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Paper short abstract:

In using archival sources, the paper will explore the ways in which the illness narratives of German settlers in German South West Africa reveals the moral and political economies of the colonial world.

Paper long abstract:

While the links between colonial psychiatry, racism, and oppression figure prominently in histories of the diagnosis, treatment and institutionalisation of the mentally ill in colonial 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 (Parle 2007; Swartz 1995; Wilbraham 2014), little is known of the experience of European settlers in the colonies. In this sense there is a need for a more balanced representation, one that shows the ambivalence of colonial psychiatry and its reach into the lives of the colonial subjects, Africans and Europeans alike. By focusing on the personal narratives of German colonial settlers in German South West Africa and of their efforts to escape diagnosis and institutionalisation, this paper will explore the ways in which supposedly delusional talks, far from being delusional, are often subversively political revealing the complex moral and political economies of the colonial world. In particular I will focus on the questions of change in the perception of medical interventions, shifts in the efforts at coherence and self-making as well as the complex issues of the political and moral economies of the colonial world (Good 2012; Martin 2009).