Imagining an Imperial Modernity: Universities and the West African Roots of Colonial Development

This article takes the formation and work of the ‘Elliot’ Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1943–45) to reconsider the roots of British colonial development. Late colonial universities were major development projects, although they have rarely been considered as such. Focusing particularly on the Nigerian experience and the controversy over Yaba Higher College (founded 1934), the article contends that late colonial plans for universities were not produced in Britain and then exported to West African colonies. Rather, they were formed through interactions between agendas and ideas with roots in West Africa, Britain and elsewhere. These debates exhibited asymmetries of power but produced some consensus about university development. African and British actors conceptualised modern education by combining their local concerns with a variety of supra-local geographical frames for development, which included the British Empire and the individual colony. The British Empire did not in this case forestall development, but shaped the ways in which development was conceived.     

Neurasthenia at Mengo Hospital,Uganda: A Case Study in Psychiatry and a Diagnosis, 1906–50

This article uses a case-study approach to examine the complex and contradictory nature of diagnoses like neurasthenia in colonial Africa. Drawing on the case notes of European and African patients diagnosed with neurasthenia at the Church Missionary Society's Mengo Hospital, Uganda, it argues that in practice, and outside the colonial asylum in particular, ideas about race and mental illness were more nuanced than histories of psychiatry and empire might imply. At Mengo, the tales of pain and suffering recorded by the doctors remind us that there is more to the history of neurasthenia than colonial anxieties and socio-political control. This was a diagnosis that was negotiated in hospital examination rooms as much as in medical journals. Significantly, it was also a diagnosis that was not always reserved exclusively for white colonisers—at Mengo Hospital from the early 1900s neurasthenia was diagnosed in African patients too. It became part of a wider discussion about detribalisation, in which a person's social environment was as important as race.     

Remapping land and remaking culture: memory and landscape in 20th-century South Africa

This article considers landscape ideas in relation to culture, language and power. The discussion is placed in the context of current debates – both popular and theological – on the topic of prophets, poets, politics and cultural practice. I argue that over the course of the previous century in South Africa, ideas of landscape have shifted the ways in which language, culture and power found expression. My focus is on the role of key cultural players in remapping land and remaking culture in the region of KwaZulu-Natal. Specifically, I explore the landscape ideas of the prophet Isaiah Shembe, who founded the Nazarite church in 1910, and the romantic poet B.W. Vilakazi. Shembe evoked a sacred landscape marked by holy mountains and other sites of importance connected through the prophet's personal religious journey. This landscape transgressed the boundaries of colonial spatial divisions, and evoked meanings considered subversive by the state. Holy mountains were places of revelation for the prophet; his life and vision were commemorated through annual pilgrimages to the summits. The sacred landscape mapped through the texts and memorial practices of the church drew on biblical, romantic and traditional African ideas. This landscape imagery and the memories it evokes have allowed for the creation of religious community in the context of the hardships, contestations and dispossessions of apartheid rule, and more recently in the uncertainties of the post-apartheid era.     

Nineteenth-century British psychiatric writing about homosexuality before Havelock Ellis: the missing story

Recent accounts of the emergence of sexology have addressed the role played by homosexuals and sexual radicals in framing the questions posed by psychiatrists. This work has focused largely upon American and Continental psychiatry (with regard to homosexuality), with attention to British sexologists sometimes being tied to contemporary feminist concerns with the sexual double standard. In both cases, psychiatrists are shown to be following other social movements. In the existing work, British psychiatrists of the nineteenth century who wrote about homosexuality have been largely ignored because it appears to have been assumed that very little material existed prior to Havelock Ellis' Sexual Inversion (1897). In this article, I demonstrate that there were a number of British psychiatric discussions of sexual perversions, and that these discourses show an engagement on the part of British psychiatrists with the theoretical issues that occupied their (mostly) Teutonic colleagues, rather than evidence of any other external driving force behind the production of sexological discourses. These sexological texts are either original papers, or reviews of Continental sources, both of which illustrate the importation of sexological ideas into Britain before the writing of Havelock Ellis.     

