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Abstract
Histories of the institutionalisation of the mentally ill in southern Africa have largely emphasised the power and perspectives of state officials, including psychiatrists, medical doctors, magistrates, and police. This article considers, however, the involvement of family members in determining when kin were in need of confinement by reason of madness. It argues that while police and state officials remained the major conduits through which patients were brought to mental hospitals, in many cases the initiative of family members in having a person committed can be discerned in a close reading of the official committal papers. Definitions of madness were, therefore, in some instances, dialectical and negotiated, rather than simply a form of ‘state social control from above’. Second, and as an early contribution to the emerging studies of ‘emotional communities’ or ‘emotional cultures’ and ‘the family’ in southern Africa, the paper suggests that by observing the expanding range of reasons being put forward by family members in initiating, supporting or challenging the certification of insanity we have an opportunity to glimpse aspects of the emotional worlds of families in South Africa in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.
Acknowledgements
This article has received feedback and valuable comments from a large number of people. While the subject matter defies easy interpretation or neat narratives, it has gained a great deal from all the critiques, including from several anonymous reviewers. In particular, I would like to thank Joscelyn Cumming for research assistance, and Susanne M. Klausen and Sally Swartz for their detailed, thoughtful and constructive engagement and support.
Notes
1. Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository (PAR), Registrar of the Supreme Court (RSC) 1/27/12 R. 19/1920, Committal and Further Detention Papers of Matilda Mbangambi, Isigogo, Matatiele District, 23 January 1920.
2. The literature on colonial psychiatry and mental hospitals in Africa is now too extensive to be cited in an essay of this length and only those works directly relevant to this article are referred to here. For wider review see ‘Introduction’ in J. Parle, States of Mind: Searching for Mental Health in Natal and Zululand, 1868–1918 (Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press, 2007).
3. R. Edgar and H. Sapire, African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet (Athens, OH & Johannesburg: Ohio University Press, 1999), 37–39; and L.A. Jackson, Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908–1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), esp. 12.
4. A. Butchart, The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body (London: Zed Books, 1998), esp. Ch. 7.
5. T.F. Jones, ‘“Dis-Ordered States”: Views about Mental Disorder and the Management of the Mad in South Africa, 1938–1989’ (PhD thesis, Queen's University, Canada, 2004), 18.
6. In 1910 South Africa had eight state asylums (one in each province, except for the Cape, which in 1910 had five). The number of patients rose from 3,624 in 1910 to 9,684 in 1929. In Natal in 1929 there were 1,311 patients. By 1944, South African state mental hospitals had 12,843 beds, but 15,593 persons, to accommodate. In Natal and Zululand in the early 1900s the percentage of the population kept as mental patients or legally defined as being insane, was 0.05 per cent. In 1945 there were just under 11.5 million South Africans, and 15,791 patients in mental hospitals (0.13 percent of the population). In 1940, about 50 medical practitioners were officially working in mental hospitals in South Africa, and there were only 26 registered psychiatrists. These numbers further declined during World War II, and during the apartheid years: UG 18 1931 Report of the Commissioner for Mental Hygiene; and Jones, ‘Dis-Ordered States’, Appendix A ‘Numbers of Beds vs Number of Patients in State Mental Hospitals, 1939–70’, reproduced at p. 4 of the recent revision and publication of her work as Psychiatry, Mental Institutions, and the Mad in Apartheid South Africa (New York & Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).
7. Biological or medical factors that may have resulted in psychiatric conditions and thus affected admittance rates would include, for instance, the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918, which was followed by an increase in insanity and in suicide rates in several countries. See K. Kristensson, ‘Avian Influenza and the Brain: Comments on the Occasion of Resurrection of the Spanish Flu Virus’, Brain Research Bulletin, 68 (2006), 406–413. See Parle, States of Mind, 113–119 for discussion of syphilis, alcoholism, cannabis, and other material factors that underlay the physiological causes of insanity.
