospital gates. From this perspective it is clear that the problem with the ‘poor white’ as an analytical category is that it presents poverty in isolation from the affective and social registers by which individual human histories found their (often-crooked) path. This is not to deny the prevalence of material privation among the Europeans in Kenya – and among the white insane in particular. Yet we cannot fully appreciate its effects unless we see how poverty compounded, and was compounded by, the kinds of idiosyncratic private traumas that, finally, only psychiatric case files can afford. The file for Mr Ivan Callow provides an excellent example. At first glance, Callow appears to fit quite neatly the image we have established of Kenya’s degenerates and down and outs. Treated at Mathari for alcoholism in 1955 – but noted to be destitute as well – Callow was transferred to Britain within weeks of his admission to Mathari on the grounds that his recovery in Kenya would be hindered by the inadequacy of facilities for his treatment.79 In correspondence regarding his transfer out of the colony, however, a more detailed account of his past was described. Callow was born in Edinburgh in 1916. On leaving school, he took a job as a clerk with an insurance company but did not enjoy office work and in 1939, aged 23, joined the Scots Guards. Two years later, Callow came to Kenya where he was seconded to the King’s African Rifles. There he married in 1943 but he left Kenya soon afterwards to fight in the South Asian campaign. A doctor’s clinical notes describe in somewhat splintered prose the succession of events: ‘Married 1943, went to Burma, wife unfaithful, Divorce, 1945.’80 Historians of the Second World War have amply documented its destructive effects on combatants’ family lives.81 As for Callow, when demobilised in 1948 he had spent almost a decade in the army and had seen active service in Burma and Abyssinia. In his absence, his father died and his wife had begun a relationship with another man; when he returned to civilian life he struggled to adjust. Unable to secure a [ 119 ]

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stable job, he spent the next ten years mostly unemployed, punctuated by spells of temporary work – as a clerk in the Public Works Department, as a labourer on a sisal estate, and as a member of the Kenya Police during the early stages of the Mau Mau Emergency. Throughout this time, Callow drank excessively. In 1953, his mother died. By July 1955 when Callow came to the attention of doctors at Mathari, he was suicidal and depressed. Estranged from his wife and orphaned by the death of his parents, Callow was very much alone in the world as he attempted to turn his life around, but with little experience of civilian employment he struggled to hold down continuous work. Callow did, however, have the support of a senior member of the Kenya Police who emphasised to hospital staff that Callow had an ‘excellent army record’ and that his unfortunate situation was the result of ‘external circumstances’ and not ‘a personality defect’.82 Without this intervention, Ivan Callow might well have added to the drunks and degenerates of River Road. As it was, arrangements were put in place for his repatriation to England. In the interim, Callow used the Mathari hospital as a refuge from the outside world. At the end of May 1956, six weeks after his second admission to the hospital, Callow was informed that Mathari was ‘not a boarding house’ and discharged. Whether he was indeed repatriated to England or found stable employment in Kenya instead – and whether indeed he was able to remain sober – is not indicated on his file. In numerous other cases, troubled relationships were aggravated by financial distress.83 With limited welfare services and in the absence of wider family networks, poverty was liable to place a considerable extra strain on colonial married life. Valerie Chaplain, who came to Kenya from England with her husband in 1948, liked the colony at first but was soon ‘overridden by the desire to go home’. This was attributed by doctors to the fact that her husband had lost his job and the couple were in debt.84 Anthony Jameson, who married his wife when on leave from the Kenya Police, suspected her of disloyalty; he too was worried over debt.85 Jeremy Lovell – treated at Mathari for depression in 1958 – believed his wife to have been unfaithful. Accounting for his depression, Lovell described a combination of increasing ‘job, financial and domestic difficulties’.86 In several other cases, men who were separated from their wives consequently encountered alcoholism, destitution and mental illness. After his wife left him in 1952, Justin MacDonald struggled to remain solvent and, after a series of five jobs in eighteen months, ‘went to pieces’.87 Some months after Helen Carter left her husband in the summer of 1948, he was found by a local doctor living alone, in a state of confusion, ‘attended only by his boys and [his] dogs’.88 [ 120 ]

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In a number of cases, the itinerant biographical pathways that the patients’ case files describe help to give expression to the essentially chaotic nature of many Europeans’ familial relations. The case of John Prosser, while in no way typical, perhaps best illustrates the tendency of these histories to diverge dramatically from the kinds of narratives that dominant discourse laid down. The following is quoted verbatim from his Clinical Sheet: 1946: three months leave in England after five years serving with the army in India and Burma. Trouble with wife at this time followed by divorce in 1949 on grounds of wife’s adultery. Returned to India 1946 – worried about wife etc. and began drinking heavily. Became involved with attractive widow with whom he lived for a period in India. Resigned from army in 1948 following partition – came to Kenya with the widow in 1948 and together they took a farm at Nyeri. Left widow in 1949 because of letters she had written to his father asking for money. Got involved in domestic brawl – followed by car accident when a jealous husband tried to kill the patient deliberately – went to Naivasha with wife for weekend – following this was arrested by police on false affidavit given by husband – 5 weeks in Nairobi prison – appealed and was released. Then job managing coffee farm at Limuru … then ran away with the sister of the managing director – set up house at Gilgil. The lady in question then in 1953 went to England to nurse her mother who had had a nervous breakdown. Following this patient got depressed living alone and took to drink … then joined Kenya Regiment as private – left in September 1948 – joined Locust Control as temporary officer – left that December 1954. Since then in European Hospital with malaria – treated and cured. Now writing a handbook on poisonous snakes.89

On arrival at Mathari, Prosser was noted to be unemployed, drinking excessively, destitute and depressed. After contact was made with his mother in England, doctors resolved that their patient be repatriated. Government funds secured an air ticket back to Britain and, six weeks after Prosser first arrived at Mathari, he was put on a flight to London.90 In Kenya, marital breakdown was hardly endemic. Nor did it have much to do with the champagne air or the intoxicating sun that together comprised so much of Kenya’s colonial mystique.91 The correspondence, however, between Kenya’s popular image as a place of ‘alcohol, altitude and adultery’ and the contents of the Mathari files is striking nonetheless. The image of the well-publicised divorcée outside the New Stanley Hotel, foot-long cigarette holder in her mouth, cocktail in her hand, should clearly be handled with care: members of Kenya’s ‘smart set’ were, by definition, extraordinary.92 This is not to say, however, that we must accept the opposing view: that Kenya was populated by men and women, by nature, committed to the values [ 121 ]

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of the bourgeois home. Not all Europeans in Kenya were inspired by the ethic of the settler colony; not all were unshakeably committed to the endurance of their marriage and the reproduction in perpetuity of the settler home. Most importantly, few Europeans in Kenya had the opportunity to stake themselves so inseparably to the colonial ideal. In any case, immigrant Europeans were hampered: by their own oftenconflicted family lives and by the burdens of their pasts. Difficulties only deepened when families split and broke apart: in a settler-colonial context, with white prestige at stake, losing the essential respectability that the family conveyed was liable to damage an individual’s racial credibility in its turn. In this regard, variables of class and gender played crucial roles, as the following cases show. Born in Australia in 1900, Pamela Ephraigm came to Kenya with her husband in 1949. Ten years previously – then aged 39 – Ephraigm had given birth to a still-born child; having failed to consequently conceive, in 1955 she had a hysterectomy. As with the death of Ivan Callow’s parents and the loss of his wife, the still-birth of Ephraigm’s first and only child can be read as a decisive trauma and does much to explain her mental distress. Yet to consider Ephraigm’s subjectivity without reckoning it against the social context in which it was embedded must be to attain only a partial view. Crucially, when Ephraigm left her husband – ‘who had always been impossible’ – in the summer of 1958, she took up the invidious position of a single white woman with her morality in doubt.93 Within a month Ephraigm had lost her job and, like Ivan Callow, began drinking to excess. When she attempted suicide, Ephraigm was apprehended by the police and consequently imprisoned. On her release, she took up lodgings at a Nairobi hotel but was duped by a male companion into spending what little of her money remained. By November, Pamela Ephraigm was destitute. For the three months before she came to Mathari, she had eaten only one meal a day.94 Ephraigm was not the only white woman in Kenya who found herself living in a less than salubrious hotel. One of the most remarkable case histories on record concerns Melanie and Terence Parker – both of whom were admitted to Mathari. Mr Parker, an engineer living in Kisumu, was first admitted to the hospital in September 1944, judged to be suffering from alcoholic hallucinations.95 Two weeks after he entered the hospital Parker was discharged from Mathari but was readmitted again in 1947, this time for a month. In that same year, he separated from his wife (but did not divorce) and undertook to make a maintenance payment of £10 per month.96 Ten years later, however, Mrs Parker was herself admitted to Mathari. Significantly one of the main points of her husband’s anxiety when he had been in hospital [ 122 ]

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was his inability to make financial payments to his wife.97 When Mrs Parker entered Mathari in April 1957, poverty was the chief feature of her emotional distress. Without the financial support customarily provided by her husband, Parker had been forced to accommodate herself at one of the less reputable hotels in Nairobi. Tellingly, Parker told hospital staff that her main concern was to find decent living accommodation.98 In a remarkable document, the Mathari superintendent, while simultaneously prescribing antipsychotic drugs, admitted that it was this – Parker’s straitened circumstances and her precarious living arrangements – that accounted for her admission to the hospital: Course and Treatment in Hospital: Largactil 50 mg from 20 Apr–25  Apr   57. Here only because she was unable to find suitable hotel a­ ccommodation.99

At admission, Parker was observed to be emotional, ‘weepy’ and apparently under great strain.100 The reason for her admission, it must be noted, was her inability to find accommodation; at least, this was the superintendent’s observation. But Parker was also thought to be deluded as well – ‘inclined to ideas of reference’ in the superintendent’s words – and was treated accordingly. Evidence for her delusional state came from her claim that ‘people were looking at her’ and ‘gawking’.101 One can only wonder as to whether, as a single white woman, living in a disreputable hotel, people were indeed looking at Melanie Parker. For over a decade Parker had been living alone in Nairobi, separated from her husband, who himself is likely to have been known publicly as an alcoholic and an intermittent patient at the Mathari hospital. The forces of shame and stigma, we can surmise, had concrete effects. In numerous cases we see the impoverishing effects of social exclusion. Social marginality, it is clear, was no static state but a dilemma increasing in its costs. Yet marginality here was as much to do with gender as it was with class. Social respectability earned inclusion within white identity but was configured very differently for men and for women. The point is not that men had a licence to transgress social norms that women did not but that boundaries of respectability were themselves gendered: while men enjoyed the ability to adventure and experiment, to prospect and pitch up unannounced, women were defined in more tightly delineated auxiliary roles, principally as mothers and wives. Single white women were especially problematic.102 This was because, in straitened circumstances and beyond the care of dominant men, women were liable to transgress colonial boundaries at their most sensitive points. White women who resorted to prostitution posed the most disturbing prospect.103 Yet to assume that only women were capable of sexual transgression – or that empire for men signalled only opportunity – is to underestimate the h ­ eterogeneity of affective [ 123 ]

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relations that developed between colonisers and colonised. This is not to say, however, that there are no patterns to be discerned or conclusions to be drawn. Understanding the particular ways in which these relations subverted white society – and precipitated mental distress for those individuals concerned – helps us to understand the dynamic combination of gender, race and class. To get closer in to the complex interplay of madness and marginality, therefore, it is necessary that we turn our attention to sex.

Notes   1 Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, p. 40.   2 For just some of the many idealised descriptions of the British settler home in Kenya, see Walter Bromhead, What’s What in Kenya Highlands: Their Pioneering Romance and Colonising Possibilities (Nairobi: East African Standard, 1924), pp. 9, 29–30, 32; Buxton, Kenya Days, p. 182; Hunter, Hunter, p. 101; Lander, My Kenya Acres, pp. 27, 44; Genesta Hamilton, A Stone’s Throw: Travels from Africa in Six Decades (London: Hutchinson, 1986), p. 85.   3 H. Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 208–19; Joanna Lewis, Empire State Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–52 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), pp. 169–85. Audrey Wipper, ‘The Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organisation: The Co-optation of Leadership’, African Studies Review, 18: 3 (1975), pp. 99–120. See also the essays collected in Nancy Rose Hunt (ed.), African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992). For women as the civilising agents for white colonial men – in the Australian context – see Marilyn Lake, ‘Australian Frontier Feminism and the Marauding White Man’, in Clare Midgeley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), pp. 123–36.   4 See Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Historicising Colonial Nostalgia: European Women’s Narratives of Algeria and Kenya, 1900–Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p.40.   5 R. M. Gregory, The Teaching of Homecraft: A Handbook for African Teachers (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1958), p. 11. On wives providing medical care for Africans see: Todd, ‘Kenya’s Red Sunset’, p. 18 and Lander, My Kenya Acres, pp. 123–9.   6 Ibid., p. 165.   7 See Emily Bradley’s Dearest Priscilla for a light-hearted account of the trials of a colonial wife in East Africa: Bradley, Dearest Priscilla: Letters to the Wife of a Colonial Civil Servant (London: Max Parrish, 1950), pp. 120, 152; Stapleton, The Gate Hangs Well, p.  41; Joanna Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters: Women of the British Empire (London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 45.   8 Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Amarah Inglis, The White Women’s Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua (London: Sussex University Press, 1975); Durba Ghosh, ‘Gender and Colonialism: Expansion or Marginalization?’, The Historical Journal, 47: 3 (2004): pp. 740–2.   9 Lewis, Empire State Building, p. 136. 10 Buettner, Empire Families, pp. 110–45. 11 MMH: EU.F.6/58, Doctor, Kiambu District Hospital to Mr Crawford, Mathari Mental Hospital, 10 March 1958. 12 Ibid. 13 MMH: EU.F.6/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Chief Complaint’. 14 MMH: EU.F.6/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’, 18 March 1958.

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battered wives and broken homes 15 MMH: EU.F.6/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’, 18 March 1958 and 22 March 1958. 16 See for example, amongst others, case files concerning: Geraldine Wallace, MMH: EU.F.14/51; Anna Hancock, MMH: EU.F.29/57; Finlay Valentine, MMH: EU.M.4/58; Brian Grieves, MMH: EU.M.18/58; Rowan Brookes, MMH: EU.M.5/59; Julian Cafferty, MMH: EU.M.25/48; and Jennifer Bland, MMH: EU.F.8/58. 17 MMH: EU.F.15/53, Clinical Sheet, ‘Marital Relationship’. 18 MMH: EU.F.14/53, Clinical Sheet, ‘Physical Appearance’. Three months after her discharge, Deborah Howard was visited at the Devon Hotel in Nairobi where she was staying. Described only as ‘drunk’ and ‘noisy’, Mrs Howard, was now less of a medical case than a social problem. 19 MMH: EU.M.20/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’. 20 MMH: EU.M.9/58, Dr A. R. Sandford, Mombasa, to Margetts, 13 May 1958. 21 MMH: EU.M.9/58, Discharge Letter, 15 October 1958: ‘Course and Treatment in Hospital’. 22 MMH: EU.M.9/58, Dr A. R. Sandford, Mombasa, to Margetts, 13 May 1958. 23 MMH: EU.F.20/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’, 3 December 1958. 24 MMH: EU.F.8/48, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’, 15 March 1948. 25 MMH: EU.F.14/51, Clinical Sheet, ‘Family History’. 26 Bronwyn Labrum, ‘The Boundaries of Femininity: Madness and Gender in New Zealand, 1870–1910’, in Wendy Chan, Dorothy E. Chunn and Robert Menzies (eds), Women, Madness and the Law: A Feminist Reader (London: Glasshouse, 2005), pp. 71–2. 27 MMH: EU.F.32/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’, undated. 28 MMH: EU.F.1/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’. 29 MMH: EU.F.22/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’. 30 MMH: EU.F.5/54, Patient’s daughter to Carothers, 19 February 1950. 31 Apart from those sources mentioned here, see also Allen, Tales from the Dark Continent, p. 119 and Anthony Kirk-Greene, Glimpses of Empire: A Corona Anthology (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), p. 255. 32 Seaton, Lion in the Morning, p. 33. 33 Or as Nora Strange put it, ‘What the average woman does or doesn’t do in Kenya in addition to her domestic and social duties would fill a chapter in itself.’ Strange, Kenya Today, p. 155; Tom Askwith, ‘Memoirs of Kenya’, II, pp. 8–9. Isolation, thought Grenfell Price, was particularly difficult for women. Price, White Settlers in the Tropics, p. 139. 34 Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire, pp. 219–20. On the metropolitan context, see Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, 5: 1 (1978). 35 MMH: EU.F.25/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘Mental State’. 36 Other lonely women admitted to Mathari include Emily Hayward: MMH.F.26/56 and Maria Kleinmann: EU.F.24/57. 37 MMH: EU.F.5/54, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. 38 EU.F.18/58, Mathari Mental Hospital to Mr Thomas Humble, 2 October 1959. In 1928, Gareth Castle was transferred to South Africa on the recommendation that ‘contact with natives … may retard his recovery’. KNA: AG / 32 / 81, Chief Secretary to Minister for External Affairs, South Africa, 21 December 1927 (1A). 39 MMH: EU.F.21/56, Patient handwritten letter, undated. 40 See, for example, Miriam Philips, MMH: EU.F.1/48; Jemima Grant, MMH: EU.F.22/56; Brian Jensen, MMH: EU.M.21/56, and Robin Barker: EU.M.13/56. 41 MMH: EU.F.5/54, Doctor, Naivasha, to Margetts, 24 April 1945. 42 MMH: EU.F.5/54, Patient’s daughter to Dr. Carothers, 19 February 1950. 43 MMH: EU.F.5/54, Doctor, Naivasha, to Superintendent, Mathari Mental Hospital, 24 April 1945. 44 Marigold Harper continued to be treated at Mathari, on and off, for the following ten years. On at least one occasion she told doctors that she preferred to stay

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45 46 47 48 49

50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69

at Mathari than return home. On every occasion that she was readmitted to the hospital, her admittance followed a voluntary request. MMH: EU.F.5/54, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress of Case’. MMH: EU.F.8/56, Interview with patient, 29 March 1956. MMH: EU.M. F.8/56, Margetts to Resident Magistrate, Nakuru, 29 May 1956. MMH: EU.F.21/53, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. MMH: EU.F.1/56, Hand-written notes, undated. KNA: DC / KSM / 1 / 15 / 206, Poor Persons Divorce Proceedings, Daisy Hart; Noreen Hennesey, Sylvia Astrop, Christine Etheridge; AG / 30 / 1A, Maintenance Orders, Various Cases ; AH / 13 / 132, Daina Watkins; DC / KSM / 1 / 15 / 206, Frances McLeod to Registrar General, 20 July 1955; JA / 25 / 1, Kenny to Turnbull, 14 October 1948; AH / 13 / 132: Eileen Clarke to the Governor, 25 March 1949; JA / 25 / 1: Muriel Potter, A. M. Webb to Colonial Office, 26 June 1953; DC / KSM / 1 / 15 / 206, Frances McLeod to Registrar General, 20 July 1955. Key texts include Levine, Gender and Empire; Chaudhuri and Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism, and Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992); Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire. On Kenya in particular, see Glenda Riley, Taking Land, Breaking Land: Women Colonizing the American West and Kenya, 1840–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2003) Joan Busfield, Men, Women and Madness: Understanding Gender and Mental Disorder (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 5–6. On colonial masculinity see Bristow, Empire Boys; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1997). John Tosh, ‘Imperial Masculinity and the Flight from Domesticity in Britain, 1880–1914’, in T. Foley, L. Pilkington, S. Ryder and E. Tilley (eds), Gender and Colonialism (Galway: Galway University Press, 1995), pp. 72–85. MMH: EU.M.7/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘Family History’. MMH: EU.M.7/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘General Appearance’. MMH: EU.M.20/48, Divisional Police Headquarters, Kisumu, to Assistant Inspector in Charge, Songhor, 14 July 1948; Carothers to patient’s father, Surrey, 23 July 1948. MMH: EU.M.6/51, Clinical Sheet, Address: Mombasa Railways, Employment: Foreman. MMH: EU.M.6/51, Clinical Sheet, ‘Previous Personal History’. MMH: EU.M.6/51, Medical Officer, European Hospital, Mombasa, 23 January 1951. MMH: EU.M.6/51, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. MMH: EU.M.6/51, Medical Officer, European Hospital, Mombasa, 23 January 1951. MMH: EU.M.4/49, R. Wilkinson to Mathari Mental Hospital, 31 January 1949. MMH: EU.M.4/49, Acting Assistant Superintendent of Police i/c Mombasa, Statement (undated). MMH: EU.M.4/49, Senior Medical Officer, European Hospital, Mombasa, to Caro­­ thers, 11 February 1949. MMH: EU.M.4/49, Mathari Mental Hospital to R. Wilkinson, 17 February 1949; Acting Assistant Superintendent of Police i/c Mombasa, Statement (undated); Assistant Superintendent of Police, Naivasha, to Superintendent of Police, Mombasa, 4 February 1949. My thanks to Alex Poots for stressing this point to me. MMH: EU.M.4/49, R. Wilkinson to Mathari Mental Hospital, 31 January 1949. Ibid. See, for example, Adam Fenshaw, MMH: EU.M.14/47; Robert Tallett, MMH: EU.M.23/54; Jasper Anderton, MMH: EU.M./6.57; Dominic Keaton, MMH: EU.M.11/57, Helen Osborn, MMH: EU.F.8/48; Anthony Atkinson, MMH:

