ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that colonial asylum spaces spoke directly to colonisers’ anxiety about the violence of colonialism itself, and became an institutional architecture within which a constant, never entirely successful process of purification was undertaken. Were colonial asylums a kind of emotional laundry in which the detritus of imperialism itself could be taken in, cleaned, and sorted? Classifications of lunatics became more refined, and asylums more efficient in separating one category of person from another, but this only sharpened the vision of encroaching disorder, the threat of attack from that quintessential other, the demeaned, disempowered, but nonetheless violent colonised subject. Dr Samuel Bailey received a piece of land on what were then the outskirts of Cape Town. In the history of Cape Colonial asylums, as with asylums the world over, space chosen is on the periphery, the edge, out of sight.