8. PAR, RSC, 1/27/12 R. 19/1920, Matilda Mbangambi.
9. PAR, RSC, 1/27/12 R. 19/1920, Matilda Mbangambi.
10. For example, J. McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and ‘The African Mind’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13; J. Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press 1999), 55, 60; K. Ngalamulume, ‘Classify and Sequestrate: The Regulation of Madness in Saint-Louis du Sénégal, 1890–1914’, in P. Viterbo and K. Ngalamulume, eds, Medicine and Health in Africa: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (East Lansing and Munster: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 166; W. Jackson, Madness and Marginality: The Lives of Kenya's White Insane (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
11. J. Sadowsky, ‘The Social World and the Reality of Mental Illness: Lessons from Colonial Psychiatry’, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, July/August (2003), 212.
12. P.E. Prestwich, ‘Family Strategies and Medical Power: “Voluntary” Committal in a Parisian Asylum, 1876–1914’, in R. Porter and D. Wright, eds, The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 98, citing N. Tomes, ‘The Anatomy of Madness: New Directions in the History of Psychiatry’, Social Studies of Science, 17 (1987), 358. ‘Post-Foucaultian’ in the sense of drawing on Foucault's immense contributions to the histories of madness and the state, but nuancing his insights with local studies that find little empirical evidence of a ‘Grand Confinement’ of the mad in the modern era. See also Parle, States of Mind, Ch. 4; and Jones, Psychiatry, 73–80.
13. Jones, Psychiatry, xx, 3.
14. Ngalamulume, ‘Classify and Sequestrate’, 158, quoting Roy's Porter, ‘Introduction’, in Porter and Wright, The Confinement of the Insane, 4.
15. C. Coleborne, ‘Families, Patients and Emotions: Asylums for the Insane in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, c. 1880–1910’, Social History of Medicine, 19, 3 (2006), 427.
16. Again, the history of ‘the family’ and familial emotions is too vast to be précised here: two useful overviews of the literature (which is largely focused on the West), though separated by two decades, are a Review Article by J.W. Scott, ‘The History of the Family as an Affective Unit’, Social History, 4, 3 (1979), 509–516, and S. Coontz, ‘Historical Perspectives on Family Studies’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 62, 2 (2000), 283–297.
17. For an excellent overview of the theoretical literature and for important contributions to the history of one emotion (romantic love) in Africa see J. Cole and L.M. Thomas, eds, Love in Africa (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009). ‘Emotionology’ – the study of changing ‘emotional standards’ – was popularised by Peter N. and Carol Z. Stearns in the mid-1980s.
18. See B.H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying About Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review, 107, 3 (2002), http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.3/ah0302000821.html.
19. This phrase is from the Form ‘Mental S. 1, Application for a Reception Order’ “I am (insert degree of relationship, if any, or words “not related”) to the said person, and this request is made by me because* (*Insert “because I am, the husband, wife, or near relation,”, or, if applicant is not a near relative, state why request is made by the applicant instead of by the husband, wife, or near relation) [or, in pursuance of Section 10, or Sections 45 (3), or 52 of the above-mentioned Act].
20. S. Swartz, ‘Colonial Lunatic Asylum Archives: Challenges to Historiography’, Kronos, 34 (2008), 285–302.
21. There is no fixed identity of ‘the family’ much less a pre-determined trajectory for its changing productive, reproductive and social identities and roles in ‘Africa’ or anywhere. Nonetheless, as Marks and Rathbone observed as far back as 1983 a general trend towards the ‘undermining of the authority of family heads and chiefs and a fall in the size of settlement groups’ can be discerned in southern Africa in the twentieth century. Quoting Jack Goody they note that one of the consequences of ‘the process whereby kinship relations shrink largely but not entirely to the compass of man's family of birth and family of marriage [… were] profound repercussions for socialization practices and the support networks performed by wider kin’: S. Marks and R. Rathbone, ‘The History of the Family in Africa: Introduction’, The Journal of African History, 24 (1983), 158.
