ABSTRACT
Histories of madness in Africa are frequently histories of colonizer encounters with mentally suffering colonial subjects, already deemed "other" by virtue of their racial, social and cultural difference to the ruling classes. In terms of treatment, colonial psychiatry across Africa was poorly resourced and dealt only with individuals unassimilable into ordinary society regardless of how madness was locally perceived and described. Psychiatric interventions in Africa were too small scale to constitute any form of social engineering or interference in locally constructed sets of cultural practices. Nonetheless, psychiatric knowledge imported from Western settings was deeply complicit in reproducing whiteness as both normative and "civilized", with deviations from this as abnormal, "primitive" and always close to the threat of breakdown, incapacity, irrationality, savagery, or violence. Throughout the nineteenth century, provision of care for those afflicted with mental illness in colonized Africa was piecemeal and responsive primarily to the needs of colonizer populations.
