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The Settler’s Demise: Decolonization and Mental Breakdown in 1950s Kenya

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Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

Existing scholarship on colonial anxieties works on the idea that certain kinds of ill-ease, discomfort and distress accompanied ‘the colonial situation’. But little of this work considers how different colonial situations engendered different kinds of anxiety for different kinds of people. This chapter populates the world of colonial anxieties with mental patients in one settler colony: Kenya in the 1950s. Their anxieties only vaguely resemble the kinds of anxieties that historians have described as characteristically colonial. More revealing is the biographical context in which anxieties were embedded. At a moment when the colonial order was on the cusp of disappearing, the lives of the settler insane give a novel counter-narrative to Britain and its empire in the twentieth century. They also place in new perspective the more overt forms of mental breakdown that the settler community in Kenya performed in response to the violence of Mau Mau.

‘I believe that a whole history is contained in the figure of the native underneath the bed’.

André Brink (2009: 43)

Thanks to Shane Doyle and David Anderson for comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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  1. School of History, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, West Yorkshire, UK

    Will Jackson

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Correspondence to Will Jackson .

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    Harald Fischer-Tiné

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Jackson, W. (2016). The Settler’s Demise: Decolonization and Mental Breakdown in 1950s Kenya. In: Fischer-Tiné, H. (eds) Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45136-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45136-7_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45136-7

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