Psychiatry in the East African colonies: A background to confinement

Abstract

This article is concerned with the discipline of psychiatry in colonial East Africa as it emerged out of the crime and disorder problem to become an intellectually significant ‘East African School’ of psychiatry. The process of lunacy certification, in particular, provides a snapshot of the medical and political tensions that existed among the medical establishment, the prison system and the colonial courts, all of whom sought to define collective African behaviour. This historical article utilises archaic terminology, such as ‘lunatic’ or ‘lunacy’, as these categories were in use at the time.