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battered wives and broken homes EU.M.11/54; and Olivia Dobson, MMH: EU.F.30/57. 70 MMH: EU.M.28/58, Psychiatric Report, 12 December 1958. 71 MMH: EU.M.28/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. 72 MMH: EU.M.28/58, K. W. Hancock, Lt, RAMC, to Margetts, undated. 73 Ibid. 74 MMH: EU.M.28/58, Psychiatric Report, Margetts, 12 December 1958. 75 MMH: EU.M.28/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’, 2 December 1958. 76 Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 261. 77 Webster, Englishness and Empire, pp. 119–48. 78 Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1989), p. 235. 79 MMH: EU.M.7/55, B. K. A. Crawford, Medical Officer, Mathari Hospital, to whom it may concern, 7 May 1956. 80 MMH: EU.M.7/55, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’. 81 Robert Mackay, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 97–105. 82 MMH: EU.M.7/55, Crawford to Director of Medical Services, Nairobi, 8 May 1956. 83 See, for example, the files of Anthony Jameson, MMH: EU.M.13/58; Deirdre Gott, MMH: EU.F.20/58; Randall Headley, MMH: EU.M.9/58; Albert Dick, MMH: EU.M.7/51; Anna Hancock, EU.F.29/57. 84 MMH: EU.F.7/50, Dr Barbara Lockwood to Carothers, 29 May 1950. 85 MMH: EU.M.13/58, Discharge Letter, 27 June 1958. 86 Ibid. 87 MMH: EU.M.10/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Mental State’. 88 MMH: EU.M.25/48, Dr Sandison, Naivasha, to Carothers, 21 September 1948. Certain details in this case have been omitted in order to preserve the subject’s anonymity. 89 MMH: EU.M.2/55, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. Place names in this case have been changed to preserve the subject’s anonymity. 90 See the case file of Arthur Dick, admitted in May 1951, for a similarly haphazard life history: MMH: EU.M.7/51. 91 Seaton, Lion in the Morning, p. 20; Scott, A Nice Place To Live, p. 9; Norden, White and Black, p. 62, Lander, My Kenya Acres, p. 43. 92 Clearkin, ‘Ramblings and Recollections’, p. 144. 93 MMH: EU.F.19/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’, 25 November 1958. 94 MMH: EU.F.19/58, Discharge Letter, 14 January 1959: ‘Other Information and Medical History’. 95 MMH: EU.M.103/44, Carothers to Dr Davies, 24 July 1944. 96 MMH: EU.F.10/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘Mental State’. 97 MMH: EU.M.103/44, Letter to Dr Carothers (correspondent illegible), 9 August 1944. 98 MMH: EU.F.10/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘Signs and Symptoms on Admission’. 99 MMH: EU.F.10/57, Discharge Letter, 26 April 1957: ‘Course and Treatment in Hospital’. 100 MMH: EU.F.10/57, Discharge Letter, 26 April 1957: ‘Information from Pre-admission Medical Legal Document’. 101 MMH: EU.F.3/53, Discharge Letter, 26 October 1958: ‘Signs and Symptoms on Admission’. 102 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, p. 61; P. Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 232, 237; Ghosh, ‘Gender and Colonialism’, p. 740. 103 See for example, the now-considerable literature on the control of prostitution in the British Empire: Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics; Fischer Tiné, ‘“White Women Degrading Themselves to the Lowest Depths”: European Networks of prostItution and Colonial Anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca. 1880–1914’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 40: 2 (2003); D. Peers, ‘Privates off

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Parade’: Regimenting Sexuality in the Nineteenth-Century Indian Empire’, The International History Review, 20: 4 (1998); Petra de Vries, ‘“White Slaves” in a Colonial Nation’: The Dutch Campaign Against the Traffic in Women in the Early Twentieth Century’, Social & Legal Studies, 14: 1 (2005); B. Dalley, ‘“Fresh Attractions”: White Slavery and Feminism in New Zealand, 1885–1918’, Women’s History Review, 9: 3 (2000).

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Cha p t e r F iv e

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Stigma, shame and scandal: sex and mental illness

Sexual congress across racial frontiers collapsed colonial boundaries in a number of ways.1 In the most literal sense, inter-racial sex represented the combining of black and white bodies, a union in which the physical separation of corporate racial groups was most dramatically and comprehensively contravened. Miscegenation – the production of mixed race children – created liminal human beings, anathema to those clear categorical divisions by which colonialism made racial sense. Across the European empires, therefore, considerable disciplinary effort was expended regulating the sexual activities of expatriate Europeans. As Ann Stoler has shown, however, attempting to manage sexual behaviour meant attempting to manage sexual desire as well. To be European did not mean merely to behave as a European but to think and feel as one as well.2 Europeans who conducted sexual relations ‘across the colour line’ were problematic, therefore, in part because their behaviour was so difficult to explain. ‘There must be something wrong with his mentality’, as one Kenya settler exclaimed, when he learned that a nearby European farmer had begun cohabiting with an African woman. Only mental aberration in this case could explain why a white man would prefer ‘a black wench to gin’.3 If sex with ‘natives’ indicated mental abnormality, so it was also excused on the grounds that it helped to keep men sane. Isolated, idle, bewildered or bored, men who did not seek solace in the arms of a native mistress were said to face ‘mental troubles’ consequently.4 In accounts of early colonial Kenya there is ample evidence of sexual contact between African women and white men.5 Episodes of black peril ‘hysteria’, meanwhile, allowed the protection of white women to serve as the pretext for the (violent) control of African men.6 The hardening of racial attitudes in Europe, however, and the rise of eugenicist thought across the European empires, meant that the figure of the mixed-race child became freighted with intensified symbolic [ 129 ]

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meaning – social contaminant at large and portent of racial deterioration.7 Within a decade of the completion of the Uganda railway the preparedness of colonial authorities to ‘turn a blind eye’ to inter-racial sex had diminished significantly. Men with wealth and status still enjoyed the chance to take a ‘native’ mistress – provided they did so with discretion or, failing that, élan. The controversy that developed around the Silberrad affair, however, ensured that colonial officials at least were subject to rigid controls. Discourses describing tropical nature, meanwhile, inscribed a hostile environment in the language of sex, with the tropics construed as a site of fetid, libidinous abandon and its inhabitants as sexually rapacious, in the case of men, or as fatally seductive in the case of women.8 At the same time, European sexual restraint operated as a critical element in articulating the moral superiority of the colonising race. While a great deal has been written on colonial attitudes towards inter-racial sex, however, far less has been written on its concrete reality.9 In part, this is to be explained by a scarcity of sources: as long as sex was troublesome or taboo it most often took place in secret and guardians of colonial morality no less than those who undermined it had much to gain from keeping scandal covered up. In this regard, the dual endeavour – to prevent and to conceal transgressive sexual unions – operated in sync, to deny disruptions to the colonial order of things in appearance if not in actual fact.10 Indeed, we might do well at this juncture to recall the definition of scandal as something that upsets social sensibilities; as something that takes on valence not so much by its having happened but in its becoming known. It is with this in mind that the salience of mixed-race offspring becomes apparent. Aside from their figurative significance, the children of inter-racial liaisons were problematic at least in part because they embodied scandal; because their irrepressible presence made manifest a previous transgression. Throughout the colonial period in Kenya mixed-race children were raised with their mothers; men, here as elsewhere, were able to avoid the tangible results of their sexual adventures.11 Children of white men and African women were raised as Africans; racial identity followed the maternal line. When European women had sex with Africans, however, both they and their offspring were irreversibly spoiled.12 What this meant in psychological terms – and specifically, what it meant for children to be both the objects of their mothers’ love and the carriers of their stigma – we can only imagine. What it meant in social terms is clearer. Prestige depended above all on women behaving as they should.13 Men also had to maintain the standards of their race but if insurrection came they had recourse to fists and guns. Legislation, in any case, forbade women from conducting sexual relations [ 130 ]

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with Africans: a 1913 Ordinance stipulated that any white woman who voluntarily allowed ‘native[s] to have unlawful carnal connection with her’ was liable to be punished with up to five years in jail.14 Of those women admitted to Mathari in the period after 1939, none was definitively known to be having sex with Africans or Asians. By contrast, a number of the male European patients were discovered to have engaged in transgressive sex. As Stoler argued, the problem of European poverty and the problem of racial mixing were intimately connected precisely because subaltern whites were seen as the most likely section of the ‘coloniser’ community to engage in inter-racial sex.15 As John Pape’s work on Zimbabwe has shown, however, the prosecution, informal as well as formal, of transgressive sex was itself profoundly gendered.16 What the following cases show is not only the salience of gender as well as class in the framing of deviant behaviour but also, through the ways in which deviance was medicalised, the sheer extent of the problem that in Kenya the ‘loose woman’ posed.

Loose women Alison Riley, divorced from her husband in Tanganyika, was admitted to Mathari on five separate occasions during the 1950s. Unemployed and noted to be keeping ‘undesirable company’, Riley had come to the notice of government welfare officers in April 1958 after a man with whom she had been conducting a relationship abandoned her at a Nairobi hotel.17 Riley was consequently granted a financial stipend from the colonial government and admitted to the European hospital but as a single woman known to be ‘morally loose’, Riley was ostracised from respectable white society.18 Despite being able to pay her costs, Riley was prohibited from returning to the hotel where she had been staying. and when she was ejected from a second hotel in August 1958, the welfare officer in charge of her case referred her to Mathari.‘No hotels in Nairobi will take her’, the welfare worker reported, ‘[and] I don’t think she will get a job – people know her too well.’19 On admission to Mathari, Riley was treated with a course of eight ECT treatments and was diagnosed to be suffering from alcoholism, a ‘psychopathic personality’ and ‘character neurosis’.20 She was discharged from the hospital in October, 1958. Another single white female admitted to Mathari was Olivia Dobson. Until she was referred for treatment in November 1957 Dobson had been working as a nurse in Nairobi. Although only treated at Mathari for eleven days and noted by doctors at discharge to be ‘quite well’, Dobson received a formal diagnosis of ‘psychopathic personality’, nonetheless.21 Also telling is the fact that under Race on her case file [ 131 ]

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was entered ‘Father: Irish, Mother: Russian Jewish’. That her racial provenance was uncertain, moreover, was recorded alongside Dobson’s own uncertain sexual status:

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Mother and father presumably unmarried. Brought up by Salvation Army. Was recently in European Hospital because of hysterics. A current boyfriend is now in jail for theft.22

Because Olivia Dobson was perceived to be not of pure white stock, because she was conducting a relationship with a disreputable male and because she occupied the problematic position of a single white woman in a settler-colony, Dobson was forced to bear her own responsibility for her mental distress: when released from Mathari after a course of four ECT sessions, the hospital superintendent commented that his patient had been ‘discharged to her own devices’ – the tenor of his comment indicative of the disquiet he felt towards her unrestrained presence in the colony.23 Both Riley and Dobson, it should be noted, were diagnosed as psychopathic. So too was Helen Opperman, who, like Riley, was treated at Mathari repeatedly throughout the 1950s. Opperman was first referred to Mathari after exhibiting intermittent outbursts of violence. It was not this, however, but questions over her sexual behaviour that framed her diagnosis. Opperman, it was noted, had been ‘associating with Asians’.24 She was also believed to be married to a ‘degenerate’, himself suspected of being a pimp.25 Inside Mathari, however, where she was treated on three separate occasions, Opperman exhibited no indications of mental abnormality or illness. In a letter to the magistrate who had authorised her final admission, the superintendent at the hospital set out his view: When she was first admitted here, she was somewhat depressed, but this cleared up in a few days. She has been bright and co-operative during her stay here. There has been no signs of actual mental illness. The only abnormal behaviour I know about is that which has been communicated to me by others. She is uncertifiable. Her past behaviour has proved her well enough to be a social scandal, and is part of her psychopathic personality, which is our diagnosis.26

Striking here is the fact that Helen Opperman was judged to be ‘uncertifiable’ with ‘no signs of actual mental illness’ and yet was simultaneously diagnosed as a psychopath. It was a diagnosis that emerged directly from Opperman’s anti-social behaviour: that she was judged to be a social scandal informed psychiatrists’ judgement of their patient as not mentally but morally abnormal. Opperman’s discharge certificate encapsulates the point: [ 132 ]

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Condition at Discharge: Asymptomatic Diagnosis: Psychopathic personality Recommendations: Untreatable. A social problem.27

In the case of Helen Opperman, the diagnosis of psychopathy made sense of social scandal. Of crucial significance here is that, alone among clinical diagnoses current in the mid-twentieth century, psychopathy signalled less of a mental condition than a moral disorder. Described as la folie raisonnante by the French physician, Philippe Pinel, and as ‘moral imbecility’ by the English psychiatrist, Henry Maudsley, what differentiated psychopathy from other psychological conditions was the supposed impossibility of correctional or rehabilitative treatment.28 As such, the diagnosis placed the culpability for aberrant behaviour squarely upon, or rather, within, the psychopath herself. Psychopaths were not thought to suffer from their condition, in other words, but were judged participant in it. They and not their illness were to blame.29 What this meant in practical terms was the supposed impossibility of correctional or rehabilitative treatment.30 Not only was it believed that psychiatric treatment could not treat psychopaths; it was also believed that it should not. The designation was itself stigmatic. European women and girls deemed to be psychopathic in colonial Kenya were poor it is true but, more importantly, they were undeserving. These were people irrevocably at fault, their failures to safeguard racial identities explicable by the impurities of their blood and the crookedness of their family trees. Medical diagnosis thus operated to endorse a form of social exclusion that placed disreputable white women irrevocably beyond the bounds of colonial society. As the following case study shows, moreover, to dwell in the margins of a society for which the very margins themselves were anathema was to endure the uniquely traumatic experience of being expelled from a community for which the sine qua non was always its collective self-defence. Caroline Watson was only 12 years old when she entered Mathari in the spring of 1957.31 The previous November, Watson had been involved in a case at the Supreme Court in Nairobi, testifying against two men, Frederick Noble and Joseph Safi, both charged with having unlawful knowledge of two girls, one of whom was Caroline. The case was reported in the East African Standard, from which the following events are gleaned.32 Watson had met the two men one day in August, she told the court, by chance in a café, having been to the cinema with her 3-year-old brother and a friend. The girls asked the men if they would drive them home, the men agreed and the group left together but instead of driving them straight back to their house, the men took [ 133 ]

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the girls on to another café where they ordered whiskies for themselves and gin and lime for the girls. At this point, according to Watson’s testimony, the girls agreed between themselves that, for money, they would consent to have sex with Safi and Noble. They were then driven to the Limuru forest where some kind of sexual congress was said to have taken place. Returning home later in the afternoon Watson told her father that she wished to go to Nairobi again the following day but her father refused permission. The next morning, however, Watson left the house against her father’s wishes and went to town where she met her friend and the two men from the day before. The group went to another café. Here the men sat at the bar and told the girls to sit at a table and order lunch. The men left, however, without paying the bill and with no money with which to do so Watson was forced to leave her watch at the café as a bond. The two girls then proceeded to an Indian pawnbroker who gave Watson 35 shillings after she allowed him to ‘be intimate’ with her. Watson’s father contacted the police later that evening. What at first glance appears remarkable about the case is the argument of the defence. Under cross-examination, Watson admitted she had told the accused that she was over sixteen years of age. She also admitted to wearing lipstick and powder but said that she did so for fun and not to make herself look older. Finally, she confessed that in the car on the way to the police station, she and her friend had cut their knees with razor blades to make it look as though they had been attacked. When asked why she had not told the truth, Watson said it was because she was frightened. Despite this and despite it transpiring that the two men had stayed at Watson’s parents’ house for six months in the previous year (and so were likely to have known Watsons’ true age), the case turned on her apparently dishonest nature. Because she had lied to the police, the defence was able to claim that their clients had been similarly deceived. That Watson wore make up aged 13 was proof enough. The two men were acquitted. The trial, one can safely assume, was common knowledge in Kenya; at the least, readers of the East African Standard would have been familiar with the case. It is only in Watson’s Mathari file, however, that we can gain a deeper understanding of her life and the intractability of her position on the margins of colonial society. The following is extracted directly from Watson’s case notes: Patient’s father had a Welsh Father and Anglo-Indian mother. Patient’s mother said to have an Indian father and a mother part Asian and part South African Dutch … No school will accept her.33

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Elsewhere in the file we learn that for a short while Watson had attended the Central School in Nairobi, an institution established specifically for ‘children of light colour who just failed to gain admission to European schools’ but that she had been withdrawn when her parents were no longer able to pay the requisite fees.34 With no government schools willing to enrol her, Watson was sent at the conclusion of the trial to a Catholic mission in Uganda, where, so she later claimed, the sisters had their African servants beat her with a kiboko, a short-handled whip made of rhinoceros hide. After repeated attempts to commit suicide, Watson was sent to the Salvation Army hostel in Nairobi and from there to Mathari in May 1957. Diagnosed as psychopathic, Watson received a series of electric shock treatments throughout May and June of that year but her condition on discharge was noted as ‘unchanged’. As for recommendations, the doctor only wrote ‘social problems – this is not the place for her’. On her case notes, however, he included a more personal assessment: ‘a charming little liar’.35 That Watson was judged deceitful by the court informed her medical diagnosis as pathologically dishonest. That she had a racial ancestry polluted across multiple generations, however, was what finally condemned her. In settler colonies, children of mixed-race parentage bore the shame of their parents’ transgression: delinquency was explained by pollutions in the blood.36 More prosaically, the racially impure were forced to occupy the intractable position – ‘economically disadvantaged, socially invisible’ – between rulers and ruled.37 Historians should be cautions in proffering their own explanations for an individual’s mental disorder but, as Caroline Watson’s case indubitably shows, the reality of social exclusion could contribute directly to psychological distress.38 That Watson’s case history involved ‘social problems’ hardly rules out the possibility that she suffered genuine mental health problems yet doctors refused to treat her on the grounds not only of her psychopathy but her dishonesty as well, both of which were explained by reference to her corrupted racial ancestry. It is, to be sure, a staple tenet of psychiatric practice to find hereditary origins for mental illness. In the Kenyan context, however, precisely because there was no social place of belonging for mixed-race children, for doctors to record that a patient had an impure racial background was to intimate both the suggestion that propensities for transgression were transmitted genetically and the likely psychological costs of living ‘out-cast’.

