The Microphysics of Power: Mental Nursing in South Africa in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Over the last decade, historians have transformed our understanding of the racialised and gendered order of the asylum in southern Africa and of colonial psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Based on government and institutional documents, the writings of colonial psychiatrists, case histories and hospital registers, much of the small but growing body of recent work has been profoundly influenced by Foucault’s understanding of the nature of power in the clinic and the asylum, and has examined the contradictions between the universalist discourse of European medicine, colonial psychiatric theory, and colonial asylum practice.3 It has argued powerfully that in South Africa the discipline of psychiatry ‘played a key role in legitimising … [a range of] interventions’ to ‘confine, regulate and control disordered and deviant behaviour that might pose a threat to [white] society’.4 Through psychiatric classification, it is alleged that patients were stripped of their identity.5 At the same time, as racial, class and gender hierarchies were entrenched in the asylum by medical superintendents who were in the mainstream of contemporary scientific thinking, their theories of the undeveloped and primitive nature of ‘the native mind’ served to legitimate colonial racism.