22. For further discussion of the Reception Orders and committal process see S. Swartz, ‘Colonialism and the Production of Psychiatric Knowledge in the Cape, 1891–1920’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1996), 82–83; and Jones, Psychiatry, 48–53. I have consulted the Reception Orders files for Natal for random years between 1917 (when the first Reception Orders were filed) and 1950, scanning approximately 620 such files for evidence of family involvement in the committal procedures and for descriptions of patient behaviours that were particularly noted by authorities or committing family members as indicating emotional states that were disturbing or extreme. There are 435 Reception Orders for 1950 alone, though some patients were admitted more than once within a 12-month period. The most recent volume of Reception Orders available at the PAR is RSC 1/27/211 which is for 1959. Clearly, this wide time frame begs the question of identifying the impact of key events such as the World Wars and the Great Depression as well as of more local matters. A fuller, statistical, analysis of these sources, and more careful periodisation of the information they contain regarding familial agency and the ways in which insanity was coded is ongoing research. Furthermore, in the absence of other studies of the family and welfare and of psychiatric patient populations in the Natal region beyond 1918, even a narrower time focus – say between 1918 and 1939 – would at this point be unlikely to yield firm conclusions. Rather, this study should be regarded as exploratory and, perhaps, as raising more questions than it answers.
23. PAR, RSC 1/27/12 R. 46/1920, Committal and Further Detention Papers of Nomakula Ndhlovu, Winterton Settlement, 17 March 1920.
24. Parle, States of Mind, Ch. 5. On the extended Indian family in Natal see H. Kuper, Indian People in Natal (Pietermaritzburg: Natal University Press, 1960); W. Freund, Insiders and Outsiders: the Indian Working Class of Durban, 1910–1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), and T. Waetjen and G. Vahed, Gender, Modernity and Indian Delights: The Women's Cultural Group of Durban, 1954–2010 (Johannesburg: HSRC Press, 2010).
25. There were a number of readmissions.
26. Importantly, while different material, cultural and political factors shaped the admittance rates of black and white patients it is also an aim of this article to write, in Catherine Burns' term, ‘in chords’, where ‘racial differences’ amongst South Africans are not accorded a priori value in such a way that they obscure other social fractures or fissions across categories of class, gender, or ethnicity, but rather, are understood as being historically constructed. In other words, through the lens of the role of families in psychiatric commitments we might glimpse commonalities as well as differences in the ways in which families and state authorities negotiated understandings of insanity, sometimes evidenced by extreme emotional imbalance, and its appropriate management. See C. Burns, ‘In Search of a Useable Past: The Search for History “in chords”’, in H.E. Stolten, ed., History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007), 351–362.
27. For a fuller discussion of gender, race and class in colonial asylums and in the admissions to the Natal Government Asylum in particular, see Parle, States of Mind, 18–20 and 107–113, especially.
28. By corollary, the labour of upper and middle class women (the majority of whom were white) became less essential in household economies; the ideological value of the ideal housewife gained momentum in the late nineteenth century and, with state support, extended to more white South Africans, particularly from the 1920s.
29. PAR, RSC 1/27/31 R. 166/1925, Committal and Further Detention Papers of Gomase Sibiya alias Niozize or Odeseas Ndabazita, of New Guelderland, near Stanger, 8 September 1925.
30. For an illustration of the kinds of strategies and remedies often sought – and their expense – see M. McCord, The Calling of Katie Makanya (Cape Town & Johannesburg: David Philip, 1995), 230–238 and Parle, States of Mind, esp. Ch. 4.
31. PAR, RSC 1/27/31 R. 166/1925, Gomase Sibiya.
32. PAR, RSC 1/27/153, M.226, Committal and Further Detention Papers of Wilson Hlela, of Peacetown, Klip River, 6 June 1950. It is intriguing to contemplate the extent to which such state prescriptions interacted with families' own expectations of their responsibility for the care of the mentally ill. In addition, formal and popular literature, radio, advertisements and other media helped mould social views on the ideal family. These remain topics for future research. The majority of South African mental hospital inmates – and their families – however were not literate.
33. PAR, RSC 1/27/131, M. 310/44, Committal and Further Detention Papers of Lloyd Kuluse, S. 9, Dated 3 October 1944. Application brought by Adam Kuluse on 30 September 1944.
34. PAR, RSC, 1/27/131, M. 339/1944, Committal and Further Detention Papers of Msiwe Tshabalala, 14 November 1944.
35. The ‘Mental S.2’ Forms, those signed by Medical Officers, had separate sections for ‘facts’ directly observed and those ‘indicating mental disorder or defect […] communicated to me by (set out facts communicated by other persons, together with the names and addresses of such persons’.