Contemporary French philosophy

Scholarship on the French Atlantic empire traditionally and uniquely focuses upon Africa as a source of slave labour for the American colonies. However, this article explores how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Africa emerged as a viable alternative for colonial expansion. Uncertainties about a colonial future in the New World directed French expansionist attention away from the Americas and towards the African continent, expanding its role beyond a source of labour. The intellectual underpinnings for a transfer of empire first surfaced within the Physiocratic School of political economy. The article examines the emergence of such ideas and their reception within the colonial administration of the Ancien Régime. It also shows how expansion into Africa became central to the imperial agenda of the first French Republic. Exploring Africa as a substitute to colonial America helps expand the lens through which Africa is examined as part of the Atlantic World. It also reveals continuities between Ancien Régime colonialism and later French republican imperialism.     

Aqui Lourenço Marques!! Radio colonization and cultural identity in colonial Mozambique, 1932–74

The Portuguese empire in Africa was one of the last to collapse amidst the waves of decolonization that swept the continent in the 1950s and 1960s. The astonishing endurance of Portuguese colonialisms until the mid-1970s can be viewed partly in relation to the communication technologies that underscored the Lusophone imperial presence in Africa in important cultural and political ways. This paper explores the historical geography of radio-broadcasting in colonial Mozambique and examines the importance of colonial anthropological knowledges in the formation of radio programming. Colonial broadcasters represented their work as «radio-colonization» and frequently stressed the links between their activities and the development of imperial and colonial modernity. From the very beginning of radio-broadcasting in Mozambique, broadcasters sought to harmonize their contribution to colonial culture and society with the objectives of the colonial state, and broadcasting became central to the capitalist development of the colony. In the dying days of Portuguese colonialism broadcasters belatedly began to attempt to assimilate non-white subjects into the perceived order of colonial modernization. Radio programming was differentiated in important ways according to ethnicity and gender and this paper seeks to discuss some of the complex relationships between colonial subjectivities and the search for the colonial modernization of Mozambique.     

Chiefs,hunters and adventurers: the foundation of the Okavango/Moremi National Park,Botswana

This article is about the politics of wildlife management in Botswana. The existing literature on the origins of wildlife conservation in Africa has portrayed the formation of protected areas as an imposition of colonial state authorities. Preservationist policies are usually cast as the product of European conservationist ideas, and related notions of the ‘wilderness’ value of African landscapes. Many recent studies have emphasized the negative effects of such ideas and policies in a colonial context: they have drawn attention to the way in which they devalued local African ideas, undermined local management strategies, and criminalized access to important economic and cultural resources. The case discussed here, however, suggests that this interpretation needs closer scrutiny: the meaning and impact of global ideas and policies of wildlife conservation depends on how they are localized in particular places. The key actors in the foundation of Botswana's Okavango/Moremi National Park in the 1960s were not state officials but local BaTawana chiefs and a network of hunters and adventurers turned conservationists. The initiative was conceived as a means of protecting wildlife from the depredations of illegal South African hunting parties and ensuring future local use, and was initially opposed by the colonial state. The article discusses why Okavango/Moremi was an exception, and why the initial coalition of African and local settler interests came to see preservationist policies as being in their interest.     

