Short Abstract

This panel addresses the connections and disruptions in the relationship between mental illness, medicine, and patients' illness narratives and experiences in Colonial Africa. In particular, we aim to reveal the contestation around these relationships with the wider political and moral economies.

Long Abstract

Recent and innovative contributions by medical anthropologists and historians on the ordinary lives of patients and their families, on their affective, emotional and subjective worlds, have re-centred our understanding of the connections and disruptions between mental illness, the patients' efforts at self-making and their relationship with wider moral and political economies. As Jenkins (2004) suggests, values manifest in psychosis, are not only alive in the experience of patients, families and medical practitioners but are inseparable from the contested values in the political and moral economies that support them. This panel aims to build on these theoretical insights, by addressing questions of continuity and change in medical interventions, in the patients' shifts at coherence and self-making in relation to the political and moral economies of colonial Africa. While the links between colonial psychiatry and racism figure prominently in histories of the diagnosis, treatment and institutionalisation of the mentally ill in Africa, there is an absence of patient-centred accounts, in the analysis of the efforts of the colonial-era subjects themselves to be pro-active not merely as 'the mentally ill', by clinical or court definition, but as persons embedded in social relationships with their kin and significant others. Moreover, despite an emerging scholarship, little is known of the European settlers's experiences and narratives of mental illness. In focusing on the illness' experiences and narratives of colonial subjects, Africans and Europeans alike, this panel will reveal the connections and disruptions between mental illness, medicine and the moral and political economies of colonial Africa.