“Segregated Spaces” Colonial mental health and associated health practices in Rhodesia 1890-1980

Abstract

Colonialism in Africa left a dark space more than what it had sought to extinguish from the continent, especially in Southern Rhodesia. Colonial practices of segregation were the most gruesome and inhumane practices Africans were ever subjected to by such systems of governance. Of interest was how segregation perfected the art of subalternity and relegated Africans to the lowest rung of society and dependence on the European system and not their own. Looking from a post-colonial lens, the paper traces how medical institutions became a battleground for proving master-servant relationships between African and European. Such a proving ground was clear in colonial psychiatry as it became a systematic tool that colonised the minds of an already vanquished and abused people through inhuman practices and treatment. The paper explores the institution of psychiatry practice and how it perfected colonial political administrative ambitions of servitude of Africans through denigration of African principles of healing, the person, beliefs, and healing systems. It utilises the subalternity principle to analyse the systems of European segregative practices and how they undermined the African through segregated practices and how these in turn affected indigenous medical and psychiatric beliefs Africans had in their own systems, in turn illustrating resistance of the newly adopted systems through the institution, healing, spirituality and the individual.