Madness and Marginality

With this insightful and sensitive analysis of Europeans incarcerated for mental illness in colonial Kenya, Will Jackson manages not only to reclaim these troubled, marginalized individuals as historically meaningful actors. He also casts a fresh and revealing light on the settler community as a whole. The result is a strikingly original and important contribution to the scholarship on settler colonialism.|The self-disciplined effort to sustain imperial prestige did not inevitably send Kenya's white settlers mad – just as the constraints of subjection did not necessarily madden Africans. But ordinary human weaknesses – financial, social, or sexual – did seem especially dangerous to an anxious white minority. The documented confinement of their 'poor men and loose women' has enabled Jackson, in this carefully observed and beautifully written study, to portray Kenya's settlers in the round. Not all were libidinous aristocrats swapping wives in Happy Valley, nor all gentleman farmers pioneering under the flame trees of Thika. -- .