36. RSC, 1/27/12 R. 19/1920, Matilda Mbangambi.
37. E. Murphy, ‘The Administration of Insanity in England, 1800–1870’, in Porter and Wright, eds, The Confinement of the Insane, 336.
38. PAR, RSC 1/27/131, M. 379/1944, Queenie Vivian Peter, Reception Order granted 11 December 1944. These chemical convulsive treatments were used to ‘produce violent epileptic fits that practitioners believed produced improvements in schizophrenics’: see Jones, Psychiatry, 32.
39. Coleborne, ‘Families, Patients and Emotions’, 430, 427.
40. Coleborne, ‘Families, Patients and Emotions’, 425. The South African historiography of the family and affect is emerging. For instance, for explorations of the ways in which the ‘literary technology of the colonial state [was adopted and used] to construct a new individualized and affective domain’ in South Africa, see. K. Breckenridge, ‘Of Love Letters and Amanuenses: Beginning the Cultural History of the Working Class Private Sphere in Southern Africa, 1900–1933’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 26, 2 (2000), 337–348 (quotation at 348); C. Burns, ‘Censorship and Affection: South African Women's Letters During World War Two’, paper presented to the History and African Studies Seminar, University of Natal, Durban, April 2000; and chapters by Breckenridge, Burns and Khumalo in K. Barber, ed., Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
41. Coleborne, ‘Families, Patients and Emotions’, 428.
42. Coleborne, ‘Families, Patients and Emotions’, 432.
43. Coleborne, ‘Families, Patients and Emotions’, 431. Richer archival materials are available for the Valkenberg and Fort England (the Grahamstown) Mental Hospitals (both in the Cape) and are being deployed in sensitive and imaginative ways by Sally Swartz, Rory du Plessis and Kylie van Zyl of the Universities of Cape Town, Pretoria and Rhodes respectively.
44. Coleborne, ‘Families, Patients and Emotions’, 426.
45. Coleborne, ‘Families’, 437–439.
46. PAR, Minister of Justice and Public Works (MJPW) 137 JPW 1732/1908, ‘Allison and Hime: Forward a Petition by Emma Lovett Praying for her Release from the Asylum, 1900–1908’, Petition of Henry Lovett to Attorney General, 25 July 1896.
47. PAR, MJPW 137, Letter to Dr James Hyslop from J.C. Lovett, 42 Carlisle Street, [Durban], 8 December 1901.
48. PAR, MJPW 137, Petition of Emma Lovett, wife of Henry Lovett, at present an inmate of the Natal Government Asylum at Pietermaritzburg, in the Colony of Natal. Sworn under oath on 17 January 1900.
49. PAR, MJPW 137, ‘Petition of Emma Lovett’.
50. This proved disastrous. Emma Lovett was readmitted some six years later after killing a grandchild: PAR, MJPW 137 JPW 1732/1908, NGA 158/00, CIO 1816/08, James Hyslop to Colonial Secretary, 15 May 1908.
51. Natal Government Asylum (European) Patient Case Patient Book XI, Patient 2339, Walter Thomas Payne. Memos/correspondence pinned to p. 179.
52. In an earlier work, I have explored issues concerning ‘hearing the insane’, as well as the ethical dilemmas posed in using patients' names. See J. Parle, ‘“The Voice of History”?: Patients, Privacy and Archival Research Ethics in Histories of Insanity’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 24-25 (2006–7), 164–187. Also, ‘Is to Name to Shame?: Relevance, Responsibility and Ethical-Activist Archival Research in South African Medical Histories’, paper presented at the Historical Association of Southern Africa Biennial Conference, Pretoria, July 2012 and at the Wellcome Trust sponsored Workshop ‘New Directions in Histories of Health, Healing and Medicine in African Contexts’, KZN Midlands, August 2012.
53. See also Colborne, ‘Families, Patients and Emotions’, 426.
54. RSC, 1/27/31 M. 194/1925, Ellen Moweni of Malvern, Durban, Reception Order granted on 30 October 1925. Application brought by her husband, Seth (or Zetha) Moweni. Ellen is described as being ‘Zulu’, and having been ‘born in Natal’, and that her father had been born in ‘Portuguese East Africa’.