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Other men It is not only in the case files of European women, however, that sexual transgression figured prominently. Harold Whitaker was employed as a senior member of the colonial prisons service when, in June 1956, he began complaining of headaches and declared himself unfit for work.39 To his doctor he appeared lachrymose. When the provincial physician was called to examine him, the two doctors together formed the opinion that their patient was suffering from an anxiety neurosis.40 Admitted to Mathari first for observation and consequently as a voluntary patient, Whitaker’s treatment comprised psychotherapy only (no drugs or electro-convulsive treatments were administered) and within a fortnight of his admission he was judged to be free of all symptoms and declared fit to be discharged.41 Doctors were unclear, however, as to what had precipitated his initial symptoms. Whitaker’s admission certificate cited ‘overwork’ as the principal cause and the doctor who referred him to Mathari noted some previous conflict between Whitaker and his employers.42 During conversations that took place at the Mathari compound itself, however, Whitaker intimated a very different reason for his mental distress. The records that remain of these conversations are extremely limited but equally revealing. On Whitaker’s Clinical Sheet, under ‘sex’ is written: Transvestite as long as he can remember … Sexual relations with wife appar­­­ ently adequate – he imagines her a man. He will go with any woman, any colour, dress as a woman and have them take the male role. Is illegitimate.43

That a senior member of the colonial prisons service during the time of the Mau Mau emergency was thought to be having sex with African women; and that, moreover, he ‘had them take the male role’, is certainly a radical departure from the conventional image of Kenya’s European population. More telling still is the fact that Whitaker’s sexual activities contributed directly to his mental distress. Whitaker, it is not unreasonable to contend, may well have been worried that other Europeans knew of his sexual behaviour. Even if his sexual relations were kept secret, it is hard to imagine that the sheer extent of the dissonance between his official public role and his private sexual predilection did not contribute in some way to his troubled mental state; certainly the fact that his sexual activity featured in his case history indicates that both Whitaker himself and the doctors who treated him considered it relevant for explaining his case. It is also important to note, however, that at no point during his treatment did doctors express any disquiet at the fact that their patient had been having sex with African women. Nor did they inform any other [ 136 ]

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potentially interested parties. No mention is made of the possibility that Whitaker be repatriated to England or retired from his position in the colonial administration. Within a fortnight of his arrival at Mathari, Harold Whitaker was discharged, diagnosed to have been suffering from depression but consequently considered to be free from all symptoms and fit to return to work. Whether his recovery was sustained, whether he continued to be troubled by his sexuality and for how long he remained in Kenya is impossible to know. Whitaker’s case is striking, of course, not because he was having sex with African women but because he ‘took the female role’. While historians have disagreed as to whether sex between colonising men and ‘native’ women should be considered in terms of opportunity or exploitation, from either perspective white men retain their positions of power.44 In situations in which European men were not active but recipient partners in the sexual act, however, the power dynamic so consonant with racially stratified societies is reversed. Thus we can explain the lack of commentary upon male same-sex intercourse. This, as Dane Kennedy had it, was a subject ‘simply too deviant’ to merit attention.45 This may well have been the case. In Kenya, however, same-sex liaisons did occur between European and African men, as the cases of Roderigo Conti and Philip Veerkamp clearly show. Roderigo Conti was admitted to the Mathari hospital on 30 January 1957. In recommending him for treatment at Mathari, a doctor practising at the European hospital in Nairobi stated that he had seen his patient ‘repeatedly in a state of alcoholic intoxication’.46 On admission to Mathari, Conti was diagnosed as suffering from chronic alcoholism and depression, although he was later noted to have exhibited ‘good behaviour and a pleasant manner’ throughout his stay in the hospital.47 By the end of March Conti was considered to be free from symptoms and was consequently discharged. Nothing is known of his life in Kenya after this point. At first glance, therefore, Conti seems to fit quite neatly Jock McCulloch’s description of those Europeans at Mathari as ‘ruined alcoholics’.48 A closer reading of his case file, however, provides us with a more complex, albeit fragmented, history. Here we learn that Conti, a 55-year-old Italian male, had travelled to Kenya from Italy in 1952: until the time of his admission to Mathari, he had been working in Nairobi, for a brother with whom he also lodged, as a foreman on a construction site. As to his life before he came to Kenya we discover that Conti had served with the Italian navy during the Second World War; that he had been captured by Allied forces and incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp in Scotland and that, on his release, he had returned to Italy where he had married. In 1952, after the death of his [ 137 ]

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only child from meningitis and estrangement from his wife, Conti left Italy and moved to Kenya to join his brother.49 That Conti’s earlier life had been arduous is remarkable in itself: emigrants to Kenya did not, despite the very best wishes of the publicists and the settlement boards, arrive emotionally pristine. One further dimension, however, must be added to our reading of Conti’s file. Roderigo Conti, we know, had a history of alcohol abuse but it was not for this that he was admitted to hospital in the January of 1957. Closer reading of his Mathari file reveals that at some point prior to his admittance Conti had engaged in sexual intercourse with a 16-yearold African male, an incident for which he was consequently charged by the Kenya police. ‘When accused’, his notes record, ‘the patient slashed his wrists.’50 Significantly, it was Conti’s attempted suicide, not his sexual behaviour (and less still the fact of his alcoholism) that brought him to the attention of doctors at the European hospital and consequently to the superintendent at Mathari. Conti transgressed colonial social norms by having sex with an African male. Social sanction followed, in the form of his arrest.51 But the fact that Conti then attempted suicide, as he awaited trial for the crime of ‘sodomy with an African’ forces us to contemplate the profound psychological repercussions that flowed from his experience of transgressing social norms. It certainly does not demand much of an imaginative leap to consider the public shame brought to bear by a trial such as this. Admission to a mental hospital in this case can hardly be said to constitute a form of social control (Conti entered Mathari as a voluntary patient, after all). But the willingness of hospital staff to discharge their patient was likely to have been affected in turn by the knowledge that their patient’s sexual transgressions were not imminently to be resumed. Conti, we should note, was discharged not to his brother but to the Kenya CID.52 Philip Veerkamp was another European discovered to be having sex with African men. In May 1941, Veerkamp, a missionary priest living at a Catholic mission station in Western Kenya, was referred to a doctor at Kisumu. Veerkamp, the priest in charge of the mission reported, had been ‘peculiar in his manner’ for some time. He was taciturn and depressed; he avoided the company of his colleagues and had occasional fits of weeping. At times, it was said, he went away for days on end, not telling anyone where he was going or where he had been when he returned. When interviewed by the Kisumu doctor, it transpired that he had for some time been having secretive sexual liaisons with African ‘boys’ at the mission.53 In a report submitted to Mathari, the doctor recounted how these liaisons had impacted on the state of Veerkamp’s mind: [ 138 ]

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He appeared to me to be very depressed and was difficult to question, as, although his conversation was quite rational, he was disinclined to talk and questions had often to be repeated two or three times before he would answer them … [Veerkamp] came out to East Africa seven years ago, as a missionary. He first had sexual intercourse with a boy three years ago and had repeated the offence on some twenty occasions since that time. When the gravity of his moral delinquencies dawned upon him, he realized that he was ‘disgracing his cloth’ and tried to get released from his vows. He thought the natives at the Mission knew of his sexual life and had noticed that sometimes they called him ‘Bwana’ instead of the more usual term of address ‘Father’ … He imagined that they used the term ‘Bwana’ as they considered him to be unworthy to hold priestly office. From the patient’s manner and demeanour, and from the history as obtained both from himself and others, I consider him to be suffering from melancholia, of advanced degree.54

Philip Veerkamp was admitted to the Mathari Mental Hospital in June 1941. After speaking at some length with his patient, Dr Carothers, the superintendent of the hospital, came to the opinion that Veerkamp was in fact in sound mental health.55 He firmly believed, however, that Veerkamp should not be allowed to return to his missionary work. ‘Now I am in a dilemma,’ wrote the Bishop of Kisumu when this news was relayed: ‘the doctor declares my priest “really quite sane” and at the same time does not think him fit to resume [his] work.’56 The problem, it appears, was, indeed, one of white prestige. While it was inconceivable that Veerkamp should be allowed to resume his sexual relations with Africans, he could not continue at the asylum or be repatriated against his will. Veerkamp was not insane but his deviant behaviour had to be controlled nonetheless. The problem was skilfully reconciled by Carothers at Mathari. ‘Father Veerkamp’, Carothers explained to the Bishop, ‘is now mentally normal, but he runs a grave risk of losing his sanity if he returns to his work.’57‘At the time of his admission’, Carothers went on, ‘Veerkamp was anxious, depressed and potentially suicidal, but hardly psychotic as he had good reason to be depressed.’58 The only viable course of action, Carothers argued, was for Veerkamp to return to missionary headquarters in London. On 25 September, therefore, Veerkamp officially ceased to be a certified ‘lunatic’ and was released from Mathari. At Carothers’ behest a passage was booked for Veerkamp to travel to London, the cost of which was met by the Bishop at Kisumu.59 No records remain to provide any further detail pertaining to Philip Veerkamp’s career in Kenya or his life after his return to London. The case of Philip Veerkamp speaks forcibly of the ambiguity by which mental illness in colonial Kenya might be read. On the one [ 139 ]

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hand, one might well argue that Veerkamp’s removal from the colony reflected the overriding colonial imperative to curb subversive white behaviour. That Carothers considered his patient to be mentally normal was ‘trumped’, in other words, by the social danger that Veerkamp’s continued residence at the Kakamega mission presented. At the same time, however, there is ample evidence to suggest that Veerkamp did suffer from the contradiction that he himself embodied as a homosexual missionary priest in 1940s Kenya. The doctor who interviewed Veerkamp at Kisumu observed that he appeared depressed and diagnosed him to be suffering from ‘melancholia’; Veerkamp himself volunteered the information that Africans at the mission station had begun to address him as ‘bwana’ as opposed to the more respectful ‘father’. His inability to uphold the colonial role expected of him, it seems, caused Philip Veerkamp genuine emotional distress. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that at Mathari Veerkamp was noted to be ‘mentally normal’, as the stresses of his colonial ordeal were temporarily suspended. The point is reinforced by Carothers’ remarks. Although convinced that his patient was sane, Carothers averred that if Veerkamp was to return to missionary work he must inevitably run ‘a grave risk’ of losing his sanity. If the imperative to maintain prestige was the deciding factor in arranging for Veerkamp’s removal from the colony, moreover, nowhere is this explicitly mentioned on his hospital file. Instead, it is the danger to Veerkamp’s mental health of a return to Kakamega that prohibited the resumption of his missionary work. As such, Carothers touched upon deep-seated and sincerely held beliefs that Africa – and Africans – posed particular threats to the bodies and minds of Europeans. Of course, one might well contend that, as justification for his removal from the colony, invocation of the fragility of Veerkamp’s mental state was pretext above all. Yet we should take seriously Carothers’ remark that, on admission to Mathari, Veerkamp was ‘anxious, depressed and potentially suicidal’. As Carothers put it, he had ‘good reason to be depressed’. Veerkamp’s mental state, in short, was neither incomprehensible nor irredeemable but rational after all. To emphasise the operation of social control in Veerkamp’s apprehension, therefore, and his removal from the colony by the colonial authorities, need not rule out conceding the reality of Veerkamp’s distress. One might go further and contend not only that the pressure of social control and the ‘reality’ of mental illness were far from mutually exclusive, but that they were constituent elements of the same single thing. To experience oneself in ways other than those prescribed by colonial social norms could itself be a cause of mental disturbance. A sensitivity to the critical importance of protecting white prestige [ 140 ]

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should not detract from, but support, the notion that mental disorder in such circumstances stemmed from the fact that ­colonialism made such exacting demands on the category of ‘the European’, demands equal only to the penalties derived from their failure to be met. Other patients at Mathari were suspected of homosexuality, though the evidence proffered in support of this supposition serves as eloquent testimony to the fact that colonial masculinity entailed much more than that circumscribed by colonial discourses. Steven Fitzwallace, it was noted, appeared effeminate but denied homosexuality. ‘He likes farming,’ a Mathari doctor noted, ‘but has come around to think he should get a softer job. He’s interested in painting, wood carving, antique work etc.’60 Anthony Jameson, it was noted, was ‘never good at games’.61 Nor was Jack Ellis.62 In 1954, Robert Tallett, 17 years old and working as a pupil on a farm near Nakuru, was admitted to Mathari in 1954 after cutting an artery in his wrist.63 His case file contains a biography of sorts: Born in Rhodesia. He is illegitimate. Italian father and English mother. Spent most of his childhood in orphanages and convents before running away from them. Trouble between parents who wrangled over possession of patient. Mother sounds a loose type, later married an Egyptian. Patient fought with this chap, then came to Kenya. Job at Molo. Depressed there, and left. Never good at games. Dislikes being watched.64

Elsewhere on file, Tallett was noted to be ‘a true homosexual’ and this, together with an ‘exaggerated sense of inferiority’, was considered to be the cause of his depression.65 Quite how Tallett coped with his sexual orientation at a time when the prevailing view of homosexuality was as a form of mental sickness we do not know.66 As to why he cut his wrist, Tallett said only that he did not intend to commit suicide but that he was ‘lonely and depressed’.67 Perhaps the most remarkable case of transgressive male sexuality in Kenya, however, is to be found in John Carman’s memoir of the colonial medical service in Kenya.68 The person here concerned was not a patient at Mathari, however, but the superintendent himself, John Smith, who took over at Mathari when Dr Henry Gordon unexpectedly retired in 1937.69 Smith’s appointment, arranged by the Colonial Office in London, looked initially to augur a new professional era in the care of the colony’s mentally ill. After a period of almost thirty years in which the hospital was managed by doctors with no psychiatric expertise, Smith was the first qualified psychiatrist to be put in charge at Mathari.70 As Carman recalls, however, Smith turned out to be hardly an appropriate choice for the position:

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He was certainly entitled to be called a consultant in his field and there was nothing whatever wrong with his professional capabilities. Nevertheless he was about as unsuitable a candidate as could have been chosen. He was a self-confessed homosexual, though not a practising one, he had been a patient in a mental hospital after an attempt at suicide and he had been a voluntary patient in an institution for the rehabilitation of alcoholics.71

‘I could fill an entire chapter with amusing reminiscences about him’, Carman recalled, his tone reminiscent of that irreverent jocularity with which memoirists smoothed over the more troubling aspects of what they encountered in Kenya. Smith, it seems, was almost certainly an alcoholic: he was frequently drunk, according to Carman, and would often return to the hospital late at night with his drinking companions so that he might show them ‘the more interesting inmates’.72 It was also suspected that Smith was having sex with the two lion cubs that he kept as pets.73 Although the Director of Medical Services pleaded leniency – Smith’s sole trouble was he believed that he was lonely – and it was not long before complaints were made and a medical board convened at which it was recommended that Smith be retired on grounds of ill health. Smith left Kenya soon after but not before he had twice attempted suicide. Employed briefly at a mental hospital in England, Smith consequently went to sea as a ship’s surgeon. ‘When the ship arrived at Cape Town,’ Carman reports, ‘Smith booked a room in a hotel and killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills.’74 While it was the violence of the breach between their own identities and the identities prescribed for them by ‘the European’ that signalled the madness of Harold Whitaker and Philip Veerkamp, John Smith was both a doctor and a sufferer of mental illness. His appearance in the historical record is, simultaneously, as psychiatrist and patient: both the recipient and practitioner of psychiatric care and both (as superintendent of Mathari) an agent of political power and (as a character in Carman’s book) a tragic archetype of failure and distress, culminating with his death in a Cape Town hotel. Smith’s dual identity most forcefully reminds us that, aside from their transgressive sexual behaviour, what Whitaker, Veerkamp and Smith all had in common was that they were all bearers of power, all office-holders within colonial institutions: a jailer, a doctor and a priest. These people hardly appear as impoverished or socially marginalised, although it may well have been the case that, for Whitaker and Veerkamp at least, transgressing colonial boundary-lines precipitated a process of social marginalisation. In any case, for these men at least, colonial transgression occurred not far from the sites of colonial power but, rather, deep within them. Transgression appears all the more remarkable when it is characterised by proximity, rather than distance, to respectable public roles. [ 142 ]

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Psychopaths and ‘multiple selves’ What does this mean for a consideration of mental illness in the colonial context? Certainly it would be reductive to think of a colonial ‘complex’ by which power breeds pathology. By far the majority of colonial office-holders in Kenya did not suffer mental illness, while among many of those who did, it was suspect racial ancestry, the loss of respectability and concomitant processes of social marginalisation that determined their psychological distress. Yet how to explain the juxtaposition of colonial transgression in these cases with the exercise of power? How can the dissonance between the public and private identities of the men described here be explained? The answer is to be found in the uniquely public ways by which gender roles were staged in the settler colony. ‘With the establishment of the English home outside England’, Rosemary George has written, ‘came a physical repositioning of the hitherto private onto what had been considered the most public of realms – the British empire.’75 As Elizabeth Collingham has argued in the case of India, as long as the British conducted their private lives under the gaze of ‘native’ servants, privacy itself was made redundant.76 Penny Russell has echoed the point, suggesting that in the colonial context family relationships were suspended between public and private worlds, with the ‘private’ family existing as a ‘theatre’ for the public display of affections and the performance of normative gender roles.77 As Stoler and others have shown, the domestic and the day-to-day were not merely important for the maintenance of colonial power but were, rather, what colonial power was all about. Unlike metropolitan Europe, therefore, where women were bound within the private sphere, in the settler-colony they were forced to live in perpetual public view. Men, by contrast, were able to inhabit multiple selves, preserving their public personas as respectable and sound while keeping their deviant personas discretely contained. Only when they were unable to hold the tension between their public and private identities did psychological stress and social shame ensue. Although the cases discussed above resist any kind of straightforward categorisation, what the individuals concerned all shared was a fundamental uncertainty over their racial identity.While all these patients were categorised as European (that is to say, their case files were all encoded with the prefix ‘EU’), none were unimpeachably ‘white’. Olivia Dobson’s father was Irish, her mother Russian Jewish; Watson’s father was Welsh, her mother ‘Anglo-Indian’; Philip Veerkamp was Dutch; Helen Opperman was South African; Roderigo Conti, Italian. Only Harold Whitaker was unequivocally British and of respectable social standing, a fact that may go some way to explain [ 143 ]

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why no action was taken to restrain his sexual behaviour. If distinctions of class or ethnicity determined how sexual transgression was perceived, however, sexual transgression was itself distinctively gendered. The cases discussed above, to be sure, are hardly comprehensive. Nor should we overstate the consistency or coherence with which psychiatrists made sense of their patients’ lives.Yet it is significant nonetheless that among those Europeans for whom transgressive sex featured in the histories of their illness it is only in those cases involving men that sex with Africans was known to have definitely taken place. Perhaps surprisingly, these men were treated sympathetically at the Mathari hospital: all were given considerable opportunity to narrate their experiences and provide their own explanations to account for their distress; all were treated with psychotherapy – as opposed to psychotropic drugs, insulin coma therapy or ECT – and all were diagnosed to be suffering from depression, a condition that carried considerably less of a stigma than other psychiatric diagnoses. Of the women, by contrast, only Caroline Watson was thought to have had sex with non-Europeans. Yet all the women discussed here were diagnosed as psychopathic. To be sure, there were European men at Mathari also diagnosed as psychopathic. But it was poverty, unemployment and alcohol abuse that appeared on the case files of psychopathic males: the correlation of sex and psychopathy was in Kenya a female preserve.78 Of particular significance in this regard may well have been the publication in 1941 of Hervey Cleckley’s hugely influential book, The Mask of Sanity. In its fourth reprinting by the time of Kenyan independence in 1963, Cleckley’s central thesis was that psychopathy was superficially invisible, concealed behind the outward appearance – what Cleckley termed ‘the mask’ – of normality.79 Whether doctors at the Mathari hospital were familiar with Cleckley’s work is unclear but what is apparent is that notions of psychopathy current in the 1950s dovetailed perfectly with prevailing conceptions of the ‘poor white’. The fact of the poor white’s unpropitious material circumstances was that they made manifest an interior shortcoming: it was the failure of an individual to perceive his poverty as problematic, not his poverty per se, that defined his basic difference.80 What the idea of the ‘poor white’ implied, in other words, was the lack of a racially defined sensibility, denoting a person whose outward physical appearance masked a hidden and otherwise imperceptible human flaw.81 Notable also is the fact that of those individuals included on the police’s List of European Degenerates, only three are to be found among the Mathari files. They are Alison Riley, Pamela Ephraigm and Helen Osborn: all single white women living outside the control of men. [ 144 ]

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Poverty among Kenya’s Europeans was certainly problematic, but far more grievous was an apparent disregard for the affective boundaries separating white from black. These boundaries invoked mentalities in turn: habits of mind or structures of feeling – the emotional states that constituted a racial disposition. Poverty in itself was straightforward; mentalities were harder to grasp – hopelessly enigmatic, incorrigibly human. Psychiatry provided one institutional means to explain why Europeans in Kenya found themselves in straitened circumstances. But whereas men transgressed colonial sensibilities by drinking to excess, by failing to hold down work or by failing to contribute to the colony’s economic development, women bore the major responsibility for inculcating racial feeling. Sexual reproduction entailed racial reproduction in its turn. Hence we come to understand the anxieties over women in Kenya living on the fringes of respectable white society: for women and girls, to neglect the crucial female role of guarding racial reproduction – the most vital, tender point at which colonial boundaries were breached – was to find oneself irredeemably beyond the bounds of social solidarity and racial self-defence. Impoverished white men may well have lowered white prestige but they were never seen as ‘dangers to the colony’ in the same way that women often were. Thus we see the consequences of the exalted status of the white woman, for while European men enjoyed ample opportunity to conduct secretive sexual relations with Africans (male as well as female), women thought merely to be at risk of sexual contamination – not only by Africans but by low-class Europeans as well – were liable to encounter levels of social exclusion that contributed directly to their experience of social marginality and mental distress. In his work on sex and empire, Ronald Hyam described the colonial domain (for men at least) as a site of sexual opportunity and it is safe to accept that inter-racial sex in settler-colonies was indeed widespread, at least, that is, before European women arrived in significant number.82 But the ways by which certain kinds of sex were entertained and others disavowed were seldom straightforward. While informal sexual arrangements between European men and ‘native’ women were commonly perceived as the evil necessary to stave off the greater dangers of loneliness and despair, for these arrangements to be sanctioned through marriage was to make visible something that should more decorously remain out of sight.83 Discretion was the key, turning a blind eye the most common response. The idea that European women, meanwhile, might enjoy sexual relations with colonised peoples was nothing short of sacrilege for it was in defending the virtue of ‘their’ women that the honour codes for imperial manhood were defined.84 [ 145 ]

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Psychopathy provided the diagnostic means to render comprehensible otherwise inexplicable behaviour; more importantly, it justified the institutional confinement of people whose continued presence in society at large was viewed as a danger to white prestige and, thus, to the future of colonial rule itself. While sex was at the heart of colonial transgression, however, it was not manifest solely in the apprehension of ‘deviant’ behaviours. Sex featured also in the minds of the mentally ill and figured prominently in the narratives that they relayed to the psychiatrists who treated them. In order to fully appreciate the historical significance of Kenya’s white insane, therefore, we need to attend directly to their versions of reality, however difficult to decode these realities might at first appear.

