Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908–1968

by Lynette A. Jackson

Focusing on the history of the Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum (renamed a mental hospital after 1933), situated near Bulawayo in the former Southern Rhodesia, Surfacing Up explores the social, cultural, and political history of the colony that became Zimbabwe after gaining its independence in 1980. The phrase "surfacing up" was drawn from a conversation Lynette A. Jackson had with a psychiatric nurse who used the concept to explain what brought African potential patients into the psychiatric system. Jackson uses Ingutsheni as a reference point for the struggle to "domesticate" Africa and its citizens after conquest. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Jackson maintains that the asylum in Southern Rhodesia played a significant role in maintaining the colonial social order. She supports Fanon's claim that colonial psychiatric hospitals were repositories for those of "indocile nature" or for those who failed to fit "the social background of the colonial type." Through reconstruction and reinterpretation of patient narratives, Jackson shows how patients were diagnosed, detained, and deemed recovered. She draws on psychiatric case files to analyze the changing economic, social, and environmental conditions of the colonized, the varying needs of the white settlers, and the shifting boundaries between these two communities. She seeks to extend and enrich our understanding of how a significant institution changed the way citizens and subjects experienced the colonial social order.

Paperback

First published July 1, 2005

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ingutsheni Mental Hospital was founded in 1908 in Bulaywo in a colony called Southern Rhodesia, now in the present-day country of Zimbabwe. The Ingutsheni Mental Hospital, which until 1933 was known as Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum, was the first asylum in the colony and the hospital still exists today. The Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum is the subject of an excellent book about the Ingutsheni Mental Hospital called Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908-1968 by Lynette A. Jackson, published in 2005. Lynette A. Jackson is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jackson is interested in how the Ingutsheni Mental Hospital reinforced the colonial state in the colonial era of Zimbabwean history. She draws heavily on Frantz Fanon. The Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum was first built to house the mentally ill who were a danger to society, who could not be managed by their family or ran afoul of the colonial government or had nowhere else to go. The original institution covered the mentally ill from all over British Central Africa (present-day Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi) and would remain the biggest mental hospital in that region of Southern Africa until 1964. Jackson does not argue that the patients within Ingutsheni were not mentally ill but that many of the patients found themselves in the institution due to a situation created by colonialism. The book, Surfacing Up by Jackson is a well-done study of Ingutsheni Mental Hospital in the Colonial era of Zimbabwean history.