民族国家形成时期英国殖民思想的发展

在从中世纪封建社会向近代资本主义过渡的历史转折时期,即民族国家形成时期,英国殖民思想经历了一个从盲目到自觉、从感性到理性的发展过程。殖民思想与民族国家思想合流,是英国民族意识觉醒的反映,对英国海外殖民扩张活动产生了积极影响,它们共同推动着海上活动的蓬勃发展。托马斯·莫尔从人文主义道德观出发,提出建立海外殖民地的最初设想。理查德·哈克卢伊特是英国早期最重要的发现史学家,他为英国的北美殖民活动进行辩护。在海外殖民扩张问题上,弗朗西斯·培根竭力赞成英国拓展海外殖民地,建立新英格兰帝国。     

The military, psychiatry, and "unfit" soldiers, 1939-1942

This article examines the psychiatric screening of U.S. soldiers during the Second World War, established by psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), as a key moment in the public application of clinical psychiatry, as well as a turning point in Sullivan's intellectual and professional career. After a brief look at the ideas and expectations Sullivan brought to the screening system, I discuss a major problem of the screening: the mismatch between the medical concept of disease prevention and the realities of the mass screening as a public policy. As a way to highlight this mismatch, I focus on Sullivan's failure to protect homosexual men from medical and social stigmatization by screening them out of the armed forces. Despite his liberal approach to the issue of homosexuality before the war, which he had created in his clinical practice, Sullivan was unable to persuade the military and the public of gay men's right to serve the nation. The examination of how his sympathetic view of homosexuality became circumscribed reveals not only the gap between clinical insights and public policy, but also how tentative views of homosexuality in public debate among liberal psychiatrists during the decade preceding the war contributed to the failure to make non-homophobic policy in the 1940s. This article shows that the relative conservatism in the politics of sexuality among liberal psychiatrists, as well as the intransigent conservatism as seen in homophobic tradition of the Army, contributed to the discriminatory screening criteria.     

CONSTRUCTION SACRIFICE,RUMORS AND KIDNAPPING SCARES IN MANGGARAI: FURTHER COMPARATIVE NOTES FROM FLORES

R.A. Drake in Oceania (59:269–79) analyzed rumor panics in Borneo about the purported need for children's heads in concrete construction initiated by the state, as a form of ideological warfare. These rumors are ways of dealing with ambiguous situations and expressions of anxiety. The plausibility of these rumors, he argues, lies in the experience that tribal Borneo has had with state governments, most particularly during colonial times when head-hunting activities were suppressed. The present article looks at a similar rumor complex found in the district of Manggarai in Western Flores within a different cultural and historical context. Manggarai rumor panics center on European missionaries who have been in their region since the beginning of the century and who have been responsible for most of the concrete construction there. This rumor expresses the Manggarai's ambivalence towards foreigners which may be particularly understood, also, in light of their experience with slave-raiders up to the beginning of this century.     

The transatlantic Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the nineteenth century

Since the 16th century, African Muslims figured prominently among the slave population of the Americas. While the number of Muslims pulled into the trade has always been a matter of speculation, lists of Africans rescued from slave ships provide us with some clues about the size and direction of the Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the 19th century. Based on an analysis of tens of thousands of names recorded in these lists, this essay argues that the majority of Muslim captives leaving Africa departed from Upper Guinea and suggests that Cuba was the center of the forced Muslim diaspora in the Americas. It traces the transatlantic links that connected particular regions of embarkation in Africa to their counterparts in Latin America and considers the implications of those connections for religious and cultural change within 19th-century slave populations. The essay challenges in important ways the colonial/postcolonial divide in Latin American history and uses Islam to pose important questions about the dynamics of social change across slave societies.     

'The Body Evidencing the Crime': Rape on Trial in Colonial India, 1860–1947

The history of rape on trial in colonial India sheds new light on the colonial civilising mission and the claims made by white men about saving brown women from brown men. Through an analysis of almost a century of case law, this article concludes that the modernisation of law and the development of a new medico-legal understanding of rape introduced evidentiary standards that placed a heavy burden on Indian women seeking judicial remedy in colonial courts. The fear imported from Britain of false charges combined with colonial views about Indian culture to make native female complainants doubly dubious. The colonial jurisprudence has survived to devastating effect in postcolonial India and Pakistan in ways that are explored and explained by the author.     