Notes   1 Linda Bryder, ‘Sex, Race and Colonialism: Sex, Race, and Colonialism: An Historiographical Review’, The International History Review, 20: 4 (1998); Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, pp. 151–3; Collingham, Imperial Bodies, pp. 181–4.   2 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.   3 Stapleton, The Gate Hangs Well, p. 148. See also Butcher, The British in Malaya, p. 204; Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 193.   4 Hyam, ‘Empire and Sexual Opportunity’, pp. 89–90; Kennedy, ‘Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma’, p. 169. Inter-racial sex was also excused on the grounds that it was preferable to white male impoverishment resultant from attempting to maintain a lifestyle fit for European wives. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, p. 30.   5 Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary, pp. 9–10, 12–13, 34; Kennedy, Islands of White, pp. 174–9.   6 McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue, pp. 36–8.   7 Philippa Levine, ‘Sexuality, Gender and Empire’, in Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 140; Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) .   8 Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji, 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 113–35; 169–75.   9 Much of this literature has been concerned with the transmission of disease, the problem of miscegenation and the perennial colonial anxiety around racial degeneration. See in particular, Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics; Donna Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Dubow, Scientific Racism, pp. 166–89; Campbell, Race and Empire, pp. 124–5; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, pp. 61–70. On the psychodynamic aspects of sex and empire, see in particular, Robert Young, Colonial Desire : Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995) and McClintock, Imperial Leather. Influential earlier work in this vein includes Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban, pp. 102–7, 110–17; and Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, pp. 1–48. 10 As one purity campaigner in India had it, what could not be prevented could at least be compelled ‘to shrink back into its own congenial darkness’. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, p. 131. An isolated example of deviant sexuality conferring mental illness occurred in colonial Natal in 1899 when a white woman known to have had sex with African men was threatened with confinement at the Pietermaritzburg Asylum: Parle, States of Mind, p. 19.

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stigma, shame and scandal 11 It is telling that when the issue was discussed after the Second World War, it was presumed to fall within the remit of African Affairs. According to the Municipal Council of Nairobi, ‘the great majority of half-castes appear to be living quite contentedly as Africans, and we consider it is in their interests that they should continue to do so’. KNA: AV / 4 / 21, Municipal African Affairs Officer at the Municipal Council, Nairobi, 8 March 1949; KNA: AV / 4 / 21, White Sisters School for Children of Mixed Parentage; KNA: AV / 4 / 21, Educational Secretary to Director of Education, 28 June 1948; RN / 3 / 36 (Nairobi County Council): Child Welfare Society; An Ordinance to Provide the Measures for the Prevention of Cruelty and Neglect of Children, Ordinance No. 12 of 1955; KNA: CS 8 / 22 / 37. 12 A particularly illuminating case concerns the ‘mixed race’ girl, conceived within the Mathari compound in 1917: KNA AG / 32 / 50, ‘Report of the Committee Appointed by His Excellency the Acting Governor to Inquire into a Recent Birth at the Lunatic Asylum 31 July 1917’. See also the relevant discussion in Vaughan, Curing Their Ills, p. 122–3. On ‘spoiled identities’ see Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963). 13 The added irony here is that while exhortations to maintain white prestige were aimed principally at women, the vast majority of mixed race children in Kenya were the result of sexual liaisons between African women and European men. KNA: AV / 4 / 21, Educational Secretary to Director of Education, 28 June 1948; KNA: AV / 4 / 21, White Sisters School for Children of Mixed Parentage; White, The Comforts of Home, pp. 151–68. 14 Nicholls, Red Strangers, p. 177. 15 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p. 2. 16 John Pape, ‘Black and White: The Perils of Sex in Colonial Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16: 4 (1990), pp. 699–720. 17 MMH: EU.F.3/53, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. 18 KNA: AH / 13 / 133, Commissioner for Police to Secretary of Defence, 19 March 1957. 19 MMH: EU.F.3/53, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. 20 MMH: EU.F.3/53, Discharge Letter, 26 October 1958: ‘Diagnosis’. 21 MMH: EU.F.30/57, Mathari to patient’s sister, 12 November 1957; Discharge Letter, 12 November 1957: ‘Diagnosis’. 22 MMH: EU.F.30/57, Discharge Letter, 26 October 1958: ‘Other information and Medical History’. 23 MMH: EU.F.30/57, Mathari to Matron-in-Chief, Medical Headquarters, Nairobi, 11 November 1957. 24 MMH: EU.F.8/48, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’, 27 June 1956. 25 KNA: AH / 13 / 133, Commissioner for Police to Secretary of Defence, 19 March 1957. 26 MMH: EU.F.8/48, Mathari to Resident Magistrate, Nakuru, 2 July 1956. 27 MMH: EU.F.8/48, Discharge Letter, 15 August 1956. 28 Michael Cavadino, ‘Death to the Psychopath’, Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 9: 1 (1998), p. 6. On psychopathy see Sarah McCabe and Nigel Walker, Crime and Insanity in England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973), Volume II, chapters nine and ten; John Reed, Psychopathy: A Legal and Clinical Dilemma (London: I.S.T.D., 1994); Morten Birket-Smith, Roger D. Davis, Theodore Millon and Erik Simonsen, Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal and Violent Behaviour (New York: Guildford Press, 1998). 29 Reed, Psychopathy, p. 1; John Gunn, ‘Psychopathy: An Elusive Concept with Moral Overtones’, in Birket-Smith et al. (eds), Psychopathy, p. 35. 30 Cavadino, ‘Death to the Psychopath’, p. 6. 31 MMH: EU.F.13/57, Discharge Letter, 17 June 1957: ‘Age’. 32 East African Standard, 21 September 1956; 22 September 1956; 19 November 1956. 33 MMH: EU.F.13/57, Discharge Letter, 17 June 1957: ‘Other Information and Medical History’.

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madness and marginality 34 MMH: EU.F.13/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’; KNA, AV / 4 / 21, Memorandum to Director of Education, 13 June 1955: School for Children of Mixed Parentage. 35 MMH: EU.F.13/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress and Treatment’. 36 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, pp. 63, 68. 37 Ibid., p. 51. 38 On the dangers of anachronism in this context, see Ernst, Mad Tales, p. 172. 39 Some details of this case have been altered to protect the subject’s anonymity. 40 MMH: EU.M.23/54, Clinical Sheet, ‘Mental State’. 41 European patients could be admitted to Mathari either as voluntary patients or with legal approval from a certifying Magistrate. If patients were judged by doctors to be of ‘unsound mind’ they could be forcibly confined at Mathari indefinitely; voluntary patients were free to leave at any time. 42 MMH: EU.M.23/54, Referring doctor to Mathari, 20 June 1956. 43 MMH:EU.M.10/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘Sex’. 44 Hyam, ‘Empire and Sexual Opportunity’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14: 2 (1986); Mark T. Berger, ‘Imperialism and Sexual Exploitation: a Response to Ronald Hyam’s “Empire and Sexual Opportunity”’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17: 1 (1988). 45 Kennedy, ‘Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma’, p. 168. On the psychiatric response to homosexuality in apartheid South Africa, see Tiffany Jones, ‘Averting White Male (Ab)normality: Psychiatric Representations and Treatment of ‘Homosexuality’ in 1960s South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 34: 2 (2008). 46 MMH: EU.M.2/57, Discharge Letter, 8 April 1957: ‘Information from Pre-admission Medical Legal Document’. 47 MMH: EU.M.2/57, Discharge Letter, 8 April 1957: ‘Signs and Symptoms on Admission’. 48 McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, p. 23. Significantly, McCulloch did not have access to case files. Of the total number of Europeans admitted to Mathari, twentyeight percent were noted to be alcoholic. 49 MMH: EU.M.2/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘Personal History’; Discharge Letter, 8 April 1957: ‘Other Information and Medical History’. 50 MMH: EU.M.2/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’; Discharge Letter, 8 April 1957: ‘Recommendation’. 51 For other cases of male to male sex that resulted in legal prosecution (across the European empires) see Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, pp. 185–211. 52 The way in which this information was recorded on Conti’s file is itself of note. All discharge letters contained a space for ‘Recommendations’ to be supplied. These were customarily of a medical nature. In this instance, however, is entered ‘Discharged to Machakos C.I.D.’, the implication being that the retention of health and the prevention of Conti from having further sexual relations with Africans were one and the same. 53 Because adult African men were commonly referred to as ‘boys’, the age of the people with whom Veerkamp had sex is unclear. 54 MMH: EU.M.30/41, Medical Officer, Kisumu: Medical Report on Father Philip Veerkamp, Kakamega, undated. 55 MMH: EU.M.30/41, Mathari to Bishop of Kisumu, 2 September 1941. 56 MMH: EU.M.30/41, Bishop of Kisumu to G. M. Rennie, Colonial Secretary, 6 September 1941. 57 MMH: EU.M.30/41, ‘Report on Philip Veerkamp, J. C. Carothers to Director of Medical Services, 15 September 1941. 58 Ibid. 59 MMH: EU.M.30/41, Director of Medical Services to Chief Secretary, 27 September 1941. 60 MMH:EU.M.7/53, Clinical Sheet, ‘Progress of Treatment’. 61 MMH:EU.M.13/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Education’. 62 MMH: EU.M.17/57, Clinical Sheet, ‘Family History’.

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69

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71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83 84

MMH: EU.M.23/54, Clinical Sheet, ‘Legal Status’. MMH: EU.M.23/54, Notes on Robert Tallett, 15 September 1954. MMH: EU.M.23/54, Clinical Sheet, ‘Cause of Present Illness’. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, pp. 104, 221. See also Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet, 1977), pp. 1–44. Homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in 1973. MMH: EU.M.23/54, Clinical Sheet, ‘Mental State’. Carman, A Medical History of Kenya, pp. 74–6. The case is also briefly discussed in Jock McCulloch’s history of ethno-psychiatry in Kenya. McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, p. 23. Carman, notably, anonymises the identity of the person concerned, referring to him as ‘Smith’. McCulloch, does not use an alias. For the sake of consistency, and in the spirit of protecting the identity of the mentally ill discussed in this book, I shall, like Carman, use the alias of ‘Smith’. Until 1929, the hospital came under the supervision of the medical officer in charge of the ‘native hospital’. For an account of the career of Dr H. L. Gordon, who managed Mathari from 1929 to 1937, see Campbell, Race and Empire, pp. 42–4 and McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, p. 20. Carman, A Medical History, p. 74. Ibid., p. 75. This last point was made by Colin Carothers in conversation with Jock McCulloch, in 1986. McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, p. 23. Carman, A Medical History, p. 75. George, ‘Homes in the Empire’, p. 99. Collingham, Imperial Bodies, pp. 174–5. Penny Russell, A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), p. 127. See the case histories, for example, of Keith Sorensen, MMH: EU.M.6/58; Donald Harmiston, MMH: EU.M.104/44; Rowan Brookes, MMH: EU.M.4/59 and Benedict Adams, MMH: EU.M.27/41. Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Reinterpret the So-called Psychopathic Personality (St Louis: Mosby, 1941). Kennedy, Islands of White, p. 173. It was a property of the ‘poor white’ that was common to both the African and American contexts. As one Southern slave-holder wrote: ‘There is something wrong with him, something inferior, possibly in his blood’, cited in Sylvia Jenkins Cook, From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction (Chapel Hill, New Jersey: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), p. x. See also J. M. Coetzee’s commentary on the South African novelist, Sarah Gertrude Millin, who herself grew up poor on the diamond fields of Kimberley: J. M. Coetzee, ‘Blood, Flaw, Taint, Degeneration: The Case of Sarah Gertrude Millin’, English Studies in Africa, 23: 1 (1980). Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality (Manchester, 1990), p. 92. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, p. 90; Ghosh, Sex and The Family, p. 3. Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p. 182; McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue, p. 28.

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States of emergency: psychosis and transgression

Of the European patients treated at the Mathari Mental Hospital during the final twenty years of colonial rule, just under a third were judged to be deluded.1 Diagnosis was inconsistent and variable: some patients were thought to be suffering from dementia praecox; others were diagnosed as schizophrenic. Other patients were recorded as ‘manic’, ‘delusional’ or ‘psychotic’. Frequently, less precise, more descriptive terms were used: patients were noted to be ‘paranoid’, ‘abnormal’ and ‘irrational’. Several patients were ‘hearing voices’. One woman was said to be, simply, ‘frightened of things that are not there’.2 The confusion by which psychiatrists and others apprehended delusion need not detain us here. The pertinent point is that a significant number of those Europeans who found themselves at Mathari were judged to have a distorted perception of reality. These were people whose madness was located at the disjuncture between the imagined and the real – between what they saw and heard and ‘normality’ as apprehended by the sane. In his analysis of patient case files held at the Yaba Mental Hospital in Lagos, Jonathan Sadowsky showed how the substance of patients’ delusions can offer the historian a valuable analytical resource. The voices of the mentally ill, Sadowsky argued, should not be dismissed as mere ‘raving’ or ‘nonsense’. Doing so, he contended, is to invest significance not in what a patient thinks or feels but in what he has, diverting attention away from an individual’s subjectivity and towards the nature of his medical condition. This, Sadowsky argued, was an approach typical of the most reductive bio-psychiatry.3 Inattentive to the multitudinous ways in which the mentally ill give expression to themselves and their lives, the bio-psychiatric approach must inevitably subdue the rich, albeit cacophonous, language of the mad. Similarly, any approach that fails to listen to the insane themselves is bound to foreclose an appreciation of historical, political and cultural context. Listening to those deemed [ 150 ]

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to be deranged, in other words, can offer up insight not only into the nature of their illness and its treatment but also into the nature of the society in which they lived. The text that is the stuff of mental illness is far less straightforward to decipher than more conventional forms of life-history but it is important that it be read nonetheless, if only to challenge the dominant narratives comprised by colonial discourses and the limits of possibility that such discourses enclosed. As Roy Porter has argued, it is important to ‘get into the heads of the mad’: For one thing, their thought-worlds throw down a challenge, being at once so alien yet so uncannily familiar, like surrealist parodies of normality. For another, if we are to understand the treatment of the mad, we must not listen only to pillars of society, judges and psychiatrists: their charges must be allowed a right to reply … such answers raise as many questions as they resolve, but examining what survives in the vox insanorum at least pitches the interpretative issues on to a higher plane.4

It has been a central premise of this book, however, that the voices of the mad should not be heard in isolation from the voices of the sane. To do so not only reiterates the exceptionality of those judged to be mentally ill but also fails to address the relationship between delusional content and social context. As the case files of the Europeans at Mathari show, prevailing ideas about Africa as a place of madness and degeneration had effect. Delusional content, it appears, was characterised not by difference from but by resemblance to dominant discursive tropes. Taking the content of delusions seriously forces us to take discourse seriously too. That many of the Europeans admitted to Mathari believed that they were in danger from African conspiracy reminds us that the Europeans in 1950s Kenya were under attack and not only in the minds of people judged insane. If fear of ‘native uprising’ was a prominent theme in delusional content, however, it was not only Africans who were perceived as carriers of catastrophe or as the harbingers of a mortal or existential threat. Fear of ‘native’ insurrection was echoed by fear of white transgression. While the delusions of many of the Europeans admitted to Mathari took ideas around savage Africa to their (il)logical extreme, others turned these discourses back in on themselves. In this regard it can hardly be without significance that while sensitivity to African danger was deemed necessary for the protection of colonial boundaries, to sense a danger emanating from within was to subvert the entire epistemic logic on which ideologies of racial difference depended. The rapacious black man was as much a feature of the colonial landscape as the gabled settler home but the predatory white man was a contradiction in terms. To invert the coordinates of self and other, if only in one’s [ 151 ]

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mind, was thus to find oneself irredeemably at odds with the social world in which one lived. Terror unfolded from the v ­ ertiginous realisation that racial belonging could so simply be undone: that Africans might appear not as servants or as fiends but as objects of desire; that colonial boundaries could collapse outwards as well as they might remain defiantly under siege; that ‘the European’ might himself step from the elevated platform on which racial ideology had him placed – from these prohibited possibilities did panic and paranoia emerge.