55. RSC, 1/27/31 M. 194/1925, Ellen Moweni of Malvern, Durban, Reception Order granted on 30 October 1925. Application brought by her husband, Seth (or Zetha) Moweni. Ellen is described as being ‘Zulu’, and having been ‘born in Natal’, and that her father had been born in ‘Portuguese East Africa’, I make the inference that she and Seth could be regarded as being ‘aspirant middle class’ from the details given that she was listed as being ‘Literate. Housewife. Church of England. 3 children. Previously a “Domestic Servant”, she was in 1925 unemployed, as was Seth. Even so, a ‘Dr R D Nelson had attended Ellen on several occasions during the past three months [who had] found her condition unchanged’. For further comment on class, see footnotes Footnote62 and Footnote63 below.
56. PAR, RSC 1/27/131, M. 34/1944, Robert Allen Sim.
57. For many other patients, the reports by the Physician Superintendents suggest that quiescence and detachment followed – rather than preceded – the first committal.
58. PAR, RSC 1/27/153, M. 175/1950, Claude Nelson, Reception Order granted 20 April 1950.
59. See Parle, States of Mind, esp. discussions of alcoholism and suicide, 234–241, 286, 305.
60. See Parle, States of Mind, esp. discussions of alcoholism and suicide, 305. NAR Department of the Treasury (hereafter TES) 4009 F21/53, Asylums: Coloured People at the Mental Hospital, Pmb, Accommodation, Mr. Benjamin, 376 Greyling Street, Pietermaritzburg to Private Secretary, 4 May 1920. The petitioner was told that accommodation for ‘Coloureds’ would, in the future, be provided at Valkenberg.
61. PAR, SC 1/27/131 (1944), M. 339/1944, Msiwe Tshabalala, Reception Order, 14 November 1944.
62. PAR, RSC 1/27/131, M. 310/44, Lloyd Kuluse.
63. David Goodhew, ‘Working-Class Respectability: The Example of the Western Areas of Johannesburg, 1930–55’, The Journal of African History, 41, 2 (2000), 266. I echo Goodhew's invocation (at 241–242) of E.P. Thompson's discussions of the challenges of defining, precisely, the concepts of ‘class’ and of ‘respectability’. Goodhew remarks ‘as with class, respectability was defined against other people’. So, too, were (in)sanity and eccentricity and the extent to which they could be accepted or tolerated by families with differing resources, material as well as emotional.
64. Goodhew, ‘Working-Class Respectability’, 241.
65. See esp. L.M. Thomas, ‘Love, Sex and the Modern Girl in 1930s Southern Africa’ 31–57, and M. Hunter, ‘Providing Love: Sex and Exchange in Twentieth Century South Africa’ 135–156, in Cole and Thomas, eds, Love in Africa.
66. This point has been made in very many international studies, once more, too many to cite here, but this quotation is from D. Wright, J. Moran, and S. Gouglas, ‘The Confinement of the Insane in Victorian Canada: the Hamilton and Toronto Asylums, c.1861–1891’, in Wright and Porter, eds, The Confinement of the Insane, 105.
67. PAR, RSC 1/27/151 M5/1950, Committal and Further Detention Papers of Jalimane Hlatswayo, Reception Order dated 17 December 1949. Constable Cloete described Jalimane as follows: ‘Unreasonable temper. Unmanageable at home. Very emotional.’ Public nakedness was one of the ‘family of symptoms’ of insanity shared across cultures and classes. See Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam, 6, 30. The point then is not that these were new behaviours, but that families now thought it significant to add these to a repertoire of indications of insanity more frequently than they had before.
68. For a fuller discussion of suicide and mental illness in Natal, see Parle, States of Mind, Ch. 5, and M. Vaughan, ‘Suicide in Late Colonial Africa: The Evidence of Inquests from Nyasaland’, American Historical Review, 115, 2 (2010), 385–404.
69. S. Mahone and M. Vaughan, eds, Psychiatry and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 2.
70. Swartz, ‘Colonial Lunatic Asylum Archives’, 286–287.
71. As Sadowsky reminds us ‘psychiatric institutions do exist, in part, to control disturbing behavior’, and that ‘control can take forms that range from the caring to the coercive, but whether one or the other (or anywhere in between), it remains social control’: Sadowsky, ‘The Social World and the Reality of Mental Illness’, 213.