‘Garden City’ in the tropics? French Dakar in comparative perspective

The aim of this article is to examine the transmission of garden city notions into the colonial context by focussing on French Dakar, a key site of colonisation in West Africa. Although there is an abundance of literature on the diffusion of urban ideas in general and garden city notions in particular, publications about extra-European planning history, especially in the formerly colonised territories and sub-Saharan Africa, are scant. The article analyses the conception and communication of garden city schemes from late nineteenth-century Britain to early twentieth-century France in terms of cité-jardin applications within the colonial urban sphere of French West Africa. It will also be shown that in interwar Dakar, the practical and terminological usages of the cité-jardin served mainly to create a prestigious image for the designated residential quarters of administrative employees. As a result, unofficial class segregation within the expatriate society was enforced as was unofficial racial segregation between the colonisers and the colonised.     

On the Coloniality of “New” Mega-Infrastructure Projects in East Africa

This article responds to a preference for short-term history in research on the infrastructure turn by engaging with the longue durée of East Africa’s latest infrastructure scramble. It traces the history of LAPSSET in Kenya and the Central Corridor in Tanzania, revealing the coloniality of new and improved transport infrastructure along both corridors. This exercise demonstrates how the spatial visions and territorial plans of colonial administrators get built in to new infrastructure and materialise in ways that serve the interests of global capital rather than peasant and indigenous peoples being promised more modern, prosperous futures. The article concludes by suggesting that a focus on the longue durée also reveals uneven patterns of mobility and immobility set in motion during the colonial scramble for Africa and reinforced after independence. These “colonial moorings” are significant as they shape political reactions to new mega-infrastructure projects today and constrain the emancipatory potential of infrastructure-led development.     

Science, gender, and the emergence of depression in American psychiatry, 1952-1980

Between the first (1952) and the third (1980) editions of psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, depression emerged as a specific disease category with concrete criteria. In this article, I analyze this change over time in psychiatric theory and diagnosis through an examination of medication trials and category formation. Throughout, I pay particular attention to the ways in which psychiatrists and researchers invoked science in their clinical trials and disease theories, as well as the ways in which gender played an important but largely unspoken role in the formation of a category of depression.     

‘Demonstrating the Machine Guns’: Rebellion,Violence and State Formation in Early Colonial Darfur

Recent literature on British colonial rule in Africa has increasingly emphasised the ways in which relatively cautious colonial states were formed in processes of engagement and accommodation with local societies. This article uses the example of a major rebellion against colonial authority in southern Darfur in 1921 to demonstrate the ways in which these processes of local engagement might themselves feed into rebellion against state authority, rather than secure colonial rule. The rebellion was inspired by Mahdist millenarian belief, but the involvement of local societies in both the rebellion and its repression was also shaped by patterns of local rivalries into which the colonial state had entered as an additional actor. The article also reminds us, more broadly, that spectacular violence and local accommodation were not distinct modes of colonial governance but rather continually intertwined in processes of colonial state formation.     

“There are mentalities that need changing”: Constructing personhood,formulating citizenship,and performing subjectivities on a settler colonial frontier

Settler colonial nations are sites of legal pluralism in which encounters between differing constructions of citizenship are formulated. These can involve customary, differentiated, and universal modes of citizenship. But the relationships amongst these are problematic, as are the ways they play out in the performance of subjectivities. To understand these dynamics, we need to think about ideas of personhood that are at their root. Based on research in Nunavik, this article focuses on how, through wildlife management, notions of personhood are being legally codified, particularly in relation to property. It examines the degree to which official ideas of personhood coincide with Indigenous ones in the construction of citizenship, and considers how these combine with property relations in the performance of subjectivities. Enforcing state wildlife regulations has altered the moral codes that define what persons are and determine how they should interact with one another. This research underscores the contradictions that arise as a result of codifying notions of personhood and citizenship in the context of settler colonialism.     