Delusions of the other Between 1952 and 1959, Kenya Colony existed in a state of emergency. Much of the historical literature on Mau Mau, however, has concerned how that emergency was mythologised: as a liberation struggle or a Kikuyu civil war; as a reversion to savagery or a peasants’ revolt.5 Significantly, the government response to Mau Mau was framed largely by the psychological theories of Colin Carothers, erstwhile superintendent at the Mathari hospital.6 Carothers described Mau Mau in psychodynamic terms – as a collective mental breakdown on the part of the Kikuyu who had been ‘civilised’ too fast. Ill-equipped to cope with modernity but cut loose from the stabilising forces of tribal belonging, ‘detribalised’ Kikuyu, Carothers argued, were caught between two irreconcilable worlds. To Carothers, therefore, and the anthropologist Louis Leakey who echoed his views, Mau Mau represented ‘the trauma of transition’, a diagnosis expansive enough to accommodate both the liberal agenda of adaptation and reform as well as the conservative settler view that it was in allowing Africans beyond their ‘natural’ subordinate positions that catastrophe must unavoidably reside. Where Carothers’ psychiatric theory was most immediately significant was in shaping the nature of British counter-insurgency operations.7 Carothers’ views did not merely shape conventional thinking, however; they reflected it as well. Not only within Kenya but around the world, in films, novels and media accounts, Mau Mau was depicted as an atavistic reversion to the primitive, a frenzied return of, and to, the jungle and a spectacular playing out of steadfast civilisation under siege from a savage and resurgent ‘Africa’.8 That Mau Mau was not so much a military force as a secret society reactivated a centuriesold British tradition of imagining Africa and Africans as animated by magic, conspiracy and witchcraft. Oathing rituals, in particular, bespoke superstition, sorcery and ‘unspeakable rites’.9 That the killing of Europeans, though few, occurred in their homes and often after dark, signalled perhaps the ultimate colonial violation; that the identity of Mau Mau members was unknown and that they retreated [ 152 ]

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to the forests – ever the emblematic symbol of ‘savage Africa’ – did nothing but compound the sense that Mau Mau was less of a nationalist movement than an irrational, evil force. To deconstruct the dominant image of Mau Mau as savage or atavistic, however, while doubtless useful for highlighting the collusion between racist, ethnocentric ideology and the repression of anticolonial insurgency, fails to allow for the fact that for the Europeans in Kenya fears of Mau Mau were nothing if not real. Exposure to sensationalist accounts in the British press or to panicked hearsay on the veranda or in the bar, could only have had a meaningful effect, all the more disquieting when one found oneself alone. Such rumours were at their height at the very beginning of the Emergency, the flames fanned by a sensationalist settler press. Particularly disturbing were reports, first printed in a British newspaper in late August 1952 but which circulated quickly in Kenya of a St Bartholomew’s day massacre of all Europeans. Another source of consternation was the booklet supplied to British troops on entering Kenya: entitled The Kenya Picture, the document included a loose-leaf insert describing Mau Mau oathing rituals in graphic detail.10 ‘For the first two or three weeks of the Emergency,’ one colonial official recalled, ‘I was more frightened than I have ever been in my life.’11 Depictions of Mau Mau as bestial or savage may have helped to define the courage of the men and women who unflinchingly fought off their assailants but they also influenced profoundly the tenor of daily life for others less steely-nerved. Defensive-mindedness in Kenya served a vital social purpose but never had the perils of Africa seemed so immediately at hand as in 1952. In an atmosphere ‘as tightly strung as piano wire’, life in Nairobi was ‘unendurably tense’.12 Up-country, Europeans took to barricading themselves in their houses at night, their verandas enclosed with wire.13 Curtains were drawn without a chink and revolvers kept unfailingly within reach, on the arm of a chair or beneath a pillow while one slept.14 Evenings were endured in a constant state of tension.15 Some settlers even built towers on their roofs, topped by spotlights that would sweep the surrounding trees.16 Graham Greene, recently arrived from another violent anti-colonial insurgency in Malaya, judged the Kenya situation worse: In Malaya … one’s enemy was better armed and trained, but he was more comprehensible. In Kenya the settler was often his only guard, he was well aware that his houseboy had taken the Mau Mau oath and any day might be required to help kill his employer, he had to depend for safety on a flimsy lock to his bedroom door, the revolver by his bed and the vigilance of his dog, and the night inevitably seems longer than the day and full of the creaks of wood and the trotting of a scavenger.17

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Indeed, it was these two salient facts – the anxiety of lonely nights and the suspicion of servants’ betrayal – that defined how Mau Mau was experienced by Kenya’s Europeans. Cherry Lander, living alone at Endebess, would wake at night convinced she was surrounded, despite her double locks, her wire and her dogs. ‘Every lizard which fell off the roof’, she wrote, ‘was suspect, and every time the dogs barked I wondered what they were barking at.’18 Most of the settlers believed their Kikuyu servants had taken at least one oath.19 A grizzly death was perhaps just a matter of time. ‘Reports of servants killing their masters’, as Frank Kitson, serving in the security forces at the time, remembered, ‘gave an extra savage twist to the general feeling of hopelessness, fear and foreboding.’20 ‘It was to the English colonist’, as Greene described, ‘like a revolt of the domestic staff … as though Jeeves had taken to the jungle.’21 For Lander it was the fear of not knowing that was worst: ‘inscrutable black eyes gave nothing away’, she wrote, ‘soft, gentle voices had either the fear in their hearts if they were coerced, or the blackness in their minds if they were not’.22 Hyperbole aside, it is reasonable to suppose that Mau Mau presented for many Europeans a violent realisation of all the vulnerability and danger to which they felt themselves exposed. The disloyal servant, in particular, emerged as a callous inversion of a favourite settler trope but it was touched upon compulsively, like a finger on a nerve. Fascination with the betrayal of the domestic staff suggested how uncertain minds fixated on the implications of their own deluded hopes: that all was well, that Africans accepted their subordination willingly and that Mau Mau and all it represented could be banished from the land. With this in mind, perhaps it is not surprising that many of the Europeans admitted to Mathari during the 1950s described to doctors Mau Mau fears. Gregory Frangos, newly arrived in Kenya from Greece in December 1951 and referred to Mathari by a Nairobi doctor, was noted on admission to be ‘confused and afraid of being attacked by natives’.23 After four months treatment at Mathari, Frangos was repatriated to Greece at his employer’s expense.24 Another patient, Madeleine Morrison, the wife of a police inspector, was observed to be ‘afraid of Mau Mau’. Morrison was convinced she was going to be killed. At Mathari, she believed the African staff were carrying concealed pangas, the machete-like implements so indelibly associated with Mau Mau killings. Morrison too was repatriated.25 Carman Brownlee, admitted to Mathari in April 1953, suffered ‘terrible nightmares’ in which she was ‘attacked by a kaffir’.26 Barbara Dalton said she felt ‘keyed up’ on account of the emergency.27 Roberta Panizzi, an Italian admitted to the hospital aged 17 in April 1957, was diagnosed as ‘hysterical’ after she talked about a Kikuyu who she believed to be [ 154 ]

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Mau Mau and who she thought was ‘putting something in her food to make her go away’.28 Lauren Constance, admitted to Mathari the previous autumn, told doctors that the world was coming to an end – that, in her words, ‘everything was destroyed’.29 This, the doctor averred, indicated ‘slight religious mania’: its uniquely late-colonial inflection was Constance’s belief that ‘the natives’ were responsible for the destruction she perceived. Neither the fact that Constance was living in a part of Kenya severely affected by the Mau Mau Emergency nor the fact that her delusions occurred when the Emergency was at its height were remarked upon by the doctors. A doctor at Mitubiri did, however, ensure that his patient was allowed no further contact with Africans and it was for this same reason that Constance was moved to Nairobi for treatment and consequently to Mathari.30 Numerous others expressed fears of Mau Mau or had such fears imputed to them by family members, doctors or psychiatrists at the hospital. All, notably, were female. Seldom is it clear, however, whether fears of Mau Mau constituted evidence of a deluded mind or, conversely, if they constituted reasonable grounds for distress. The outcome in either case was usually the same: speedy repatriation out of Kenya or treatment within the Mathari hospital, typically comprising a course of ECT or the administration of anti-psychotic drugs. In some cases, it was the failure of an individual’s friends or family members to appreciate a danger that only the individual perceived that brought them to the notice of hospital doctors and eventually to their ­certification and their confinement at Mathari. In cases such as these it was an individual’s inability to manage and moderate their fear – to ‘put a brave face on it’ to put it simply – that began them on their path to psychiatric treatment and their labelling as insane. In this regard the case of Janet Harris is particularly instructive and is here discussed in depth. Janet Harris was admitted to Mathari in March 1953, just weeks after the violent murder of the Ruck family in January and only days after the infamous massacre at Lari, two critical events in creating the impression among Europeans of Mau Mau as irrational and atavistic.31 Although the picture that we can gather of Harris’s life history and her psychological condition in the spring of 1953 is inevitably incomplete it is supplemented significantly by letters sent from her husband to the hospital authorities. As such the documents provide an intimate glimpse into one woman’s experience of the Mau Mau Emergency as well as the role of family members in managing and making sense of her mental ill-health. Janet Harris had come to Kenya in 1944. She met her husband soon after and married the following year. In the spring of 1953, the couple were camped at Ekarakara on the Yatta plateau where her husband was [ 155 ]

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employed by the African Land Settlement Board. ‘Most of my time’, Mr Harris explained, ‘is on safari, living in a tent: not a suitable life for a lady of a nervous type as my wife is.’ ‘This year’, he added, ‘she seemed more nervy and became easily excited over trivial matters.’32 At the end of February, Harris received secret police information detailing that a Mau Mau meeting had taken place close to his camp, itself located over twenty-five miles from the nearest Europeans. On hearing of this news, Janet became ‘terrified’, ‘demented with fears’ and ‘hysterical’ at the idea of returning to the camp.33 Mr Harris’s handwritten notes explain the situation: We arranged for her to stay (in two rondavels) at Kithimani some 300 yards away from the DO’s House … She felt she would be safe there (30 miles from any Kikuyu) and the DO would lay on a night watchman. A few days later, I came to Kithimani to find my wife in great distress. She hated the loneliness and said that the night watchman failed to turn up  ….   I have omitted to mention that I had tried to persuade her either to go and live in Mombasa or Nairobi (until a house was built for us) or go to her mother in UK. She declined, as she was determined in making a home (in new house). So, Janet returned with me to my camp… Here she was tranquil but complained of headaches each evening.

On 10 March, Mrs Harris went to Nairobi to look into the possibility of obtaining an advance for a passage back to the UK. Refused a loan by her bank, she returned to the camp. Three days later, however, still complaining of headaches, she went to Thika where a doctor referred her on to the European hospital at Nairobi. There she was judged to be ‘restless and unmanageable’ and on 20 March was transferred to Mathari, a ten-day observation certificate having been obtained in a magistrate’s court the previous day. On 21 March, Mr Harris arrived in Nairobi: I was shocked to hear that she had been transferred the day previous to Mathari Hospital for the Insane. There I found her quite off her head, and imploring me to take her away. Dr Foley, the psychiatrist, said they were going to give her electrical treatment.

At Mathari, Janet Harris was noted to be ‘afraid of Mau Mau’, diagnosed with ‘acute melancholia’ and treated with a series of electric shocks.34 On 8 April, she was noted to be ‘approximately 50% better’ and ‘with luck’, eligible for discharge within a week; to her mother in England, Harris wrote that she would ‘do her best’ to keep cheerful and happy.35 To Mr Harris doctors recommended that he take his wife to England as soon as could be arranged, ‘if possible by air’.36 [ 156 ]

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On 25 April, Mrs Harris was discharged from Mathari and admitted to the Noelterese Convalescent Home in Limuru. By now, however, fears of Mau Mau had been overtaken by fears of the Mathari hospital: when Mr Harris visited his wife at the convalescent home on 9 May, she expressed ‘a dread of being made to return to Mathari’.37 By the end of the month, Harris had been relocated to a second convalescent home at Thika. When her husband visited her there he noted that his wife had ‘deteriorated mentally’. Now, it appeared, she was suffering from delusions that the other residents at the home were conspiring against her. ‘She has faith in you,’ Mr Harris wrote to Dr Foley at Mathari, ‘but says on no account would she return to Mathari, nor to the European Hospital where she alleges she was taken by force by two nurses to ambulance for transfer to Mathari.’38 For Mrs Harris, Mau Mau fears developed into paranoid psychosis. No evidence remains by which to corroborate her belief that she was forcibly transferred to the Mathari hospital yet nor is there is reason to suppose that this did not in fact occur considering legal powers were in place for her to be confined against her will. To her husband, however, Janet Harris’s claim was evidence principally for her state of confusion; that she had requested he bring her revolver to the convalescent home was also mentioned to this effect. It is worth remembering, however, that, since the beginning of the Emergency, all Europeans were encouraged to keep their guns to hand. In the aftermath of the Ruck murders in particular, Kenya’s ‘nervous tension’ was at its height. And yet, if the case of Janet Harris is testament to the mental strain of living through Mau Mau, it might equally be argued that it was the experience of psychiatric treatment and institutional confinement that precipitated psychosis. Harris, quite reasonably we might contend, became alarmed at the prospect of camping so close to where a Mau Mau meeting was known to have taken place. Her husband, her most immediate source of protection, was compelled to remain but when Harris stayed alone at Kithimani, she found herself still more exposed when the night watchman failed to arrive. Having tried and failed to get a passage back to England, Janet Harris’s only option was to return to Ekarakara. Two days after returning to the camp, Harris took herself to see a doctor. Hoping to get some treatment for her headaches, or merely a temporary reprieve from the terror she was experiencing at the camp, it is unlikely that Harris anticipated her forcible transfer to Mathari. To Mr Harris, the reasons for his wife’s distress were clear. ‘It appears obvious’, he wrote, ‘that the strain and worry of living a lonely life on the Yatta and her fears of being attacked, caused her mental breakdown.’39 That being so, psychosis only emerged after psychiatric treatment and not before. [ 157 ]

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Prohibited zones It is not only women whose delusions can be linked directly to Mau Mau. While ‘black peril’ taught women to be afraid, men by contrast learned anger and contempt. Violence in 1950s Kenya was hardly out of the ordinary.40 But while cruel or random violence enacted in the course of counter-insurgency operations was often overlooked, men who exhibited violence outside the secrecy of the forest and in ways that appeared to others as incomprehensible were as likely to be identified as psychotic as they were to be judged criminally at fault. The case of Richard Maddison amply illustrates this point. On the evening of 5 May 1955, Maddison, a British settler, attacked an African at Fort Hall (now Muranga), whom he stabbed several times, ‘apparently in a frenzy’.41 On the same evening that the assault took place, Maddison was examined by a doctor, certified as ‘a lunatic’ and transported to the Mathari hospital where he was admitted for a period of thirty days’ observation. Significantly, however, at no time during his treatment did Maddison exhibit any evidence to suggest that he was mentally unwell. On 14 June he was released, deemed to be ‘normal mentally’ and ‘not certifiable’.42 The documentary evidence on Richard Maddison’s file is extremely sketchy. What is notable, however, is that for some time prior to the incident for which he was admitted to Mathari, Maddison had, like many of the Kenya settlers, taken part in counter-insurgency operations. As the doctor who treated him at Fort Hall commented, ‘For the past two years he has done good work with security forces in the forest and of course he has learned to be very ready with a knife on the farm.’ To this same doctor, moreover, Maddison confided that for some time he had experienced urges to kill someone and, further, that he might ‘commit rape at any time’.43 There is no further information on file attesting to Maddison’s earlier life history or what became of him after he left Mathari. Nor can one reasonably infer from the documents available that Maddison’s mental illness flowed directly from his military service. What does appear salient, however, is the similarity between Maddison’s mental distress and the atrocities that were perpetrated by British security forces in the course of counter-insurgency operations. What is particularly suggestive is the doctor’s remark that Maddison had done ‘good work in the forest’. Maddison, in other words, had proved himself adept at becoming the person that the forest required; somebody, that is, able not only to hunt and kill Africans but to hate and fear them as well. With that in mind, it seems unremarkable that Maddison felt propelled towards violence, violence, however, that he was unable to keep apart [ 158 ]

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from his civilian, public life. As another member of the security forces tellingly recalled, ‘It was not at all difficult to imagine “Micks” under one’s bed at night: the only thing was we hadn’t learned how to distinguish them from the ordinary African.’44 That Maddison’s attack was not controlled but frenzied; that it took place not in the borderlands of the forest but in the unambiguous light of the everyday; that his behaviour violated the collective self-image of the colonial European – for all these reasons, his assault on an African described the disorder in his mind. Richard Maddison was not the only European at Mathari who had taken part in counter-insurgency operations. Anthony Atkinson, a 19-year-old national serviceman from Yorkshire, was diagnosed as schizophrenic on admittance to Mathari in February 1954.45 According to the military doctors who referred him, Atkinson had been exhibiting delusions of persecution.46 His Clinical Sheet described his recent behaviour: Violence, jumping on top of next door neighbour and striking him; says vigilantes are after him and the black cooks are all Mau Mau; also talks irrelevantly, mannerisms, constantly grimacing and laughing.47

Atkinson received a series of seven ECT treatments before being repatriated to Britain under military escort. Another patient, Gordon Townsend, admitted to Mathari in November 1956, also took part in the counter-insurgency campaign.48 Like Richard Maddison, Townsend also admitted to violent urges: he hated Africans, he said, and frequently felt inclined to ‘bash somebody’.49 Three times during his service with the Kenya Regiment, Townsend had been court-martialled for firing at unarmed Africans: each time he was – ‘of course’ – acquitted.50 While subject neither to legal sanction or psychiatric treatment after these events, it was Townsend’s behaviour when returning to civilian life that marked him out as mentally ill. On three separate occasions, Townsend exhibited uncontrollable violence, all occurring during a twelve-month period after he retired from counter-insurgency operations in 1955. These incidents were all relayed by Townsend himself to a psychiatrist at Mathari: March 19th, c.8–9 pm after 1 drink – feeling as though had been grabbed by hair, something rising up … apparently after that I screamed the place down – taken home, felt thoroughly depressed. On 21st taken to Kitale Hospital.   Coming down in car last night got whimpering fit again, felt everything hopeless. Had the same thing 1 year ago – when came out of forest – more or less the same thing – I shouted my head off for 10 minutes, then OK. Apparently no content, just yelled. Felt limp after.51

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While it cannot be our objective to trace our own aetiology for Townsend’s mental distress, what does come powerfully and unequivocally across from his file is a refutation of the idea that young men involved in counter-insurgency operations found their experience in the forest to be exciting, invigorating or affirmative. Wendy Webster has argued that for European men in Kenya, Mau Mau represented a challenge to their masculinity above all: the civilian encounter with Mau Mau, she writes, emasculated men, ‘pinned [them] down in domestic settings’ and surprised them after supper while in their dressing gown and pyjamas.52 ‘If this was a war’, as Lonsdale writes, ‘then its frontline was at home, between supper and bedtime, as wives and husbands waited out the evening, radios turned off, eyes trained upon the door.’53 As white men were emasculated in their homes, they rushed to take up arms and resist their state of siege. By Christmas 1952 almost all the European settler-farmers had joined the Kenya Police Reserve. Others served in the Kenya Regiment.54Getting out on patrol certainly provided a more expansive stage for colonial manhood to be performed and memoirs of serving in counter-insurgency operations frequently rehearse the familiar tropes of danger and adventure that safari entailed.55 Occasionally, however, they intimate a less intrepid set of feelings. Guy Campbell, the title of whose memoir, The Charging Buffalo, suggests nothing in the way of equivocal feeling, hinted nonetheless at the psychological effects of patrolling the Aberdares: Patrols could last from three to fourteen days at a stretch: hot days of climbing up and down deep gulleys, and freezing cold nights. The entire operation was mentally and physically tense, to such a degree that some men suffered hallucinations and most became jumpy and shorttempered.56

Hallucinations in the forest take us back to Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness. But perhaps we should not be surprised that things were not what they seemed where white men blacked their faces to masquerade as insurgents. Racial transgression was given official sanction by the extraordinary circumstances of the Mau Mau Emergency but pseudo gangs were to mimic Africans, not become them: blacked up whites did not ‘go native’ in any way deeper than the colouration of their skin. Yet too much time in this twilight world made soldiers ‘bush happy’. For military commanders the concern was that their men failed to remember the moral of Kipling’s Kim – that they were white after all. For those on patrol themselves, the forest was to prove a testing ground for their own subjective racial selves.57 [ 160 ]

