Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Will Jackson is Lecturer in Imperial History at the University of LeedsWith this insightful and sensitive analysis of Europeans incarcerated for mental illness in colonial Kenya, Will Jackson manages not only to reclaim these troubled, marginalized individuals as historically meaningful actors. He also casts a fresh and revealing light on the settler community as a whole. The result is a strikingly original and important contribution to the scholarship on settler colonialism.|The self-disciplined effort to sustain imperial prestige did not inevitably send Kenya's white settlers mad – just as the constraints of subjection did not necessarily madden Africans. But ordinary human weaknesses – financial, social, or sexual – did seem especially dangerous to an anxious white minority. The documented confinement of their 'poor men and loose women' has enabled Jackson, in this carefully observed and beautifully written study, to portray Kenya's settlers in the round. Not all were libidinous aristocrats swapping wives in Happy Valley, nor all gentleman farmers pioneering under the flame trees of Thika.
- .,
General Editor's introduction
Introduction
1. Approaching madness: deviant psychology in Kenya Colony
2. No ordinary chaps: class, gender and the licensing of transgression
3. The lives of Kenya’s white insane
4. Battered wives and broken homes: the colonial family
5. Stigma, shame and scandal: sex and mental illness
6. States of emergency: psychosis and transgression
Conclusion
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
Kenya Colony, for the British at least, has customarily been imagined as a place of wealthy settler-farmers, expansive panoramas and the adventure of safari. Yet for the majority of Europeans who went there life was very different. Based on over two hundred and fifty psychiatric case files, this book offers an unprecedented new account of the social history of reputedly Britain’s most picturesque overseas colony.
While Kenya’s romantic reputation has served to perpetuate the idea that Europeans enjoyed untroubled command, this volume illustrates powerful stories of conflict, immiseration, estrangement and despair. Europeans who became impoverished in Kenya or who transgressed the boundary lines separating coloniser from colonised subverted the myth that Europeans enjoyed a natural right to rule. Any deviation from the settler ideal was politically problematic, and Europeans who failed to conform to the collective self-image were absented, from the colony itself in the first instance and latterly from both popular and scholarly historical accounts.
This book brings into view the hardships of Kenya’s white insane and makes for an imaginative and intellectual engagement with realms of human history that were previously suppressed by colonial ideologies. By tracing the pathways that led an individual to the hospital gates, it shows the complex interplay between madness and marginality in a society for which deviance was never intended to be managed but comprehensively denied.