Bad blood: poverty, psychopathy and the politics of transgression in Kenya Colony, 1939-59

This article examines the inter-relationship between psychiatry and sex, both fertile fields within the recent historiography of colonialism and empire. Using a series of case files pertaining to European patients admitted to the Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi during the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how sexual transgression among colonial Europeans precipitated, and was combined with, mental distress. Considering psychiatric treatment as a form of social control, the article investigates a number of cases in which a European patient had been perceived to have transgressed the normative sexual behaviour codes of settler society in Kenya. What these files suggest is that transgressive sexuality in Kenya was itself framed by indices, as insistent as they were uncertain, of gender, race and class. While psychiatry as social control has some degree of purchase here, more valuable is an attempt to discern the particular ways in which certain forms of sexual behaviour were understood in diagnostic terms. Men who had sex with Africans, we see, tended to be diagnosed as 'depressed' on arrival at the hospital but were judged to be mentally normal consequently. Women, by contrast, were liable to be diagnosed as psychopathic, a diagnosis, I argue, that helped to explain the uniquely transgressive status of impoverished European women living alone in the margins of white society. Unlike white men, moreover, women did not have to have sex with non-Europeans to transgress sexual codes: this is because female poverty was a sexual problem in a way that male poverty decidedly was not. Poor white women were marked by uncertainty over their sexual behaviour—and dubious racial identity in its turn—and the problem of social contamination was described by reference both to the polluted racial ancestry of an individual and to the prospective contamination of healthy racial stocks. This article aims to address current historical debates around sex and empire, 'white subalternity' and the social history of psychiatry and mental health. All names have been changed to protect patient anonymity.     

‘It Was Necessary to Do Something With Those Women’: Colonial Governance and the ‘Disposal’ of Women and Girls in Early Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone

The colonial archive offers comparatively few glimpses of the individual lives of enslaved African women and girls brought to Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century and ‘liberated’ under the terms of the British Abolition Act of 1807. This article sets out to do four things: first, to consider what colonial sources reveal about how women and girls experienced and responded to becoming ‘liberated Africans’, and to the ‘disposal’ practices of the Liberated African Department – including schooling, indenture and arranged marriages. Second, it considers what factors might have shaped those experiences. Third, it seeks to make a contribution to the literature on marriage in early colonial Africa by considering whether, and to what extent, British colonial policy towards liberated African women in Sierra Leone meets a modern definition of government-led coerced or forced marriage. Finally, it evaluates the usefulness and limits of official archives, missionary records, court records and the accounts of self-styled British Sierra Leone experts for studying the experiences of women and girls, and indicates potential avenues for further research.     

Performing a cure for schizophrenia: insulin coma therapy on the wards

Most historians of psychiatry regard insulin coma therapy (ICT) either as an embarrassing stumble on the path to modern biological psychiatry or as one member of a long line of somatic therapies used to treat mental illness in the mid-twentieth century. This article explores the ICT era, roughly 1933-60, as a key moment in the development of American psychiatry. Developed only ten years after insulin had been embraced as a "miracle drug" for the treatment of diabetes, ICT was perceived by psychiatrists as a means of bringing their field closer to mainstream medicine, particularly to neurology. In addition, the story of ICT reveals how a treatment never quite proven on paper was unquestionably efficacious in the local world in which it was performed. An institutionally-based treatment, ICT was administered in a specific area of the mental hospital deemed the insulin unit, a room with its own staff, practices, and attitudes toward mental illness. There, psychiatrists often experienced wondrous recoveries of individual, formerly intractable patients. These intense personal experiences allowed psychiatrists to feel truly efficacious, enabling them to reinvent themselves as medical doctors rather than behavioral and disciplinary supervisors. The confidence they derived from this capacity, along with the operating room-like setting of the insulin unit, the unit's specialized staffing and group bond, and the availability of both risk-assessment tests and a medley of treatments that countered side effects and complications, allowed ICT to be understood as an efficacious treatment for schizophrenia within the local world in which it was administered.