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Revisionist histories that stress the widespread nature of atrocities committed by British security forces during Mau Mau has provided a welcome challenge to those sanitised contemporary accounts of the counter-insurgency campaign. It is important to recognise also, however, that the perpetrators as well as the victims of violence are likely to suffer from its traumatic effects. To emphasise the repressive, often appalling, nature of the counter-insurgency still risks positing those Europeans who took part as strong, powerful and in command. To some extent, clearly, the problem is evidential: those who wrote of Mau Mau did so largely in a spirit of criticism or defence. In either case, Europeans remain as dominant agents and Africans as either their beneficiaries or their victims. Only in the psychiatric files do we get a sense of the panic, paranoia and pervasive fear that affected not only Africans in 1950s Kenya but Europeans as well. If the evidence discussed above is sufficient to correct a prevailing view of Europeans in Kenya as staunch, committed and unafraid, it is suggestive also of how sensationalist discourses depicting ‘savage Africa’ both reflected and affected how people experienced their time in Kenya during a time of ‘native’ insurrection. It was not only around Mau Mau, however, that prevailing discourses can be found, albeit distorted, in the substance of mental illness and the content of delusions. Pamela Humble, admitted to Mathari in September 1958, told her doctor that the nursemaid who she employed to care for her child was bewitching the baby.58 Soon, Humble’s delusions conflated to include other African employees including the ‘shamba boy’ and the clerk employed by her husband who Humble believed was stealing money. Humble’s delusions, of course, were not out of line with prevailing colonial discourses: Africans, it was widely believed, were both inveterate thieves and inclined to witchcraft.59 Reading Humble’s case file sensitively, moreover, forces us to ask whether delusions were delusions at all. Was Pamela Humble’s nursemaid bewitching her baby? To psychiatrists at Mathari, the proposition was absurd; to latter-day cross-cultural psychiatrists, the possibility can at least be entertained.60 The added irony here is that the only testimony to suggest that Humble was not mentally afflicted could have come from the one person who would never have been consulted: the ayah herself. Time and again, delusions force us back to prevailing colonial discourse. Ingrid Wilson, admitted to Mathari in July 1957, told doctors: ‘Africans come in at night, maybe they rape me, I don’t know.’61 ‘The patient voiced very pronounced racial hate of Africans,’ the Mathari superintendent noted, ‘quite out of proportion to any justification.’62 Diagnosed to be suffering from ‘manic-depressive-psychosis’, Wilson was at the same time judged to be ‘asymptomatic’, hence fit for [ 161 ]

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discharge. The superintendent recommended that, when she leave the hospital, Wilson take a fortnight’s holiday at Mombasa. Florence Koetzee, admitted to Mathari on January 1958, divulged that six years previously, while living in South Africa, she had been assaulted by two African men, in her bedroom at midnight.64 There are no police records on file, however, relating to this assault. Nor, moreover, was there any doubt on the part of the Mathari doctors that Koetzee was deluded. Documents record her condition as ‘schizophrenic’ and note that during her time in Mathari she was hostile, aggressive and subject to auditory hallucinations. No doubt is cast, however, upon the veracity of the midnight assault, despite the fact that the only testimony to this effect was provided by Koetzee herself. Throughout her treatment the assault is mentioned not as evidence but as explanation for Koetzee’s disordered mind. Nor was Koetzee’s the only case file from which it is difficult to conclude decisively whether attacks by ‘natives’ were real or imagined. Doctors who treated Marilyn Stevens, admitted to Mathari in 1957, noted ‘some history of an attack by a native’ but nowhere else on file is this incident mentioned.65 Brian Jensen, diagnosed as ‘hysterical’ after entering Mathari in December 1956, claimed to have been attacked by an African on the Fort Hall road. His story, however, was not believed.66 The case of Brian Grieves is more instructive. Admitted to Mathari in August, 1958, Grieves was diagnosed to be suffering from ‘acute manic-paranoid psychosis’.67 On 26 August, a doctor at the Kitale District Hospital visited Grieves at his farm and concluded that his patient exhibited ‘paranoid signs’. In a letter to Mathari, the doctor described the nature of this paranoia: His paranoid delusions were chiefly on the lines that everyone was trying to do him wrong; that he was extremely clever and had great ‘intuition’ which warned him when a trap was being set; that he had learned a lot about how the Africans were trying to gain control of Africa from West Africa … [that] he knew how to cope with African labour (i.e. with violence) and that if a particular African came on his farm again he would kill him.68

That Grieves was suffering from psychosis belies the fact that Africans in Kenya and elsewhere, were, in 1958, trying to gain control of their political affairs. In 1957, Ghana had gained its independence; the Mau Mau Emergency by now was six years old; two years later, eighteen independent African states had emerged. Mr Grieves was right to feel his position under threat. As one of the new post-war settlers encouraged to migrate to Kenya by government-sponsored settlement schemes, Grieves had been led to expect that in Kenya he would be [ 162 ]

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able to enjoy the delights that ‘Britain’s fairest colony’ had to offer. In conversation with an officer of the European Agricultural Settlement Board, Grieves described the ‘whole purpose’ of his buying a farm in Kenya as to ‘provide a home for his family, and a future for his sons’.69 To European settlers who had sunk fortunes, worldviews and the health and welfare of family members into the premise of a ‘white man’s country’, the prospect of African freedom was – incontrovertibly – distressing. The proximate relation between discourse and delusion highlights the distortive yet strangely illuminating light that madness sheds on colonial common sense. Janice Croft, who was treated for a week at Mathari in November 1956, demanded that she ‘leave to catch the boat’ and that she ‘wanted to go to England’.70 Homesickness, in a society based on the transposition of English homes to foreign soil, was, by definition, illegitimate, but it was repatriation, as we know, that provided the stock recourse for dealing with the mentally ill. Croft’s insistence that she had to leave to catch the boat suggested psychosis. There was no boat, at least none for which she had a passage booked. Other delusions exhibited a more ornate parody of the colonial imagination. Gareth Martin, a district officer at Makardara, south of Nairobi, told doctors that he was going to be knighted by the Kikuyu.71 Gilbert Rowe, diagnosed with ‘eccentric paranoia’, wrote extravagant letters to various eminent persons, cited by doctors as a sign of his grandiosity but providing to the historian a vivid parody of colonial self-esteem. The following is a letter Rowe wrote to the Queen in December, 1956: Your Majesty,   Assuming that His Excellency the Honourable Sir Evelyn Baring, Knight Grand Cross of the most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, Governor and Commander in Chief of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, has granted me the honour of forwarding to you for implementation a matter which has apparently been overlooked, may I very respectfully request that you grant me the favour of attending to the matter personally and very leisurely. May I end by wishing you and all members of the Royal Family a very Happy New Year.   I am, your majesty, your most obedient and affectionate subject …72

Like Janice Croft and Gareth Martins, Gilbert Rowe was judged to be suffering from delusions. He was also the only European treated at Mathari during this period who cited literature in his correspondence. To Kenya’s Governor, Evelyn Baring, Rowe recommended the works of Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard.73 Despite the delusional content of his letters, however, Rowe was not certified as being ‘of unsound [ 163 ]

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mind’ and his condition was noted to be unchanged at discharge. ‘If he continues to be a public nuisance,’ doctors at Mathari recommended, ‘he must be certified’.74 Analysing the case histories of psychiatric patients during the period of the Mau Mau Emergency highlights the close and complex relationship between discourse and delusion as well as the very real nature of anxiety and distress. To critique colonial discourse is not enough. Instead, we need to think about the ways by which discourse both effected and expressed the reality of idiosyncratic, lived experience. Either we must conclude that prevailing discourses were accurate – in that they reflected sentiments commonly felt – or that they were formative – in that they shaped how people came to experience the world around them. If Europeans who were judged to be mentally ill reiterated prevailing discourse, however, combined with fear of the colonial other was also a fear of the colonial self. Reading the delusions of Europeans treated at Mathari shows us that although some expressed fears of a savage or resurgent Africa, many more voiced fears of their own degradation; indeed, as the following cases shows, it was precisely in their voicing of these fears that their insanity was perceived.

Delusions of the self Abraham Stein was a stateless German Jew who from 1940 until 1947 was interned at a camp for displaced persons at Entebbe in Uganda. In June 1947, Stein was admitted to Mathari. During the previous three months he had been suffering from persecutory, auditory hallucinations. Doctors at Mathari diagnosed Stein with paraphenia, deciding that his illness was a result of prolonged incarceration.75 Though this may well have been the case, the content of Stein’s hallucinations concerned Africans primarily: ‘Hears African voices’, the doctor at Mathari noted, ‘threatening him night and day.’76 Stein’s African persecution, however, had an added twist: the Africans who threatened him were doing so, so Stein believed, at the instigation of ‘certain unnamed Europeans’. Significantly, Stein rehearsed a staple colonial idea: that Africans moved at Europeans’ behest. ‘The African’ in a discursive sense, was a colonial creation, the vehicle by which the mastery of ‘the European’ was articulated, either as proof of the success of his civilising mission or as evidence to demand that the mission be continued. Success or failure, the effect of European over African agency was consistently held up as benign. According to Stein, however, the European manipulation of Africans was put to malevolent, self-destructive ends. Stein’s perception that he was persecuted by African voices repeated the idea of African malevolence but inverted [ 164 ]

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the European virtue that had been articulated in contradistinction. Here, it was the European ‘self’, less the African ‘other’, that was in doubt.77 In other cases, anxieties centred on the vertiginous sensation that transgression could emanate quite literally from within. Robert Dunnet was diagnosed with ‘paranoid psychosis’ when he was admitted to Mathari in October 1957.78 While at the European hospital in Nairobi, Dunnet, aged 19, had told a doctor that he had been forced to live with a Nandi woman and that all the members of the farm where he worked were ‘against him’.79 In this instance, it seems, Dunnet’s delusions inverted public discourse. Instead of expressing fears of violation by Africans, Dunnet believed that he himself might be drawn into having sex with African women. Dunnet’s case-notes elaborate on this theme: Some African ‘hypnotised’ him and ‘planted’ a Nandi woman on him – he slept with her a few nights, worries whether he got the ‘pox’ from her. Says he took a government vehicle to go see Special Branch – he thought he might be ‘marked’ by natives to set off another emergency.80

Like Stein, Dunnet believed that he was the victim of Africans’ supernatural powers. His worries over the possibility that he may have contracted venereal disease from the African woman with whom he believed he had sex also reflected prevailing colonial discourses.81 Discussion of sex between colonial men and ‘native’ women, in Kenya and elsewhere, focused on the transmission of venereal disease from African women to European men.82 Such discussions reflected anxieties over the health and virility of the racial European body but they also operated metaphorically – to express concerns over the dangers of contagion – social and psychological as well as biological – that colonised places and people represented. Dunnet, notably, was not the only male patient to believe himself to have contracted venereal diseases from African women.83 In Dunnet’s case, however, there is an additional reason that might help to explain the nature of his psychosis. On his case notes is recorded: Has a much married father … he was divorced from his first wife, patient’s mother, when patient was age 3. Married twice more since – 3 children by first, 2 by second and twins by third wife … patient and father evasive about past history.84

Dunnet’s belief that he had been duped into having sex with an African women may in part be attributable to his father’s sexual behaviour. Notably, in a letter to Mathari, the doctor who treated Dunnet at the European hospital recorded that from hearsay he had gathered that Dunnet had a ‘bad family background’ and that his father, who was [ 165 ]

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working on the railway, was living with a woman in Nairobi. There is nothing to suggest here that Dunnet’s father had been living with an African woman but it is reasonable to contend that his father’s sexual behaviour affected Dunnet’s own sexuality. Nothing, however, was more troubling within the colonial context than desire, sexual or otherwise, for the people from whose supposed inferiority one’s own ‘white’ identity was derived. Robert Dunnet may well have wanted to have sex with an African woman; indeed, it is perfectly possible that he did so. Yet, critically, his sexual anxieties coincided with, and were compounded by, the political insurrection that was Mau Mau. Specifically, Dunnet believed that unknown African conspirators had hypnotised him into having sex with an African in order to ‘set off’ another emergency. Dunnet, in short, had come to perceive that the potential for colonial catastrophe resided within himself. This is not so dramatic or surprising, however, when we consider that this was essentially the message of white prestige: on the behaviour of the colonial European rested the stability of the colonial world in which he dwelt. Mau Mau threatened Dunnet not by physical assault but by implanting unthinkable desires. At Mathari, Dunnet was treated with largactil and electric shock therapy and was discharged at the end of November, a month after he was first apprehended. Considered by doctors to be ‘much improved’ at discharge, he was granted two weeks’ convalescent leave.85 If a fear of sexual transgression characterised Dunnet’s psychosis, several women at Mathari suffered from the belief that their husbands – the very men set up to protect them from African predation – were in fact conspiring against them. Eva Sokolowski, for example, admitted to Mathari in November 1954, believed that her husband was forcing her to have sex with Africans by giving her an aphrodisiac in the form of rhinoceros horn.86 Another woman, Elaine Bennett, believed her husband was keeping ‘a native’ in a cupboard in her bedroom at night.87 As Mrs Bennett believed, her husband kept the ‘native’ there to ‘work magic’ on her.88 To the psychiatrists who treated Mrs Bennett, her belief that there was a ‘native’ hidden within her bedroom cupboard was clear evidence for psychosis and it was recorded to that end. To the historian, however, Bennett’s delusion neatly distils a decades-old discourse around the dangers of Africans employed within the home. Indeed, if ‘the native in the cupboard’ seems redolent of a certain colonial gothic-horror it is worth remembering that from the very beginning of white settlement settler newspapers regularly carried stories of predatory or larcenous ‘natives’ apprehended whilst hiding in sheds, out-houses, cupboards, and chests, even underneath the stairs.89 [ 166 ]

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Like those of Abraham Stein, both Bennett’s and Sokolowski’s delusions picked up a basic strand of colonial common sense and turned it on its head: that their husbands were not protecting them from peril but orchestrating it themselves signalled a vision of colonial patriarchy horrifically transformed. Others, like Robert Dunnet, voiced fears of their own transgression. Amelia Sweet, diagnosed with ‘delusions of persecution’ in 1957, told doctors that she was wanted by the police for ‘consorting with men’.90 In other cases both men and women expressed the fear that they had violated the colonial social order or were in some other way illegitimate. Natasha Lawson told a psychiatrist at Mathari that she heard voices in the passage outside her room saying that she was an illegal immigrant into Kenya.91 Robin Brown told doctors he should be hung for treason – but did not say why.92 In all these cases, it was the fear of transgression, articulated around the prevailing idioms of a destabilising African environment and the critical imperative that Europeans keep not only physical but emotional distance from its ‘native’ inhabitants that characterised the content of psychotic delusions. Among many of the Europeans in Kenya judged to be insane, ‘madness’ became apparent from an inability to control emotions that were themselves produced from the epistemic imperatives of white minority rule. From analysis of the Mathari case files it is clear that psychotic delusions were not senseless or random but replicated, inverted and rearranged key idioms of colonial discourse. Indeed, such is the collusion between discourse and delusion that the historian can seldom establish what was real, what was imagined, what was forbidden and what was suppressed. That psychotic delusions bear an intimate, if complicated, connection to colonial discourse, however, is not necessarily to posit a colonial pathology or ‘condition’. Of those Europeans judged to be deluded, the vast majority were also affected by other phenomena – poverty, broken homes and social marginality chief among them. Of the patients discussed in this chapter alone, Abraham Stein and Eva Sokolowski both had recent experience of persecution in Europe. Anthony Atkinson, Robert Dunnet, Janet Harris, Pamela Humble, Marilyn Stevens and Gordon Townsend all had come from unstable or broken family backgrounds; Elaine Bennett lived fifty miles from the nearest European and, aside from her husband, had no other family in the colony. Carmen Brownlee was impoverished and alcoholic. Their ‘idioms of madness’ bore the hallmarks of racial transgression and yet to read idioms of madness or delusional content out of social context – and removed from the idiosyncrasies of individual lives – is to miss the mutually exacerbating dynamics of social marginality and racial transgression. In order to integrate the experience of [ 167 ]

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mental illness with its social constitution we need to return to the nature of settler society as it entered its terminal decline.

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Notes   1 Of a sample of 230 case files, 30 per cent contain evidence that doctors, either working at Mathari, or referring patients to the hospital, perceived the patient in question to be experiencing some sort of delusionary psychosis. In cases where doctors did not provide clear diagnosis of psychosis, schizophrenia or delusion, they frequently made observations to this effect. Ambiguity often characterises these remarks. A doctor, for example, may write that a patient ‘thinks Africans are watching her’ yet provide no evidence to the opposite effect. The challenge is made more complicated still when psychiatrists recorded patients’ words verbatim. Hence, they may write, ‘Africans are watching her’ as opposed to ‘says Africans are watching her’. When doctors employed the first person – ‘Africans are watching me’ – the text becomes yet harder to decode.   2 MMH: EU.F.29/57, Clinical Sheet, Interview with patient’s husband, undated.   3 Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam, p. 50. A similar approach is taken by Thomas Beddies and Andreas Dorries in their analysis of files pertaining to psychiatric patients in Germany during the period of the Third Reich. The importance of taking the content of delusions seriously, Beddies and Dorries argue, is especially apparent during this period when many patients referred, in their deluded state, directly to political events taking place around them. Thomas Beddies and Andreas Dorries, ‘The Wittenauer Heilstatten in Berlin: a Case Record sTudy of Psychiatric Patients in Germany, 1919–1960’, in Porter and Wright (eds), The Confinement of the Insane, pp. 157–8. For an opposing view, in which the author sees no meaningful correlation between delusional content and historical context, see John C. Burnham, ‘Psychotic Delusions as a Key to Historical Cultures: Tasmania, 1830–1940’, Journal of Social History, 13: 3 (1980).   4 Roy Porter, Madmen, A Social History of Mad Houses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (London: Stroud Tempus, 2006), p. 314.   5 Nottingham and Rotberg’s Myth of ‘Mau Mau’ was foundational in this respect. John Nottingham and Carl Rotberg, The Myth of ‘Mau Mau’: Nationalism in Kenya (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966). Other significant contributions in this vein include: Robert Buijtenhuijs, Mau Mau, Twenty Years After; A. S. Cleary, ‘The Myth of Mau Mau in its International Context,’ African Affairs, 89: 355 (1990); John Lonsdale, ‘Mau Maus of the Mind’; Dane Kennedy, ‘Constructing the Colonial Myth of Mau Mau’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 25: 2 (1992); Joanna Lewis, ‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Mau Mau: The British Popular Press and the Demoralisation of Empire’, in John Lonsdale and E. S. Odhiambo (eds), Mau Mau & Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration (Oxford: James Currey, 2003).   6 Carothers retired from Kenya shortly before the Emergency. His key works on African Psychiatry are The African Mind in Health and Disease: A Study in Ethnopsychiatry (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1953) and The Psychology of Mau Mau (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1954). See also Louis Leakey, Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (London: Methuen, 1952) and Defeating Mau Mau (London: Methuen, 1954).   7 See, in particular, East African Royal Commission Report (Cmd. 9475, 1955) and F. D. Corfield, ‘Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau’ (Cmd. 1030, 1960), both of which drew heavily on Carothers’ analysis.   8 Films of Mau Mau included Simba (Rank, 1955, dir. Brian Hurst), Safari (Columbia, 1956, dir. Terence Young) and Something of Value (MGM, 1957, dir. Richard Brookes). Novels included Elspeth Huxley’s A Thing to Love (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955); Robert Ruark’s Something of Value (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955) and C. T. Stoneham’s Kenya Mystery (London, 1954). Numerous non-fictional

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  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

accounts of Mau Mau were also published, most notably Gunther’s Inside Africa, Alexander Campbell’s The Heart of Africa (London: Longmans Green, 1954) and Stoneham’s Mau Mau (London: Museum Press, 1953) and Out of Barbarism (London: Museum Press, 1955). On the British media portrayal of Mau Mau, see Lewis, Daddy wouldn’t buy me a Mau Mau and Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, pp. 119–48. On fictional accounts of Mau Mau, see also David MaughanBrown, Land, Freedom and Fiction: History and Ideology in Kenya (London: Zed, 1985). Lonsdale, Mau Maus of the Mind, pp. 399–402. As Lonsdale writes, ‘to be returned after being read, [it was] a charming protection for wives and girlfriends in the days before the photocopier’. Lonsdale, Mau Maus of the Mind, p. 399; Evans, Law and Disorder, p. 28. Allen, Tales from the Dark Continent, p. 137. Gunther, Inside Africa, pp. 319, 352. Scott, A Nice Place to Live, p. 169; Huxley, Nine Faces of Kenya, p. 168. Lander, My Kenya Acres, pp. 18, 102; Gunther, Inside Africa, p. 319. Scott, Nice Place to Live, p. 169–70. Carnegie, Red Dust of Africa, p. 234. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (London: Bodley Head, 1980), pp. 163–4. Lander, My Kenya Acres, pp. 18, 51. Lonsdale, ‘Mau Maus of the Mind’, p. 398. Kitson, Gangs and Counter-gangs (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1960), p. 15. Greene, Ways of Escape, p. 162. Lander, My Kenya Acres, p. 100. See also J. C. Appleby, Woman on Patrol, RH, Mss. Afr. S. 846, p. 2. That Frangos’s anxieties preceded the start of the Emergency by almost a year forces the question as to whether his fears were paranoid or, rather, perceptive. MMH: EU.M.28/51. Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. MMH: EU.F.4/53. Dr Foley, Clinical Notes on Mrs Morrison, 9 June 1953; Foley to Director of Medical Services, 27 July 1953; F. M. Elmston to First Class Magistrate, Nairobi, 1 August 1953. MMH: EU.F.21/53, Carman Brownlee: Medical Officer of Health, Central Nyanza, to Mathari Mental Hospital, 24 April 1953. MMH: EU.F.4/57, Barbara Dalton: Clinical Sheet, ‘Mental State’. MMH: EU.F.7/57, Discharge Letter, 6 May 1957: ‘Signs and Symptoms on Admission’. MMH: EU.F.25/56, Medical Officer in charge, Catholic Mission [location undisclosed], 11 October 1956. Ibid. Janet Harris was admitted to Mathari under a magistrate’s warrant, initially for a ten days observation period that was then extended for a further twenty days. MMH: EU.F.11/5. Foley to Resident Magistrate, 26 March 1953. On the importance of the Ruck murders and the Lari massacre for establishing the European impression of Mau Mau as savage, see: F. Majdalany, State of Emergency: The Full Story of Mau Mau (London: Longmans, 1962), p. 124; Susan Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1944–1960 (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), pp. 136–7; and David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty war in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Norton, 2005), pp. 93–8, 119–80. MMH: EU.F.11/53, ‘Notes on the Illness of Mrs Janet Harris’, handwritten notes, undated. MMH: EU.F.11/53, ‘Regarding Mrs J. Harris’, handwritten notes, undated; ‘Notes on the Illness of Mrs Janet Harris’, handwritten notes, undated. MMH: EU.F.11/53, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. MMH: EU.F.11/53, Janet Harris to her mother, undated, cited in Patient’s Mother to Dr Foley, 28 April 1953. MMH: EU.F.11/53, Dr Foley to Mr Hawes, 8 April 1953.

