Unsettled States: Madness and Migration in Cape Town, c. 1920

Abstract

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, as many as half a million people sailed from the British Isles to southern Africa, a significant proportion of them with at least some idea in mind of permanent migration. Almost all of these travellers spent time in Cape Town, the principal entry point to the subcontinent not only for migrants but also for assorted soldiers, speculators, missionaries and colonial officials and a miscellany of transients for whom Cape Town represented just one episode within much wider itinerations across Africa, the southern hemisphere and the, so-called, ‘British world’. This chapter takes Cape Town in the early twentieth century as its setting to investigate the confluence of migration and mental health through an integrated analysis of psychiatric and non-psychiatric archival sources. By looking at the case files of mental patients alongside case files relating to other kinds of distressed British migrants, its aim is to place mental health—and its failing—in a wider social and historical context than an exclusive focus on mental illness can allow.