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madness and marginality 37 MMH: EU.F.11/53, Ralph Harris to Dr Foley, Mathari Mental Hospital, 12 May 1953. 38 MMH: EU.F.11/53, Ralph Harris to Dr Foley, Mathari Mental Hospital, 27 May 1953. 39 MMH: EU.F.11/53, ‘Circumstances leading to the nervous breakdown of Mrs J. E. Harris, handwritten notes by Mr Ralph Harris, undated. 40 On atrocities perpetrated during the course of counter-insurgency operations, see Anthony Clayton, Counter-Insurgency in Kenya: A Study of Military Operations Against Mau Mau, 1952–1960 (Nairobi: Transafrica, 1976), pp. 41–52; Edgerton, Mau Mau, pp. 150–72; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, pp. 130–5; Anderson, ‘Mau Mau in the High Court. 41 MMH: EU.M.5/55, Native Civil Hospital, Fort Hall, to Dr Murray, 5 June 1955. 42 MMH: EU.M.5/55, Clinical Sheet. 43 MMH: EU.M.5/55, Native Civil Hospital, Fort Hall, to Dr Murray, 5 June 1955. 44 Peter Hewitt, Kenya Cowboy: A Police Officer’s Account of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya (London: Avon, 1999), pp. 18–19. 45 MMH: EU.M.11/54, Anthony Atkinson. 46 MMH: EU.M.11/54, Admission of a Member of the Armed Forces of the Crown to Mathari Mental Hospital, 12 Feburary1954. 47 MMH: EU.M.11/54, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. 48 MMH: EU.M.19/56, Gordon Townsend. 49 MMH: EU.M.19/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. 50 MMH: EU.M.19/56, Dr Wray, District Hospital, Kitale, to Mathari Mental Hospital, 22 November 1956. 51 MMH: EU.M.19/56, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. 52 Webster, Englishness and Empire, p. 131. 53 Lonsdale Mau Maus of the Mind, p. 407; Lander, My Kenya Acres, pp. 18, 105. 54 Lander, My Kenya Acres, p. 89; Clayton, Counter-insurgency in Kenya, p. 18; Guy Campbell, The Charging Buffalo: A History of the Kenya Regiment (Secker & Warburg, 1986). 55 Memoirs of fighting Mau Mau include: Kitson, Gangs and Counter Gangs; William W. Baldwin, Mau Mau Man-Hunt (New York: Dutton, 1957); Ian Henderson, The Hunt for Kimathi (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958). On the analogy between hunting Mau Mau and hunting game, see Frank Kitson, Bunch of Five (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 22; Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters, pp. 196–7; Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds, pp. 152–3. 56 Campbell, The Charging Buffalo, p. 81. See also the testimony of Dick SymesThompson in Charles Allen, Tales From the Dark Continent, p. 137. 57 White, ‘Precarious Conditions’, pp. 613, 616. 58 MMH: EU.F.18/58, Discharge Letter, 26 October 1958: ‘Information from Pre-admission Medical Legal Document’. 59 See, for example, on witchcraft: Marion Dobbs, ‘Recollections of Kenya’, p. 79; Nightingale, ‘Memoirs’, p. 5; Ainsworth, ‘Kenya Reminiscences’, p. 33; Carman, Medical History, p. 53–4. 60 The seminal work on cross-cultural psychiatry is Arthur Kleinman, ‘Depression, somatization and the ‘new cross-cultural psychiatry’, Social Science of Medicine, 11: 1 (1977); On the later literature, see John Herrera, William Lawson and John Sramek (eds), Cross Cultural Psychiatry (Chichester: Wiley, 1999) and Dinesh Bhugra and Kamaldeep Bhui (eds), Cross-Cultural Psychiatry: A Practical Guide (London: Arnold, 2001). 61 MMH: EU.F.18/58, J. Michael Vaizey, Kampala to Mathari Mental Hospital, undated. 62 MMH: EU.F.16/27, Discharge Letter, 20 July 1957: ‘Signs and Symptoms on Admission’. 63 MMH: EU.F.16/27, Discharge Letter, 20 July 1957: ‘Course and Treatment in Hospital’; ‘Condition at Discharge’; ‘Diagnosis’. 64 MMH: EU.F.2/58, Clinical Sheet, ‘Previous Health’.

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states of emergency 65 MMH: EU.F.33/56, Dr Kenneth Heber to Mathari, December 1956. 66 MMH: EU.M.21/56, Doctor, District Hospital, Kapsabet, to Margetts, 5 December 1956. 67 MMH: EU.M.18/58, Discharge Letter, 22 October 1958. 68 MMH: EU.M.18/58, Dr D. R. Haupt, District Hospital, Kitale to Margetts, 27 August 1958. 69 MMH: EU.M.18/58, Executive Officer, European Agricultural Settlement Board, to Margetts, 8 September 1958. 70 MMH: EU.F.28/56, Janice Croft, Clinical Sheet: ‘Mental State’. 71 MMH: EU.M.4/57, Gareth Martin, Clinical Sheet: ‘History of Present Illness’. 72 MMH: EU.M.7/57, Gilbert Rowe to the Queen, 7 December 1956. 73 MMH: EU.M.7/57, Gilbert Rowe to Evelyn Baring, 7 December 1956 and 25 April 1957. 74 MMH: EU.M.7/57, Gilbert Rowe, Discharge Letter, Margetts to Dr S. Jackson, Nanyuki, 25 June 1957, ‘Recommendations’. 75 MMH: EU.M.6/47, Carothers to Jane Philips, International Refugee Organisation, 17 January 1948. 76 MMH: EU.M.6/47, Clinical Sheet, ‘History of Present Illness’. 77 Notably Stein remained at Mathari for over eighteen months not on the grounds that he was receiving appropriate treatment but because accommodation could not be found for him in Nairobi and nor could Stein’s removal out of Kenya be arranged. Although his delusions persisted during his time at Mathari, Carothers was firm in his view that they were due only to his continued incarceration and that recovery could only, therefore, be attained by his release. 78 MMH: EU.M.20/57, Dr Brown, European Hospital, to Margetts, 29 October 1957. 79 Ibid. 80 MMH: EU.M.20/57, Discharge Letter, 10 November 1957: ‘Signs and Symptoms on Admission’. 81 The document is ambiguous as to whether Dunnet did have sex with an African woman. It may have been the case that he did so and that his claims to have been bewitched were a way to exculpating guilt. 82 Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics; Peers, ‘Privates off Parade’. 83 See also the case files relating to Jasper Anderton: EU.M./6.57 and Paul Burroughs: EU.M.1/58. 84 MMH: EU.M.20/57, Discharge Letter, 10 November 1957: ‘Other Information and Medical History’. 85 MMH: EU.M.20/57, Discharge Letter, 10 November 1957: ‘Recommendations’. 86 MMH: EU.F. 22/54, Lunacy Case No /54, 10 November 1954. 87 MMH: EU.F. 35/43, Mr Bennett to Mathari Mental Hospital, 19 January 1943. 88 Ibid. 89 See for example, The East African Standard, Saturday 17 April 1909, p. 9; 1 May 1909, p. 9; 12 June 1920, p. 14; 19 June 1920, p. 13. 90 MMH: EU.F.25/57, Discharge Letter, 26 October 1957: ‘Other information and Medical History’. 91 MMH: EU.F.15/55, C. W. Thornton, handwritten report, 30 August 1955. 92 MMH: EU.M.13/56, Discharge Letter, 25 September 1956: ‘Course and Treatment in Hospital’.

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Conclusion

That the late colonial period in Kenya was a time of uncertainty and flux, coupled with the emergence of a violent nationalist movement, leads us to consider whether the evidence of mental illness among Europeans might attest to what might be loosely termed a collective nervous breakdown. It also returns us to Frantz Fanon’s work on psychiatric patients treated in Algeria during the war of independence, a conflict largely coincident with the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya. Violent resistance to colonial rule, in Kenya, Algeria and elsewhere, presented a dramatic assault upon the high hopes and grand illusions on which settler-colonialism depended.1 At no time in Kenya’s stormy past, Lonsdale has argued, was the future of Kenya more anxiously contested than in the years after the Second World War.2 Shibboleths that had once been held as self-evident were now exposed as fallible, if not altogether false. Barbara Dalton, a community development officer at Naivasha, admitted to the Mathari hospital in 1957, told doctors that she had ‘lost her humanitarianism’. ‘Instead of being out to help the Africans’, she said, ‘I wonder if I am beginning to hate them.’ ‘She is becoming rather disheartened in her work,’ doctors noted, ‘realising she cannot teach African women civilisation in one tour.’3 Empire now had lost its lustre. At the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi, the journalist John Gunther took the mood in the bar: I peeped into the big lounge. The tall white-robed waiters in their red fezes still served tea and pushed trolleys of sandwiches and cakes from table to table. But the people who sat at the tables no longer looked gay, idle chatterers. They had a grim and at the same time a bewildered look. They were like people whose comfortably upholstered universe has suddenly developed cracks.4

Examining the content of patients’ delusions in Kenya offers us insight into the nature of European society at this time. Delusions, [ 172 ]

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conclusion

however, did not merely replicate prevailing discourses describing Africa and Aficans in terrifying or terrified terms. The ‘native’ at the window with a knife in his teeth was fantasy, of course. Far more terrifying, if only for those judged to be deluded, was the porosity of what had always been so vigorously defended: those vital boundary lines separating European from African, colonisers from colonised. It was not solely the perceived threat of invasive Africans, however, but awareness that Europeans might themselves transgress their racial identities that characterised psychosis. In several cases, the ­experience of psychiatric confinement was itself combined with Mau Mau fears: for the woman who believed that Africans employed at Mathari were themselves Mau Mau agents, alarm at her own mental illness was sounded around prevailing idioms of ‘native’ insurrection. That a significant proportion of patients’ delusions concerned Mau Mau highlights the ambiguity of these records. The patient who believed that the workers he employed on his farm were Mau Mau may well have been right. What determined, therefore, that his belief was taken as evidence of illness? To believe that Mau Mau were active on settler farms was never, on its own, evidence of mental disturbance. Living, as Wendy Webster has described, in a state of siege, Mau Mau afforded Europeans the opportunity to demonstrate their courage and their commitment to the settler-colonial cause.5 But while ‘the European’ remained steadfast and unafraid, those who exhibited their fear were liable to be considered fit for treatment at Mathari. When doctors recorded on files ‘afraid of Mau Mau’ the inference is unclear: the patient might be paranoid – or perceptive. In either case, the evidence at Mathari might best be considered as the visible tip of a far larger hinterland. Mau Mau, we must contend, provoked fear and consternation as often as it induced steely nerves and British pluck. ‘Savage Africa’ we have to conclude, was more real than has previously been supposed, if only inasmuch as discourse had effect. Madness, however, was as prosaic as it was pathological. Very rarely did Europeans suffer mental illness in Kenya without also suffering from a range of other hardships. Precisely because hardship was the test of racial character, however, to suffer from their effects was to suffer twice. Every European in Kenya, as the wife of a senior administrator put it, inevitably represented ‘all that his country ­ should stand for’: individual failure could not be separated from national failure as well; alienation conveyed a double cost.6 In a situation in which the ability to dispel doubt, to withstand privation, to persevere and prosper itself had political significance, failing to do so was to know oneself – and to know that others saw you likewise – as having fallen short in a performative display that, if racial ideolo[ 173 ]

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gies were to be believed, should have proceeded smoothly of its own accord. Accounts of colonial hardship, while providing a welcome antidote to ‘brand Kenya’, remain rooted in the primitive conditions of the colony’s frontier phase. By the interwar years, so the logic goes, the dirty work of breaking land, of pegging out homes and putting down roots, was complete. Life in 1945, we might imagine, was incomparably more straightforward than it had been when the pioneers arrived fifty years before. Discomfort eased as development progressed and, as the colony grew to maturation, so the hazards of its early days became relics of the past. Replacing the hardships of the frontier, however, developed another set of contributing factors to European mental strain: the threat of Mau Mau and the strict imperative that Europeans conform to social norms chief amongst them. To argue that either European mental illness or social transgression increased over time remains problematic, not least because it is only when transgression or illness is constructed as such that it can be said to exist. Nor should one assume that instability, transience and failure were not features of colonial society before 1939, simply because the evidence by which to reconstruct the lives of the poor and the marginalised is so difficult to find. While it is indisputable that late colonial Kenya witnessed profound social and political upheavals, it is equally the case that marginal Europeans were anything but new. It was in the 1920s that the link had first been forcefully made between the need to uphold white prestige and the credibility of the settler rationale. The controversy that surrounded Indians’ claims for political enfranchisement in the 1920s made clear the connection between the pre-eminent political position of the Europeans and their supposedly unique ability to foster civilisation among ‘backward races’. The colourful characters sighted at the more fashionable Nairobi hotels raised eyebrows for the likes of Margery Perham but while disparaging dilettante farmers served to reiterate the need for conduct becoming of a civilising race, authorities were working hard behind the scenes to pre-empt a poor white problem from coming to pass. By the later 1940s, Kenya’s settlers had come to promote themselves less as trustees of Africans than as their (unequal) partners, but their claims were much the same. To deny political enfranchisement, not to Kenya’s Indians this time but to the country’s far greater African population, the mastery of the European had to be assiduously reasserted. It was an equation delicately hinged. ‘The European will have to prove his right to leadership,’ Huxley wrote in 1946, ‘just as the African will have to prove his fitness for citizenship.’7 The hope (or, as some might [ 174 ]

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say, the lie) was that both could be simultaneously entertained – that a commonality of interest could prevail and a future be envisioned with the country’s races going forward in progress together. In practice, the need to protect the Europeans’ pre-eminent political position required that the criteria by which Africans were excluded be repositioned. Africans may have fought for king and country but that did not mean necessarily that they had the enterprise and expertise to take their country on. What ‘the European’ possessed, it was suggested, that ‘the African’ still did not, was talent, technique and that training in civilisation that only they could now impart. It was in this peculiar context that the question of white insanity in late colonial Kenya must be viewed. As the European Welfare Society maintained in 1955, tackling the poor white problem had become necessary less for humanitarian reasons than ‘for the preservation of our good name and for the maintenance of our position as leaders’; to undergird, in other words, the dominant political position of Kenya’s white minority. That the problem was recognised as such suggests that the time in which Kenya’s ‘other whites’ could be debarred, deported or forgotten was coming to an end. Rather than positing that the extent of European mental illness in Kenya was on the rise, therefore, a more feasible proposition is that it was the nature of its apprehension that changed over time and with it the kinds of behaviour that were constituted as aberrant, inexplicable or strange. What was novel about late colonial Kenya was that the increased visibility of racial transgression coincided with a diminishing tolerance towards it. Because adherence to social norms was so important, moreover, those whose racial credentials were cast in doubt were liable to face irrevocable social marginalisation. The experience was uniquely impoverishing. Transgression was itself traumatic. From the Catholic priest appalled at ‘disgracing his cloth’ to those ‘dangerous’ women judged to be ‘loose’ or – worse – psychopathic, what the contents of the Mathari files indisputably show is the distress generated from the failure to approximate to the colonial ideal, a distress that was all the more grievous when that ideal was in critical demand. Failure by Europeans to embody their supposed racial superiority was undoubtedly detrimental to white prestige and theories of social control do go some way to making comprehensible the confinement of Europeans within the Mathari hospital and their removal from Kenya. Yet the limitations of social control theory unfold directly from the presumption that systems for securing conformity succeeded. By focusing on the ways by which conformity was achieved, historians risk underplaying the extent to which individuals operate not only beyond the control of state authorities but often out of sight as well. [ 175 ]

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If, moreover, racial identity was constituted by a sensitivity to the boundaries that enclosed it, at Mathari we find not only a failure to conform to protect these vaunted boundaries but a failure to appreciate that such boundaries existed at all. While it would be misplaced to find heroic resistance in the lives of Kenya’s ‘white insane’, to those alienated by the insistent claims of colonial discourse such failures present, nevertheless, something of a welcome disregard. The story of Anita Burkitt with which this book began is significant in part because it contains such a proximate positioning of the reality and the mythology of mental illness. Anita’s husband, we recall, was a leading exponent of the view that the tropical climate led to European degeneration. In the tropics, he insisted, Europeans were ‘exotic’: unless their natural disadvantage could be mitigated by all manner of palliatives and precautions, whites would inevitably face physical and mental deterioration. To wear protective clothing – the red spine pad, the topi – was only part of the equation. No less important were the mental accommodations that needed to be made. Whites wore the spine pads and the hats not because of their medical benefits (which were, of course, spurious) but to signal to each other (and to remind, if in doubt, themselves) that they were white. Whiteness, in this sense, conferred a racial frame of mind: to be white in Kenya was to be perpetually alert to the possibility that colonial boundaries might be transgressed – but confident also that the necessary protective measures were in place. While it is too much to say that Anita Burkitt’s illness resulted from her husband’s behaviour, there is something uncanny, nonetheless, about the coincidence of the two. That Roland Burkitt found in his wife’s otherwise inexplicable mental condition support for his own climatic theories renders Anita as scientific evidence, less sovereign subject. At no point in Gregory’s book is it mentioned that Burkitt was distressed at the demise of his wife. On the contrary, her illness was used as vindication for his medical claims. Burkitt’s climatic theories, moreover, demanded that there could only be one solution to the problem: Anita’s departure from Kenya for England, leaving Burkitt in Kenya where, as we know, he enjoyed a considerable public reputation. Anita’s death on the voyage back is in no way explicable by the evidence available but it does, nonetheless, chime with what we do know: that Anita’s subjectivity, for her husband and his biographer was irrelevant. Only if Europeans did emulate the European ideal was an interior, emotional realm allowed. Those whose behaviour deviated from this ideal were read, as Burkitt read his wife, not as ‘ordinary’ human beings but as species of phenomena. Tropical neurasthenia was just one of these, itself scientific code for the perennial shortfall [ 176 ]

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conclusion

between what it meant to be white in the colonial domain and what it meant to be human. In her work on the white insane in colonial India, Waltraud Ernst argued that it was not so much the Indian climate in its meteorological sense that upset Europeans but ‘the whole range of social and cultural trappings peculiar to their life in the East’.8 The evidence from Kenya takes us further. ‘White prestige’, John Lonsdale has written, was secured by ‘middle class emotional discipline’.9 Europeans, Kennedy argued, lived in a ‘straitjacket of conformity’. Again, it is too much to say that empire bred particular kinds of mental illness but what the lives of Kenya’s white insane do show up are the complex struggles that took place as colonisers lost hold not only of their mental bearings but their racial identity as well. The argument that in the settler colony the pressure to conform took a particular mental toll is difficult to support: nowhere in these files do we read of a European patient at Mathari telling doctors that it was the need to maintain white prestige that was driving him mad. It would be mistaken, however, to envisage the prestige imperative as totalising or all-encompassing. Rather, it is best imagined as dynamic and dispersed, animating both the subjectivity of colonial Europeans and the ways in which some among them were constituted as insane, not only by psychiatrists at Mathari but by the various individuals who encountered them before they found themselves officially designated as ‘of unsound mind’. To a great extent, the value of these histories is in the challenge that they present to the ideologically freighted archetype that was ‘the European’. Colonial culture in Kenya, it is important to note, did not avoid troublesome areas – sex, violence, poverty – but throughout the colonial period racial transgression was discursively policed. Even madness itself was incorporated into Kenya’s irreverent settler culture. In the most recent of the popular histories of the colony, Christine Nicholls includes the following account of the ‘eccentric’ Captain Dugmore, stationed at the turn of the century at Fort Elvira at Ngong: As a retired British military officer, [Dugmore] was put in charge of a detachment of Sudanese troops and sent upcountry to help garrison the forts. Hall and Russell did not take to him at all, for he was decidedly strange. Instead of walking a few paces to discuss matters face to face with his white colleagues, Dugmore would type them lengthy letters signed ‘Mugdore ye Looniac’ or ‘The Bloody Old Shit’. He sent to Mrs Martin an elephant foot as a delicacy for her table. To counter fleas, he soaked his pyjamas in paraffin before going to bed, which brought him out in boils all over his body. And when his pet monkey got into some of his belongings he gave it a sound flogging. ‘What the natives can think of him I don’t know’, said a despairing Edward Russell. He was seconded

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to Uganda, and when he returned to Fort Elvira he found he had been replaced by Captain William Cooke. After displaying signs of insanity he was sent to Machakos under the escort of Cooke, whom he shot dead at the Athi River. Arrested and sent to Mombasa for trial, he committed suicide by means of a bootlace. Dugmore was an example of the less than satisfactory personnel sometimes employed to guard the British empire overseas – men whose behaviour would not be tolerated at home.10

Here, Nicholls combines a light-hearted rendition of Dugmore’s eccentric behaviour with a more censorious admonition that behaviour that would not be tolerated at home was not sufficiently sanctioned overseas. In Kenyan white writing, irreverence worked as a disciplinary tool. To laugh at deviant behaviour was to prohibit the possibility of a deeper disquiet. While the image of the white man driven mad by the tropics has been associated with the early colonial period in Kenya, the language of degeneration, as we have seen, was still alive and well in the 1950s, testament less to the enduring power of eugenics (the eugenics movement in Kenya had largely faded from view by the outbreak of war in 1939), and more to the refusal of a settler society to contemplate, let alone tolerate, the reality of complex, difficult marginal lives.11 With limited resources at their disposal, colonial authorities too often had to lean on men – and women – of uncertain stock but the discursive archetypes – of the strapping pioneer, the uncomplaining housewife and the hale and hearty district officer – were all that Kenya Colony could, in every sense, afford. For others, there simply was no place. Yet the strapping pioneer and the other ideal types in the Kenya cast – the ‘poor white’ among them – were categories first of all and the challenge for the historian must remain to work beyond the limited realm of possibility that such typologies invoke. At base, the credibility of colonial rule rested on the character of the colonising self, the embodiment, male or female, of mastery and good order. Deviations from this ideal tarnished the sense and sensibility by which confreres in the colonial project took their own existential bearings. As for all those tens of thousands of people who neither ended up in Mathari nor immortalised their lives in print (the great bulk that is the historically invisible) we have to allow at least the possibility that colonial rule entailed, for whites as well as blacks, stress, jeopardy, doubt and alienation. The ‘poor white’ served mainly as a trope and the degenerate European, gone to seed in the tropics was a caricature above all; a rhetorical fire curtain behind which the messy complications of colonial hard-living were effectively concealed. Poor whites and neurasthenics, degenerates, down-and-outs and drunks provided the imaginative coordinates for confining these ‘other whites’ within manageable conceptual bounds. But between these [ 178 ]

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extremes – between the archetypes and their antonyms – were countless numbers of people, people whose stories have not been told and whose experiences of empire must remain undisclosed. This is not to say that there was anything inherent within the colonial situation that precipitated mental illness. Rather, it is to stress the marginalising force of an ideology embodied in the European ideal. That the boundaries separating white from black were vital for making sense of colonial rule is not to say that they were only seldom breached. The rule of racial difference was never more than imperfectly upheld. Insistence that Kenya’s Europeans perform their racial identity meant that those who did not were absented, not only from society at large but from the historical record as well. It was precisely this apparent absence, moreover, that explains the nature of the relationship between madness and marginality among Kenya’s colonial Europeans. The tragedy for Kenya’s white insane was, ultimately, the very fact of their denial.

Notes   1 See Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial End Game: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).   2 Lonsdale, Mau Maus of the Mind, p. 395.   3 MMH: EU.F.4/57, Dr. Henderson, Nairobi European Hospital, 11 February 1957; Discharge Letter, 10 April 1957: ‘Other Information and Medical History’.   4 Campbell, The Heart of Africa, p. 242.   5 Webster, Englishness and Empire, p. 130.   6 Hinde, Some Problems, p. 87.   7 Huxley, Settlers of Kenya, p. 126.   8 Ernst, Mad Tales From the Raj, p. 162.   9 Lonsdale, ‘Home County’, pp. 88–9. 10 Nicholls, Red Strangers, pp. 24–5. 11 Campbell, Race and Empire, p. 179. On the decline of tropical neurasthenia, see Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun, p. 135; Stepan, ‘Races and Proper Places’, pp. 114–15.

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a p p e n di x o n e

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Numbers of extant European case files, Mathari Mental Hospital, 1939–59

Year

Number of extant European case files

Minimum number of European patients admitted

1939

0

—

1940

2

36

1941

18

64

1942

16

90

1943

3

105

1944

11

154

1945

0

—

1946

7

29

1947

10

29

1948

13

50

1949

8

23

1950

6

48

1951

7

21

1952

1

4

1953

16

42

1954

14

49

1955

21

41

1956

28

50

1957

34

52

1958

30

49

1959 Total

3 248

35 971

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a p p e n di x TWO

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European Population of Kenya, 1911–63

Year

European population

1911

 3,200

1921

 9,700

1931

16,800

1948

30,800

1953

42,200

1956

54,000

1957

58,000

1958

59,000

1959

60,000

1960

61,000

1961

59,600

1962

56,000

1963

53,000

Source: D. A. Low and Alison Smith (eds), History of East Africa, Volume III (Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 578.

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a p p e n di x T H R EE

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List of European Degenerates, 1957

Commissioner for Police to Secretary of Defence, 19 March 1957 The Assistant Commissioner of Police, Criminal Investigation Department, reports that there is a considerable number of Europeans of both sexes in Kenya whose drunken and degenerate habits constitute an embarrassment. A list of the names of 21 persons of both sexes has been compiled whom it is considered should be inmates of an institution which you describe. A supplementary list containing 9 names of likely candidates for admittance in the near future to such an Institution has also been prepared. It is suggested that these figures indicate that the setting up of such an Institution is amply justified and desirable. (a) George Lewis Bryant – was formerly a manager of Whiteways – drank himself out of this position. Is unemployed, degenerate, living in Eldoret. (b) Austin George Murphy – formerly employed by Mr Plumb, Eldoret – drank all the profits and was discharged. Has three traffic offences in Antrim, Ireland, one of which involved manslaughter. Charged recently at Nakuru result not yet known. (c) Alfred Maclean – married to a Nandi woman – apparently dependent on his brother, Henry Maclean, a farmer in Eldoret, who is heavily in debt and faces liquidation of the farm – Alfred has one conviction for Theft Section 276 Penal Code in 1951. (d) Cornelius Wellman – Charged recently in Eldoret for creating a disturbance – believed now to have gone to Mombasa. (e) Harry Thomas Budgen – has one previous conviction for obtaining by false pretences and one for non-payment of wages – unemployed. Helped financially by the British Legion and European Social Welfare – drunkard and degenerate. (f) Sydney Arthur Francis Chivers – has ten previous convictions for vagrancy, forgery, theft, traffic ordinances and possession of HM Forces equipment. Frequents Nairobi. (g) Mrs Pat Ephraigm – Separated from her husband Philip Ephraigm and has had many jobs in Nairobi and Mombasa being discharged

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appendices

on account of her unreliability through drink. (h) Robert Lockhart Garvin (alias Paddy Garvin) aged about 71 years, is helped financially from time to time by Social Welfare. He is unemployed, spends his time in bars scrounging drink. (i) Mrs ‘Kay’ Gregson – separated from her husband Garth Gregson. A chronic alcoholic and was for a short while in Mathari. Sought employment at one time at EAR&H but was discharged after a few weeks. (j) Major E J Herbert – Aged early 50s. Ex City Council Engineer, habitual drunkard has had numerous jobs but is discharged for drunkenness. One previous conviction for drunk in charge of a vehicle. Separated from his wife. (k) Mrs Key Keyser – ex-wife of Major Keyser of Kitale – chronic alcoholic – has recently been released from Mathari where she was under voluntary observation due to suspected DTs. (l) Wilhelmus Johannes (Willy) Killian – has 7 previous convictions for obtaining by false pretences, unlawful use of a vehicle etc. – is drunk when he has enough money to drink. (m) John Marham – separated from his wife and five children. Recently smartened himself up and may now be employed. (n) Mrs Martha Knoble – separated from her husband, Tom Knoble. Morally loose. (o) Tom Knoble – Seven previous convictions under labour laws, game laws and theft etc. Recently charged but acquitted on a charge of defilement concerning two young girls. (p) Mrs Osborn – South African at present under supervision of the Probation Officer having been charged with being drunk and disorderly. (q) Kenneth Osborn – husband of (p) above – South African – degenerate. Information is that he is a pimp. (t) Clive Percival Taylor – Thirty-two previous convictions for theft, vagrancy, obtaining by false pretences, drunk and incapable, trespass etc. (s) John Robert Percival – At present on a charge of murder in Tanganyika, has charges outstanding in Nairobi for theft. (t) Alison Riley – alias Anne Macginn alias Anne Walker aged about 36 years. Was married to Riley who was 21 years old but they are now separate. Morally loose. (u) Rosemary Stewart-Prince – was previously Mrs Meyrick but has changed her name back to her maiden name Stewart-Prince. Has had many and varied jobs, was recently discharged from EAA. Frequents San Chique, Oriental and Railway Station Bars. The following is a list of Europeans who are likely candidates in the near future for access to the proposed institution. (a) Mrs Eleanor Allen – Separated from her husband ‘BA’ Allen, a chronic alcoholic. Has just been discharged from the last job for drunkenness.

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(b) Norman Hardwicke – on vacation leave pending retirement from the Income Tax Department – heavy drinker. (c) Mrs Mary O’Brien – always heavily in debt, of unsavoury reputation, frequents Nairobi and at present managing the Harcourt Guest House. (d) Mrs Betty Preston – ex wife of Ralph Preston, receives an allowance of £20 a month from Preston. Mrs Preston’s children are under care and protection. Has periodical bouts of drunkenness and is in and out of work. (e) Gordon Anthony Twohey – one previous conviction under 276 Penal Code (stealing by servant) – separated from his wife, previously employed by EAR&H – heavy drinker. (f) Richard Knud Bjorning – Dane – dismissed from Veterinary Services for drunkenness. Case pending before Nakuru Court (drunk in charge of a car and drunk in charge of a firearm). (g) Mary Van Vluten – immoral character – drunkard. (h) Frederick Martin – One previous conviction under Merchant Shipping Act (embezzling cargo) – living with European woman at Kisumu. Frequents Asian and African bars – in debt – heavy drinker.

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b ib l io gra p h y

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In de x

abortion 109 Africa as a site of madness 24–26, 32, 36 African landscape 32, 34, 151 alcohol 27, 116, alcoholism 55, 69, 70–2, 82, 87, 92, 113, 114, 119–23, 131, 137–8, 142, 167, 182–4 anti-psychotics 86, 94, 96, 123, 136, 144, 155 anxiety 1, 12–13, 30, 32–4, 38, 53, 92, 95, 122, 136, 153–4, 164 armed forces 67, 84, 91, 116, 119 see also counter-insurgency Barlow, Arthur 52, 55 black peril 129, 158 blackwater fever 30, 82, 93, Blixen, Karen 10, 12, 23, 75, 91, 117–18 Blundell, Michael 29, 66 Boedeker, Henry 52–3 Boyes, John 53 Burkitt, Roland and Anita 1–5, 18, 52, 111, 176 Carothers, Colin 139–40, 152, 168 Cleckley, Hervey, 144 climate 1– 5, 25, 30–1, 46, 59, 81, 176 Coetzee, J.M. 34 Cole, Berkeley 48, 51, 117 Cole, Galbraith, 32, 55 colonial condition 13, 28–30, 33–5, 40, 143, 167 colonial discourse 4, 7, 23–4, 30–6, 46, 107–8, 130, 151, 161–7, 173 Commissioner for Social Welfare 67–8 Conrad, Joseph, 26–7, 160 counter-insurgency 99, 158–61

Crewe circular 50 crime and criminality, 71 decolonisation 14, 67, 90, 95–6, 162–3 see also Mau Mau degeneration 2, 7, 25–7, 31, 45, 46, 69–73, 144, 176, 178 delusions 17, 81, 93, 123, 150–68 Denmark 65, 92, 94 deportation 8, 15, 54–6, 60–1, 68–9, 71, 73, 90, 120–1, 139, 154, 155, 159 depression 109, 120, 137, 138–9 see also melancholia deviance 7, 16, 31, 38, 45–6, 52–8, 73, 118, 137 Distressed British Subjects 8, 54 domestic service 50, 66, 161, 166 drugs 30 see also anti-psychotics dystopia 23–4 East African Standard 18, 61–2, 70, 133–4 East African Women’s League 63, 68, 70, 77 eccentricity 1, 46, 48–53, 57, 177–8 electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) 86, 94, 131, 155 Europeans in Kenya exemplars for African civilisation 37, 62, 174–5 image of 6, 16, 47, 49, 60, 106 in Kenya’s jails 60, 80, 88, 11 social profile 14–15, 64–6, 98 see also immigration European Welfare Society 69–73, 175 explorers 24, 26, 28, 47

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League of Mercy 61, 63, 67, 71 Lessing, Doris 12, 34 loneliness 12, 95, 110–12, 115, 141, 157

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family 17 absence of 28, 96, 108, 114–15, 120 conflict 66, 108–10, 114, 116 estrangement from 116–23, 138 ideal 106–8 role in admission 85, 110, 134 Fanon, Frantz 23, 34–5, 172 Federation of Social Services 70 femininity 2, 110 Fooks, Pelham 53–5 forest, symbolism of 32, 153, 158–60 Foucault, Michel 10, 39 friendship 47, 55, 115–16 frontier 29, 30, 45, 52 Germany 93, 94, 168 going native 2, 52 Greene, Graham 153–4 Grogan, Ewart 53 Happy Valley 57–60, 118 homosexuality 138–42 Huxley, Elspeth 33, 37, 49, 61, 62, 174 Huxley, Julian 60 hysteria 66, 86, 110, 129, 132, 154, 156, 162

malaria 29, 30, 52, 82, 93, 114, 121, Mathari Mental Hospital 5–6, 80–5 see also patient records Mannoni, Octave 34–5 masculinity 2, 3, 108, 113–18, 141, 161 Mau Mau 14, 16, 70, 118, 152–61, 172 see also counter-insurgency melancholia 139, 140, 156, mental patients profile of 82, 91–3 removal from Kenya 5, 81–2 miscegenation 129–30 missionaries 12, 24, 28, 51, 135, 138–41 Mombasa 53–4, 66, 67, 72, 80, 90, 93, 95, 114, 115–16 Nairobi 52, 58, 59, 60–1, 66–72 narrative 1, 7, 50, 84, 90–1 nerves 27, 33, 59–60, 156 Northern Frontier District 30, 115,

illness (somatic) 82, 93, 107, 115 immigration to Kenya 14–15, 58, 64 from India 15, 63, 67–8, 91, 92–3, 95–6, 121 from South Africa 88 limitations upon 2, 15, 70 Indian Lunacy Asylums Act 80 Institution for European Degenerates 71–3 itinerancy 92–3, 96, 114, 121 Jung, Carl Gustav 36 jungle 24, 27, 33, 152 Kenya Colony, image of 1, 5, 23, 46, 56

patient records 6, 8–9, 12, 14, 17, 82–90 patriarchy 108–13, 166–7 Perham, Margery 58–9, 174 police involvement with ‘poor whites’ 54, 61, 63, 71–2, 182–4 involvement in apprehension of mental illness 80–1, 97, 115–16, 121, 122, 134, 138 mental illness among 120 poor whites 2, 8, 29, 46–8, 58, 60–71, 94–100, 144, 149, 175, 178 poverty amongst ‘white insane’ 29, 94–8, 116–20, 122–3 prisoners-of-war 65–6, 84, 137 propaganda 16

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South Africa 45, 56 suicide 12, 30, 109, 112, 114, 142

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prostitution 71, 123, 132 psychopathy 12, 131–3, 135, 144–6 psychosis see delusions racism 25, 93–5, 98–9 racial contamination 35–6, 99, 132, 134–5, 141, 143 racial boundaries, transgression of 25–6, 29, 47–52, 55, 61, 72, 97–8, 115–16, 129–50, 164–7 railway, employment on 63, 114 refugees 15, 22, 65–6, 84, 93, 164 religion 155 see also missionaries remittance men 11, 53, 115–16 repatriation see deportation respectability 63, 119, 122–3, 143, and social exclusion 47, 68 safari 5, 58, 160 Said, Edward 9 Salvation Army, 8, 60–3, 68, 91, 132 Second World War 67, 84, 98, 137 settler culture 17, 26, 32, 37, 106 Shanghai 92 socialites 58–60 sex 17, 50–2, 129–46, 165–6 social control 13–14, 39–40, 58, 140, 175 Social Welfare Organisation 67 Soldier-Settlement scheme 58

Tanganyika 92 Taylor, Clive 70 temperance 106 tropical neurasthenia 27–8, 45 see also climate tourism 16 Uganda 65, 92 undesirables 15, 54 unemployment 64, 70, 95, 120 vagrancy 60–1, 71, 115 venereal disease 165 violence 11, 36, 50, 135, 158–74 domestic violence 109 welfare 67–73 absence of 61, 63, 96, 120 whiteness 9, 176 white prestige 2, 37–8, 46, 59, 62, 69, 118, 130, 140 witchcraft 161, 165 women as civilising agents 106–7 as wives 107 as racial symbol 108 neglect of 110–12 single white women 122–3, 131–5, 143–4

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